Desert Island Discs: Archive 1996-2000

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the businessman Sir Ernest Hall.

His life is like a fairytale. From a sickly boy, living in the one room he and his family shared, he became a successful businessman and millionaire - and all because of an inspirational piece of music. Today on the site of an old carpet factory in Halifax, he's brought together his two loves - business and the arts - to form an environment in which plastic-bag manufacturers and building societies draw inspiration from the painters and sculptors who work alongside. At the age of 68 he has also realised his ambition to be a professional pianist.

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

Favourite track: Piano Trio in B Major by Franz Schubert

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the abstract artist Sir Terry Frost.

He first became interested in art as a prisoner of war, when lack of food and freedom enhanced the beauty of a single leaf. On his return to Britain, nature continued to fascinate him and inform his work; bright circles of colour inspired by the Sun and Moon, or patterns of white-on-white remembered from a snowy landscape. Now 83, he's never been so busy. A good thing, he says, because it keeps the aches and pains away.

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

Favourite track: Tea For Two by Max Bygraves

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the actress Dame Judi Dench.

She's been delighting audiences for some 40 years, on film, television and the stage. It's partly this versatility that makes her so special. Nominated for an Oscar for the film Mrs Brown, in which she played an ageing Queen Victoria, she says the difference between film and the theatre is that on stage she can make an audience believe that she's a tall, willowy blond, when in reality she is five foot nothing.

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

Favourite track: Lady in Red by Chris de Burgh

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the experimental composer Gavin Bryars. One of his best-known works, The Sinking of the Titanic, pays tribute to the band which continued to play as the ship went down. It poses the question what if they hadn't stop playing; how would their music have sounded under water? His most popular composition, Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, features a tramp singing the same verse again and again, building up layer upon layer of emotion.

Composing is a craft he learnt as an assistant to John Cage, after hearing his work Four minutes, thirty-three seconds - of silence. Today he is both established and establishment - the ENO are soon to stage his latest opera and if you look closely at the orchestra, you'll spot him on the bass!

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

Favourite track: My Foolish Heart by Bill Evans Trio

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis.

A devout and traditional Catholic, she didn't begin writing until she was 42. The Sin Eater, that first novel, was her reaction to the changes in the Catholic Church after Vatican Two and channelled her anger at what she saw as the excesses of the 1960s. She's a woman of apparent contradictions. She wanted to be a nun, but fell in love and became a mother of seven instead. She's deeply religious but believes in ghosts and the supernatural and although her books are often triggered by anger, they are frequently tender and full of humour.

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

Favourite track: Rorate Caeli Desuper by Monks & Choirboys or Downside Abbey

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the poet Andrew Motion.

He describes his writing as a "biological thing" - like developing a headache or the flu - but much, much more pleasurable. Also a biographer, his first, controversial work was about his friend and fellow poet Philip Larkin. While researching for it, he collected together his own personal writings and burnt them. Dominant in his work is the figure of his mother; injured in an accident which left her severely ill and from which she eventually died. His poems, he says, are his way of bringing her back to life.

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

Favourite track: Cello Suite No. 6 in D by Johann Sebastian Bach

Sue Lawley's castaway this week believes he has the answer to "life, the universe and everything". According to mathematician Ian Stewart, it's 137-and-a-half degrees.

He calls it "the golden angle", and says it can be found everywhere in nature - whether in the pattern of seeds on a sunflower head or in the spiral of a snail's shell. Mathematics, he says, has nothing to do with arithmetic and everything to do with being able to pack the luggage into the boot of the car. But for a broken collarbone which meant he stayed at home working out puzzles with his mum, he would have remained bottom of the class and never discovered how much fun maths could be.

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

Favourite track: Scarborough Fair by Simon and Garfunkel

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the Artistic Director of the Royal Ballet, Sir Anthony Dowell. His future was determined as a child when he stood before Dame Ninette de Valois with his trousers rolled to the knee. It took only a short glance at his legs for her to accept him into the Royal Ballet School. As he grew and developed as a dancer, his talent was spotted and soon the great choreographers Kenneth Macmillan and Frederick Ashton began creating roles for him.

His outstanding technique and dramatic sense inspired generations of dancers. But now, as Director of the Royal Ballet, he fights to keep dance at the top of the arts agenda in the face of much criticism and controversy.

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

Favourite track: Eight English Dances by London Philharmonic Orchestra

Sue Lawley's castaway this week has turned around a failing supermarket chain by introducing his staff to 'black-bin Mondays' and 'dress-down Fridays'. As the Executive Director, Archie Norman made ASDA one of the top three grocers on the high street.

In the process, he's answered every one of the 40,000 suggestions from his staff - personally. And he's learnt how to keep his colleagues on their toes - he's removed their chairs from the meeting rooms. Now as a new MP and Vice Chairman of the party, can he do the same for the Conservatives?

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

Favourite track: Requiem by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the opera producer David Pountney. Alongside Mark Elder and Peter Jonas at the ENO, he tried to make opera more attractive to a wider audience. The opera stage, he says, shouldn't be treated like a mantle shelf filled with fragile objects. It's a versatile and robust art form which needn't be stuck in the past. So he staged Carmen in an automobile graveyard, with a pink Cadillac and a giant billboard, while his Hansel and Gretel was set in a 1950s housing project.

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

Favourite track: String Quartet No 2 'Intimate Letters' by Leos Janáček