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BBC Radio 4


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


Desert Island Discs: Archive 2000-2005

Sue Lawley's castaway is the actress Kim Cattrall. Kim Cattrall became a household name in her forties as a result of playing man-eater, defiant singleton and PR mogul Samantha Jones in Sex and the City. She is about to star in the play Whose Life is it Anyway? in the West End of London.

She was born in Liverpool but grew up in Canada and decided to be an actress at a young age. She says a formative experience was appearing in a school play Piffle It's Only a Sniffle when she took the role of a cold germ which had to infect the other children by tickling them with a feather until they sneezed. She spent time in drama schools in Canada, Liverpool and New York and says now that her first love is theatre - and her film roles allow her to feed her theatre habit. 

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: My Favourite Things by John Coltrane
Book: An English Dictionary
Luxury: Fragrant body cream

Kim Cattrall

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, his family returned to the UK and Leicester. At 17 he began performing in clubs and pubs. In 1965 his manager changed his name to Engelbert Humperdinck but it was still two years before his chance arrived. His big break came in April 1967 when Dickie Valentine was ill and Engelbert took his slot on the show Sunday Night at the London Palladium. His single Release Me flew off the shelves staying in the charts for 56 weeks. He went off to conquer America and there he shared the bill with Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra while he counted Elvis Presley as a close friend. He starts a new UK tour in February next year and his autobiography Engelbert - What's in a Name? was published this year.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Return to Me by Dean Martin
Book: What's in a Name? by Engelbert Humperdinck
Luxury: A saxophone

Engelbert Humperdinck

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 forefront of political satire for John Fortune - he had joined Peter Cook in setting up The Establishment Club in the 1960s and had taken the review to America to widespread acclaim and returned to Britain to write for, among others, BBC Three and Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Piano Sonata No 30 in E Major by Ludwig van Beethoven
Book: The Leopard (In Italian & English) by Giuseppe di Lampedusa
Luxury: A rug made by the Baluch people from Afghanistan

John Fortune

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 gift and was attracting the attention of the local talent scouts. But, despite being offered a professional place by his home team of Newcastle, he decided to head south to Fulham, where he thought he'd have a greater chance to shine. He went on to play successfully for Fulham and West Bromwich Albion and earned twenty England caps before an ankle injury cut short his international career. He then managed Ipswich Town for 13 very successful years - leaving when he was offered the opportunity manage the England squad. After a successful career in Europe he returned to Britain in 1999 to manage Newcastle but was sacked early in the season. Despite health problems, he says he hasn't given up hope of finding another club to manage. 

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: It Was a Very Good Year by Robbie Williams and Frank Sinatra
Book: The works of historian John Keegan: The First World War & the Second World War collected into one volume by John Keegan
Luxury: Sun lounger with canopy to protect him from the sun

Sir Bobby Robson

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, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With and the Turner Prize-nominated My Bed. Her art is adored and condemned in equal measure, but wherever she exhibits she attracts queues and has a room at Tate Britain dedicated to her work. She was brought up in Margate and she has recently finished a film, Top Spot, which reflects her own experiences. 

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Young Americans by David Bowie
Book: Ethics by Spinoza
Luxury: A pen which would never run out

Tracey Emin

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 was still in use. He planned to become a campaigning journalist, but a summer spent meeting prisoners on death row inmates convinced him that he would be able to achieve more by representing them directly. So he trained in law and set up his own legal practice to enable him to do so. He has received several awards for his work including, in 2002, the OBE.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Spem in Alium by Thomas Tallis
Book: The Koran (in Arabic and English)
Luxury: My computer

Clive Stafford Smith

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 of classical ballets such as Nutcracker which he reworked from being a cosy Christmas setting to a grim Victorian Orphanage. Swan Lake was similarly changed with the traditional tutu-clad ballerinas being replaced by dozens of bare-chested male dancers with wings, and he transformed Carmen into Car Man about a bisexual male drifter set in a small American town. He was awarded an OBE in 2001.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Night and Day by Ella Fitzgerald
Book: Diaries by Kenneth Williams
Luxury: Spotted Dick with Lyon's syrup

Matthew Bourne

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 and loved India and its culture. When she was around 10 years old she was sent to a boarding school in England. From school she went to Oxford and from there she joined the Daily Express. She was brought to London and was given her own column at the age of twenty-two. But she resigned, saying she wanted to do proper reporting, and it was David English's support for her that saw her start writing foreign news stories and set the course for her distinguished career.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Improvisation - The Theme Music Pather Panchali by Ravi Shankar
Book: Completed Works by P G Wodehouse
Luxury: An enormous amount of garlic with a garlic press

Ann Leslie

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 Canadian team by less than a tenth of a second. 

He won his first Gold at the Junior World Championships aged just seventeen. Between 1991 and 2002 he won a gold medal every year at the World Championships and his life was given over to rowing - he took a year out from his studies to compete in the 1992 Olympics, fitted his wedding around the rowing calendar and followed a rigorous training regime to maintain his 6'5'', seventeen-stone frame at the peak of its strength and fitness.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Fields of gold by Sting
Book: World Atlas, extended
Luxury: Shaving kit

Matthew Pinsent

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 woes besetting his country. Although his book, Of Chameleons and Gods, was only sold in one book shop in Malawi, it won considerable acclaim around the world and was awarded the Rotterdam International Poetry Prize. He was ambitious and set up a writers group within his own University and, although he knew it was dangerous, felt compelled to continue with his writing. He was arrested in 1987 while drinking in a bar. The World Service broadcast a news item about Mapanje's arrest the following day and his cause was taken up by writers' groups and activists across the world. Dr Mapanje was held without charge or trial in Mikuyu Prison for more than three years, scarcely aware of the international campaign to free him. When he was finally released, again it was without warning or explanation. Believing his life was still in danger, he fled with his wife and children to Britain. He has lived here ever since and now lectures at the University of Newcastle. 

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Ave Maria by Johann Sebastian Bach
Book: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Luxury: A guitar

Jack Mapanje

Sue Lawley's castaway is writer Margaret Drabble.

Favourite track: I Know That My Redeemer Liveth - (from Messiah) by George Frideric Handel
Book: Old Wives Tale by Arnold Bennett
Luxury: Painting by Maurice Cockerill - Ariadne's Thread

Margaret Drabble

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