Desert Island Discs: Archive: 2016-2018 – Details, episodes & analysis

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Desert Island Discs: Archive: 2016-2018

BBC Radio 4

Society & Culture

Frequency: 1 episode/9d. Total Eps: 126

Guests are invited to choose the eight records they would take to a desert island.

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Apple Podcasts

🇨🇦 Canada - personalJournals
19/08/2026
#69
🇬🇧 Great Britain - personalJournals
19/08/2026
#35
🇨🇦 Canada - personalJournals
18/08/2026
#53
🇬🇧 Great Britain - personalJournals
18/08/2026
#36
🇬🇧 Great Britain - personalJournals
17/08/2026
#36
🇬🇧 Great Britain - personalJournals
16/08/2026
#35
🇬🇧 Great Britain - personalJournals
15/08/2026
#37
🇬🇧 Great Britain - personalJournals
14/08/2026
#39
🇬🇧 Great Britain - personalJournals
13/08/2026
#38
🇬🇧 Great Britain - personalJournals
12/08/2026
#41

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Score global : 38%

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Alan Carr, comedian

Sunday, December 23, 2018 • Duration 52:19

Alan Carr, comedian and chat show host, is known for his love of silliness, dressing up and camp daftness. His stand-up shows have filled arenas, and on TV he co-hosted the Friday Night Project and then his own show - Chatty Man.

Alan was born into a footballing family – his dad, Graham, was a professional player and then a manager. Alan first tried his hand at comedy while reading Theatre Studies at Middlesex University. After he graduated, he took on a range of jobs before his ability to make friends laugh with his stories of working in a call centre in Manchester led him to try stand-up at a local venue. In 2001 he won the City Life Best Newcomer of the Year and the BBC New Comedy Awards.

His break into TV came after a spell as the warm-up man for the Jonathan Ross chat show. He has won many awards including Best Entertainment Show for Alan Carr: Chatty Man at the 2010 TV Choice Awards, the 2013 BAFTA for Best Entertainment Performance and 2013 British Comedy Award for Best Comedy Entertainment Personality. In 2015 he won the National Television Award for Best Chat Show Host.

He and his long term partner Paul were married in January 2018 by Adele - who also organised the wedding, and paid for it.

Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Cathy Drysdale

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Hella Pick, journalist

Wednesday, December 19, 2018 • Duration 39:32

As one of the Guardian’s first female foreign correspondents, Hella Pick reported on events that shaped the world in the second half of the 20th century, from Martin Luther King's civil rights activism to Watergate, the Gdansk shipyard strikes to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Born in Vienna in 1929, she was raised by her mother who, in March 1939, put her on a Kindertransport train to Britain to escape the Nazis. Her mother was able to follow her to England a few months later and Hella spent her formative years in the Lake District. After reading Politics at London School of Economics, she worked as commercial editor of a London-based weekly publication called West Africa. After she left, she offered her services to The Guardian – and spent the next 35 years or so with the paper.

While UN correspondent, she worked alongside Alistair Cooke in New York and subsequently held posts as European Integration correspondent, Washington correspondent, Eastern Europe correspondent, and diplomatic editor before retiring in the mid-1990s. Since leaving The Guardian, she has nurtured a new career as a writer, publishing a biography of Simon Wiesenthal and a book about Austria’s post-war history.

BOOK: Scorn by Matthew Parris LUXURY: Recliner armchair FAVOURITE TRACK: Mozart's Marriage of Figaro

Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Cathy Drysdale

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Thea Musgrave

Sunday, October 7, 2018 • Duration 39:56

Composer Thea Musgrave celebrated her 90th birthday this year, an event marked by celebrations and concerts around the world, including the BBC Proms and the Edinburgh International Festival. She has published more than 150 compositions, including major orchestral works and numerous operas, and continues to write every day.

Thea was born in Edinburgh in May 1928, and still has sharp memories of hearing news of the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940. She learned the piano as a child, but had ambitions to become a doctor. She began medical studies at the University of Edinburgh, but after struggling with the sciences, she switched to the music department, which happened to be in an adjacent building. In the early 1950s, she spent four years studying composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris before moving to London and establishing herself as a prominent member of British musical life.

In 1970 she became Guest Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1971 she married the American opera conductor Peter Mark, and she has lived in the United States since 1972.

She was awarded a CBE in 2002, and earlier this year she was presented with The Queen's Medal for Music.

Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Sarah Taylor

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Professor Dame Ann Dowling

Sunday, July 24, 2016 • Duration 36:25

Kirsty Young's castaway is the engineer and international expert on aircraft noise reduction, Professor Dame Ann Dowling.

The first female president of the Royal Academy of Engineering, one of her passions is encouraging more young people, particularly women to choose engineering as a career. In 1998 she became the first female professor of Engineering at Cambridge University and went on to be the first female head of the Department.

As a child she was fascinated with how things worked, taking her bike apart aged six, and even dismantling the electric lights in her dolls house. Later, an over enthusiastic session with her chemistry set caused the conservatory curtains to briefly catch fire.

A passion for aeroplanes led her down the path of aeroacoustics and aircraft noise reduction alongside her hobby of flying airplanes.

She was awarded the DBE for services to science in 2007 and was appointed to the Order of Merit in 2016.

Producer: Sarah Taylor.

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Levi Roots

Sunday, July 17, 2016 • Duration 34:42

Kirsty Young's castaway is the entrepreneur, Levi Roots.

His business success began following an appearance on BBC Two's Dragon's Den in 2007. With guitar in hand, he sang about his 'Reggae reggae sauce' which he had been selling for years at London's Notting Hill Carnival. Both Peter Jones and Richard Farleigh invested in the business and within six weeks, his sauce was bottled and on supermarket shelves. Recipe books, TV shows and a restaurant, or 'rastaurant' followed.

He is the youngest of five children born in Jamaica. When he was four, his parents went to build a new life in the UK. Each year one of his siblings came to join the family in Britain. When Levi was 10, he left his much loved grandmother behind, never to see her again. Unable to read or write when he started school, he caught up quickly. He became a Rastafarian as a teenager. Following school, he became an apprentice engineer but left that to pursue a career in music.

In his late twenties, he went to prison for five years. His time inside would prove to be a turning point for him. Music continued to play an important part in his life and he was nominated for a Best Reggae Act MOBO award in 1998.

A father of eight, he lives in Brixton, London.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

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Nicole Farhi

Sunday, July 10, 2016 • Duration 36:31

Kirsty Young's castaway is the designer and sculptor Nicole Farhi.

Born into a Turkish family in France, Nicole's interest in fashion was present from an early age. As a child, she used to design clothes for her paper dolls; as a teenager, she was taken to couture shows in Paris by her stylish aunts.

Aged eighteen, she enrolled in fashion school in Paris and began selling her design sketches to earn a little pocket money, thus setting out on a career as a freelance designer. In the early 1970s, she met the British entrepreneur Stephen Marks who was just starting the retail chain French Connection where she became chief designer, and it was he who encouraged her to set up her eponymous label in 1982. Her fashion empire would eventually extend to New York, London and Tokyo before being sold in 2010, and Nicole herself left the business in 2012.

Since retiring from fashion, Nicole Farhi has dedicated herself to her other passion - sculpture. She sculpts predominantly in clay and then casts her works in different materials including glass, bronze and concrete.

She has been married to the playwright Sir David Hare since 1992.

Producer: Christine Pawlowsky.

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Matthew Barzun

Sunday, July 3, 2016 • Duration 35:32

Kirsty Young's castaway is the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Matthew Barzun.

Born in New York City as the second of four children to Roger Barzun, a lawyer, and his wife Serita Winthrop, he was brought up in the small Massachusetts town of Lincoln. He followed in the family tradition and read History and Literature of America at Harvard University, taking a break for a year to work as a teaching assistant in Cape Town. After graduating he worked for an internet start-up company in San Francisco, where he became chief strategy officer. He left in 2004 after getting involved with fundraising for John Kerry's failed presidential campaign.

He was in the audience for Barak Obama's, 'there are no red or blue States, just a United States' speech in 2004 and subsequently went to work for him, fundraising for Obama's 2008 bid for the White House. When President Obama won, he appointed Matthew as Ambassador to Sweden only to recall him to take up the role of National Finance Chair for the 2012 re-election campaign. Matthew is credited with developing a 'low dollar' model of funding, where many pay a few dollars for tickets to political events. In July 2013, he was nominated as the new Ambassador to the UK by President Obama, a post he took up in August 2013 and which ends in January 2017.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

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Sara Khan

Sunday, June 26, 2016 • Duration 35:06

Kirsty Young's castaway is Sara Khan.

A British Muslim human rights activist, she's the director of Inspire, a counter-extremism and women's rights organisation which she co-founded in 2009.

Born in Bradford in 1980 to Pakistani parents, she decided to wear the veil when she was thirteen changing her mind eighteen years later. She studied Pharmacy at the University of Manchester but never felt she was fulfilling her potential, and set up Inspire in her home. She has been at the heart of various campaigns to raise awareness of her cause from Jihad Against Violence to #MakingAStand which encouraged women in particular to stand up against extremism.

In 2009 she was listed in the Equality and Human Rights Commission Muslim Women's Power List and in 2015 was included in BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour Power List. She is currently sitting on the Department for Education's Due Diligence and Counter-Extremism Expert Reference Group and on the Government's Community Engagement Forum.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

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Barrie Rutter

Sunday, June 19, 2016 • Duration 33:41

Kirsty Young's castaway is the actor and theatre director Barrie Rutter.

He is the founder and artistic director of the touring theatre company Northern Broadsides.

There was nothing in his background to suggest he'd spend his life on stage. He was brought up by his father, who worked nights unloading fish in Hull. There were no books in his childhood home and he discovered his passion for theatre whilst at secondary school with the help of his English teacher who spotted his talent for performing. His first role was as the Mayor in Gogol's, 'The Government Inspector'.

He was a member of the National Youth Theatre where he appeared with Helen Mirren and went on to study at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. After a career in the National Theatre and the RSC, in 1992 he founded Northern Broadsides which stages Shakespeare plays, other classical works and new writing with the aim of presenting "Northern voices, doing classical work in non-velvet spaces".

Producer: Sarah Taylor.

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Warwick Davis

Sunday, June 12, 2016 • Duration 35:08

Kirsty Young's castaway is the actor Warwick Davis.

His career began thanks to his grandmother who heard a radio advert calling for short people to be in the latest of George Lucas's Star Wars films. He played his first role as an Ewok in Star Wars when he was 11 years old and found himself on set with his childhood heroes. Since then he's worked on all the Harry Potter films, appeared in TV sitcoms, documentaries, horror movies, quiz shows and Christmas pantomimes.

Born with Spondyloepiphyseal Dysplasia Congenita (SED), a rare disorder of bone growth which results in dwarfism, the view of his doctors was that he'd be wheelchair bound and unlikely to live beyond his teens. Now in his mid-forties, he is married with two children of his own.

Producer: Sarah Taylor.

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Desert Island Discs: Archive: 2016-2018 – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Desert Island Discs: Archive: 2016-2018 – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify