Desert Island Discs: Archive 2000-2005

Sue Lawley's castaway is the singer Engelbert Humperdinck. Engelbert Humperdinck is one of Britain's most successful entertainers. He is known as the King of Romance and has been at the top of the showbusiness ladder for nearly 40 years - selling more than 130 million records including sixty-four gold and 23 platinum albums. He was born Arnold George (Gerry) Dorsey in 1936 in India and was one of 10 children. At the age of 10, hi...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is John Fortune.

John Fortune is one of Britain's most respected and enduring satirists. For the past 12 years he has been half of the award-winning double act, The Long Johns, with John Bird, that have brought a sharper political edge to Bremner, Bird and Fortune. As a result of the act, they have been named the Best Opposition by The Oldie Magazine and are Bafta award winners. It is a return to the ...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Sir Bobby Robson. Sir Bobby Robson is one of the most enduring and popular faces in football. For more than five decades he has dedicated his life to the game - as a player and manager. As a small boy growing up in a mining village in County Durham, he learnt his ball skills by playing football in the streets and backyard with his four brothers.

By the time he was 15, Bobby knew he had a particular...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the artist Tracey Emin.

Tracey Emin is one of the most successful and controversial artists to emerge during the 1990s. Her work was championed early on by influential art dealer Jay Jopling and later by the collector Charles Saatchi. Her work is highly autobiographical and confessional. A talented drawer and painter, she has attracted most attention for her art installations - including her tent,...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the death row lawyer Clive Stafford Smith.

Clive Stafford Smith spent more than 25 years representing people on death row. He's saved hundreds of lives and counts his clients among his friends. He says his work is his calling - one he was drawn to after writing an essay on capital punishment while at school. Initially he thought it was a history essay and was appalled to find the death sentence wa...

Sue Lawley's guest this week is the internationally acclaimed choreographer Matthew Bourne. He was born in the East End of London in 1960. As a child, his great passion was musicals and stage shows - rather than ballet. Despite his later success, he showed no interest in dance until the age of 20 when he enrolled at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance in London. He's built his reputation on his unconventional interpretations ...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the distinguished foreign correspondent Ann Leslie. She has witnessed and reported on some of the most significant events of the past 30 years including the fall of the Berlin wall; the failed coup against Michael Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela's final walk to freedom. She has reported on uprisings, massacres and wars, collecting numerous awards as she has done so.

She grew up in India and Pakistan ...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the Olympic gold medallist Matthew Pinsent. Matthew Pinsent won his fourth Olympic gold medal at this summer's games in Athens. His first three were all won rowing with Sir Steve Redgrave - as a pair in 1992 in Barcelona and 1996 in Atlanta and as part of the coxless four in 2000's Sydney games. This summer's success saw him lead the four to victory - in a photo-finish that saw them beat the Canad...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the poet Dr Jack Mapanje who is one of the most important living African poets. He was born into a poor household in a typical African village in 1944, when Malawi (then Nyasaland) was a British colony, but while he was still a child it became part of the Central African Federation, together with Northern and Southern Rhodesia.

Jack started writing poems, inspired by his despair at the political w...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the Liberal Democrat politician Sir Menzies Campbell. Born in Glasgow, he excelled at both academia and sports making it to the University in Glasgow and then Stanford in California where he studied law but all the while dividing his time between this and his other great love - athletics. He became the fastest man in Britain holding and re-breaking the record for the 100 metres between 1967 and 19...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the journalist and writer Anne Scott-James. Now in her 92nd year, Anne Scott-James came from a line of critics and writers and became one of the first women career journalists, editors and columnists, before embarking on a second career as the author of a series of gardening books. After Oxford she joined Vogue - first as an assistant to a secretary and then went from writing the odd picture ca...

Sue's Lawley's castaway this week is the zoologist turned author and broadcaster Desmond Morris. He made his name with The Naked Ape first published in 1967 in which he persuasively argued the case for viewing man as a 'risen ape' rather than a 'fallen angel'. To him, humans should be observed like any other beast in the animal kingdom. The book has sold more than 12 million copies and has been translated into 23 languages. Dozens ...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the actress and wildlife campaigner Virginia McKenna. She was born in London and, after spending five years of her childhood in South Africa to escape the Blitz, she returned to England. She enrolled at the Central School of Drama but left after two years when offered six months in Repertory at Dundee. Classics such as the Cruel Sea, Carve Her Name with Pride and A Town Like Alice, for which she w...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the mountaineer Joe Simpson. He was born in Kuala Lumpur in 1960 where his father was stationed with the British Army. Over the next few years the family lived in Gibraltar, Ireland and Germany, although Joe returned to England for schooling at Ampleforth and showed an early adventurous spirit and love of sport.

But it was only after reading the classic account of attempted ascents on the Eiger - '...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the world famous musician Hugh Masekela. As a boy growing up in the impoverished townships of South Africa, he was inspired to learn the trumpet after seeing Kirk Douglas play Bix Beiderbecke in Young Man With A Horn. He begged one of his teachers - the anti-apartheid crusader Father Trevor Huddleston - to buy him a horn and in return he promised to stay out of trouble.

Hugh soon made a name for hi...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the leader of the Conservative Party, Michael Howard.

He was raised in an orthodox Jewish family in Llanelli, South Wales, where his parents ran ladies' fashion shops. In the Labour-supporting, rugby-playing valleys, the teenage Michael preferred football and his leanings were towards the Conservatives. He propelled himself to Peterhouse College, Cambridge, and was part of the Cambridge mafia tha...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the world famous lyricist Sir Tim Rice. Sir Tim is best known for his collaborative work with Andrew Lloyd Webber creating some of the best loved musicals of recent years. The duo first teamed up in the late 1960s first producing Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, which is a staple of school end-of-term shows as well as enjoying numerous runs in the West End. The groundbreaking Jesus C...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the writer and book editor Diana Athill. For nearly 50 years Diana Athill was involved in every aspect of publishing, from editing and even completely rewriting books to drawing adverts, designing covers and nursing authors for the publishing house Andre Deutsch. They published some of the greatest names of the 20th century, including Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, VS Naipaul and Jean Rhys.

Her care...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the businessman Karan Bilimoria - who set up production of a beer designed to be drunk with Indian food, imported it to Britain - and is now selling it back to India. As a student at Cambridge, Karan missed Indian food and used to eat at restaurants several times a week. But he disliked the gassy lagers they served – finding he could neither eat nor drink as much as he would have liked. He decided...