Desert Island Discs: Archive 2000-2005

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is one of Britain's best known actresses - Geraldine James.

She is a well respected stage actress - key roles include Portia in the Merchant of Venice opposite Dustin Hoffman and When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout. Her most recent screen work was as the prim and disapproving Women's Institute leader in the hugely successful film Calendar Girls. After school she studied drama at the Drama Centre, London, and spent three years in repertory theatre and school theatre before embarking on her television career; most recently as Lady Rowley in Trollope's He Knew He was Right. She was made an OBE in 2003.

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

Favourite track: In Tears of Grief, Dear Lord We Leave Thee by Johann Sebastian Bach

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the man who's designed some of the most famous film sets ever made.

Sir Ken Adam began life as Klaus Adam, born into a middle class family in 1920s Berlin. As Hitler rose to power the Adam family were forced to flee to Britain. Klaus adopted the name Keith during the war when he became a fighter pilot and the only German to fight for the RAF. He became known as Heinie the Tank Buster in recognition of his daring raids across the continent. After the war he changed his name again to Ken and trained as an architect. This led to work in the film industry; first as a draughtsman, and then as an art director and eventually as a production designer. He won two Oscars: the first for Barry Lyndon, which he made with Stanley Kubrick in the 70s, and The Madness of King George.

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

Favourite track: Java Jive by Inkspots

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the explorer Pen Hadow.

He turned to exploring in his late 20s, but had already shown himself to be a daredevil foolhardy, determined and physically strong. At prep school he learnt the importance of training and practice to develop greater athleticism and, at Harrow, he successfully ran 'The Long Ducker' - a marathon from Harrow, taking in Marble Arch and Little Venice - that hadn't been attempted for 50 years. After university, he spent four years working at the sports agency IMG and ended up by chance on a 70-day trek photographing polar bears, and the thought struck him that, with organisation, training and determination, in the same length of time he could trek to the North Pole.

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

Favourite track: Piano Concerto No 2 in B Flat Major by Johannes Brahms

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is one of Britain's best loved poets - U A Fanthorpe.

Since then she has written many more volumes. Her poems use a great deal of humour and a lot of dialogue. In addition to her work about patients and hospitals, much of her writing is concerned with war and its effects on children on the nature of Englishness and the British character.

During the interview, U A Fanthorpe reads extracts from the following poems: 'The List' taken from Selected Poems, and 'Atlas' from Safe As Houses.

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

Favourite track: Come Away With Fellow Sailors by Henry Purcell

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the larger than life TV presenter Graham Norton. He was recently voted the most powerful man in comedy with four Baftas and an international Emmy under his belt. He's been on screen recently with his weekly show from New York but he's better known to British audiences for his So Graham Norton, as well as the annoying Father Noel in the series Father Ted. After six years with Channel 4 he's been poached by the BBC to front a Saturday night light entertainment show. He's compared the two channels to the difference between a night out with your friends or a family Christmas lunch and media critics have pondered how his camp brand of adult humour will translate to mainstream TV.

Originally born Graham Walker in Dublin in 1963, he was brought up in the small town of Bandon in West Cork. As a child he loved television describing it as a 'window to life' and a world he wanted to be part of. He began an English and French degree at University College Cork but dropped out after his first year and went to America where he lived in a hippy commune in San Francisco. He eventually returned and enrolled at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London with the ambition of becoming an actor. He changed his name to Norton - as the actor's union Equity infomed him they already had another Graham Walker on their books. He moved to Channel 4 in 1998 and moves to the BBC on his return from the States later this year.

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

Favourite track: Islands in the Stream

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the conductor Antonio Pappano. He took over as music director of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden two years ago following in the footsteps of Bernard Haitink and the late Sir Georg Solti. Observers have pointed to a noticeable shift in leadership since his arrival describing him as the 'Mr Motivator' of the opera world. He's also earned a reputation for being able to attract and nurture some of the industry's most difficult stars.

