Desert Island Discs: Archive 2011-2015

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the Reverend Rose Hudson-Wilkin.

The first black woman to be chaplain to Her Majesty the Queen and also to the Speaker of the House of Commons, she's also kept busy with her work in less rarefied surroundings - ministering to two churches in the east London borough of Hackney.

It's all a long way from the crystal waters and swaying palms of her birthplace, Montego Bay, where brought up by her Auntie Pet she coped with poverty and separation from her mother. She did however have a sense, from the age of just 14, that her future lay in faith.

She wasn't wrong and the combination of her belief and dynamism has taken her to as close to the top as The Church of England will currently allow. If they do eventually permit women bishops it's easy to imagine she'd be a shoe in.

She says "Oh I have lots of ambition. You can't be Jamaican and not be ambitious. My ambition is to enjoy life. My ambition is to do everything I do to the best of my ability."

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the violinist, Nicola Benedetti.

She had her first violin lesson at the age of four, and by the age of eight, she was leading the National Children's Orchestra of Scotland. By the grand old age of ten she was boarding at the Yehudi Menuhin School and receiving lessons from the great man himself.

Her big break came when she won the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition - the first Scot to win it. Lucrative recording contracts followed together with a hectic programme of concerts. Still only 26, she is now world-renowned as a soloist and chamber musician.

Of Italian descent, her family wasn't particularly musical though the qualities of discipline, hard work and perseverance meant that fun & freedom came after music practice. Passionate about the importance of classical music in education, she walks the talk, committed to developing young musical talent through charity work and masterclasses & she received an MBE from Her Majesty the Queen for these services in 2013.

She says, "when I teach seven year olds and they can play Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, I say 'that's amazing! Well Done!' And then occasionally Mum would remind me "do you remember what you were playing at that age?"

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is woodsman Ray Mears.

A traveller to the world's remotest corners and a renowned expert in bushcraft, wild cooking and survival techniques, he's one of very few castaways who would genuinely relish the challenges of a desert island.

Those of us not possessed of his spirit and skill can live vicariously through his exploits on TV and through his survival handbooks. Enlightening and entertaining the sofa-bound masses is only one strand on his hand whittled bow: he's also trained elite troops for The British Army and in 2010 he was called on by police to help them track the fugitive killer, Raoul Moat.

It was survival skills of a different type he needed when he lost his first wife Rachel to cancer: he met his second wife Ruth at a book signing and they share not just a love of each other, but also of the great outdoors.

He says of the wild: "I can see nature; I feel it intuitively and I can understand what can't be written."

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is Miranda Hart.

She writes and stars in the hit sitcom "Miranda" and has congaed her way to the top of TV comedy by exploiting the universal truth that awkwardness lies at the heart of the human condition. Slapstick and misunderstanding underpin her work along with the impression that she's just a really, jolly, lovely 'girl': her father was a naval commander and her mother has devoted much of her life to tending a glorious garden.

Making her mark has been something of a slog. After her first appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe it was another 11 years before she could give up her job as a P.A. - for a good while she was photocopying scripts rather than performing them.

She says: "I started writing comedy because it was more fun inside my head than the real world, but that's no longer true."

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is Gillian Clarke.

Wales's National Poet, she has received the Queen's Gold Medal for her work. She writes about everything from dinosaurs to suicide, but the potency and power of nature is a recurring motif.

Although she's recognised for her significant and distinguished contribution to her homeland's literature and culture, her verse has been translated into ten languages and she regularly receives fan mail from South America, Pakistan and most countries in between.

Aside from writing, her main project in life is the conservation of her own small patch of West Wales - restoring hedges, conserving bluebells and tending sheep take up her spare time.

She says, "A poem is the only work of art you can have for nothing. Read it, memorise it, copy it into your notebook and it's yours."

Producer: Paula McGinley.

Kirsty Young's castaway is Barbara Hulanicki, designer and creator of Biba.

Today her creativity spans fashion, illustration, interior design and architecture but it was the success of the label Biba that first made her name; launching a high street revolution with its opulent-looking but entirely affordable high fashion. According to Twiggy, "she changed fashion in England singlehandedly".

A newspaper advert for a £3 pink gingham dress in 1963 kicked things off and by the seventies her London department store was a throbbing temple to all things skinny-fitted in plum, mulberry, green, brown and black. Romantic, mysterious, nostalgic and very profitable. But when it all turned sour with her business partners, she and her husband Fitz walked away, leaving behind the hugely popular creation that had made her name.

The fantasy and perfection of her creations were a far cry from the harsh reality of her childhood; born in Poland just before the Second World War, the air of privilege that surrounded her family was traumatically punctured when her father, a diplomat, was assassinated.

She says "Now whenever I finish something I take some photographs and say 'goodbye'. When you lose everything, you realise that the only thing you have is what's in your head."

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the broadcaster Clare Balding.

The BBC TV coverage of London's 2012 Olympics was her triumph and much like Team GB she'd been in training for her big moment for quite a while.

She's worked on five Olympic Games, four Paralympics, three Winter Olympics and a great deal of horse racing. It's on the turf that's she's most at home - her father was a champion racehorse trainer and for a number of years she herself was a leading amateur flat jockey.

The first pony she ever rode, as a toddler, was a gift from the Queen; she went to public school and Cambridge but her life hasn't been an entirely easy ride. She has coped with thyroid cancer, being forcibly "outed" by the tabloid press and in her own words being "a disappointment from the moment" she was born.

She says, "This may sound nauseating but I'm a very happy person. I love my work, I love my life and I'm told by those who know and love me that it's a bit like living with Tigger".

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Rt Hon Ed Miliband MP, Leader of the Labour Party, joins Kirsty Young to choose his Desert Island Discs.

He's been in charge of his party for three years and was the youngest leader they'd ever elected. But that fact got somewhat lost in the drama that surrounded his coronation: famously, he stood against his brother, David. To say the younger brother's victory upset the political apple cart would be something of an understatement.

Politics is in his pores. His mother was a human rights campaigner, his father a renowned Marxist academic. Both parents came from Jewish families who settled in Britain having only just survived the Nazis.

Looking though his CV - clever comprehensive schoolboy, degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford, an intern for Tony Benn, Economics lecturer at Harvard, Special Advisor to Gordon Brown - it's clear, for him, there's only ever been one abiding passion.

He says, politics "is not something I chose. It's not something I learned from books, even from my Dad's books. It was something I was born into."

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the writer Malorie Blackman.

A prolific and multi-award winning author she has powered her way to success not just through talent but determination and perseverance. From the careers mistress who told her, "black people don't become teachers," to the 82 rejection letters she received before she was published, significant parts of her life seem to have been spent proving people wrong. A technology wiz, her first career was in computing. As a writer her books have tackled challenging themes: bullying, teenage pregnancy, racism and terrorism.

Currently Children's Laureate, her own formative years were spent in South London where as a little girl she went from thinking everyone was her friend to feeling, as a teenager, that the world was her enemy.

She says, "Good stories made me reassess the world and people as I thought I knew them. Great stories made me reassess myself."

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the classical pianist, Alfred Brendel.

A performer of world renown, his career spans seven decades, and he is particularly famous for his interpretations of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt. An Austrian who's lived in the UK for many years, he was born in 1931 in what is now the Czech Republic. Although not from a musical family, he began playing the piano aged six and gave his first recital aged 17. Largely self-taught, in addition to his live performances, he's enjoyed a long and successful recording career. Revered for his intellect and individual and original take on the world, he is also a published poet and essayist.

He says, "I regard pessimism as a sign of intelligence. Optimism is a very welcome and life-enhancing feature, a gift, but not necessarily a realistic outlook. I am a pessimist who enjoys being pleasantly surprised."

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.