He was born in 1959 in Epping, although his parents were originally from the Campania region of Italy near Naples. The family soon moved to Clapham in South London where Antonio's father worked as a singing coach at a studio in Pimlico. As a boy he studied the piano and, by the age of ten, was his father's regular accompanist. When he was 13, the family moved to Connecticut in America, where he organised school and church choirs and played the piano in a local cocktail bar. He didn't take the traditional career path into the world of opera through college and conservatoire but was sufficiently gifted to become a rehearsal pianist at the New York City Opera by the age of 21. He began to conduct, and soon came to the attention of Daniel Barenboim, who took him on as his assistant. From there he moved to the Opera House in Oslo and, by the age of 32, he was appointed musical director of the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels where he stayed until his move to the Royal Opera House two years ago.

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

Favourite track: Young and Foolish by Tony Bennett and Bill Evans

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Britain's most popular writer of historical fiction Bernard Cornwell. His work has sold more than five million copies in nine languages. His most famous character is the rifleman Richard Sharpe - an embittered, slightly villainous career soldier whose fortunes are followed through the late 18th century and early 19th. Cornwell's journey to writing was a long one. He was born in 1944 the illegitimate son of an English woman and Canadian airman. His mother was forced to give him up for adoption when he was a few weeks old and, after a short spell in an orphanage, he was brought up by an Essex couple who were members of the religious group The Peculiar People.

He trained first to be a teacher and then joined the BBC as a researcher on Nationwide. He had a successful career in television but, when he met the woman he wanted to marry, he had to leave it all to join her in America. Refused a Green Card, he reassured her that he would support them both by writing historical novels - an ambition he'd held for years but had yet to realize. On the strength of the first book, he was offered a contract for an entire series and, eventually, his character Richard Sharpe was brought to life by Sean Bean.

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

Favourite track: Flower duet from Lakme by Delibes

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the widely respected children's author and the current Children's Laureate Michael Morpurgo. He styles himself as a 'story-teller/writer' and the themes he explores are the relationships between young and old, children and animals and children's experiences of loneliness and self-reliance.

Together with his wife, Clare, he set up the charity Farms for City Children in Devon to give inner-city children the opportunity to experience life on a farm, working with animals and being close to nature. The charity now has three farms and they have been visited by more than 30,000 children. He is the third Children's Laureate and says he is devoted to giving children a love of books and reading. His own works include War Horse, Kensuke's Kingdom, Why the Wales Came and, most recently, Private Peaceful.

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

Favourite track: Spem In Alium by Thomas Tallis

Angela Gheorghiu is one of the world's foremost sopranos, beautiful, a good actress and with a voice that critics say is close to perfect, she has been hailed as the next Maria Callas. She is the daughter of a Romanian train driver and says she knew she wanted to be a singer almost as soon as she could walk. Theatre, music and the arts were a form of escaping the drudgery of everyday life and, as a career, offered a rare means of escape from the most austere of the communist regimes.

She was trained through the communist regime's rigorous schooling system, graduating with a first-class honours degree from the Bucharest Music Academy in 1990. The fall of the Ceaucescu regime meant that as an artist she could travel and develop an international career. Her international debut was at Covent Garden in 1992 in Don Giovanni. Later the same year she was Mimi in La Boheme. It was her first performance with the celebrated tenor Roberto Alagna. They've now been together for nine years and their performances together have resulted in operas that had fallen from favour being staged once again.

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

Favourite track: Ciocarlia - the Lark by Gheorghe Zamfir

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the artist Jack Vettriano.

Jack Vettriano is the painter of Britain's most popular work of art. More than a million prints and posters have been sold of his work The Singing Butler since the original was bought for just over £4,500 in 1991. It shows a glamorous couple dancing on the beach while a maid and butler hold umbrellas over their heads to shield them from the rain. The original is due to go under the hammer, once again, in April and this time is expected to fetch hundreds of thousands of pounds. Vettriano has enjoyed painting since he was in his 20s after a girlfriend gave him a set of watercolours. But he did not devote himself full time to art until the late 1980s when he was nearly 40. Since then, his rise has been meteoric and the public have clamoured both for his romantic, nostalgic views of a world gone by and for his far darker works that depict the sexual tensions between men and women.

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

Favourite track: Like A Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan