Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu is Professor of Pharmaceutical Nanoscience at University College London and President of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge.

She has devoted her career to harnessing the potential of nanoparticles – which are less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair - to take medicines to hard-to-reach areas of the body such as the back of the eye and the brain. Using nanoparticles in this way is said to increase the efficacy of medicines and reduce side effects.

Ijeoma was born in London where her parents had settled from Nigeria. At 13 she moved with her family to Nigeria where she developed an enduring love of chemistry.

In 2010 she co-founded a pharmaceutical company Nanomerics with her husband. The company is currently developing eyedrops to treat blindness and a nasal spray to target pain which she hopes will go some way to addressing the opioid crisis. Earlier this year Ijeoma was appointed a DBE in the King’s New Years Honours List.

Ijeoma lives in Cambridge with her husband Andreas.

Presenter Lauren Laverne

DISC ONE: Chop My Money (I Don’t Care) - P-Square

BOOK CHOICE: Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

Actor Danny Dyer became a household name when he joined the cast of EastEnders as Mick Carter, landlord of the Queen Victoria pub. He recently stole the show from some stiff competition playing Freddie Jones in the television adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s novel Rivals which won him a Royal Television Society Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Danny was born in Custom House, East London in 1977. He loved drama at school and, with his teacher’s encouragement, he signed up for after-school classes in north London which were run by a charity called Wac Arts. When he was 14 he was cast in the television drama Prime Suspect 3 alongside Helen Mirren and David Thewlis.

He went on to star in a series of films including Human Traffic and Football Factory. In 2000 he played the waiter in Harold Pinter’s new play Celebration and went on to appear in two other productions by the playwright - No Man's Land and The Homecoming.

In 2013 he took over the Queen Vic and his performances earned him three National Television Awards. He appeared on the BBC genealogy programme Who Do you think you Are? in 2016 and discovered he was descended from King Edward III and related to Thomas Cromwell.

Danny lives in Essex with his wife Jo. They have three children and three grandchildren.

DISC ONE: Slave to Love - Bryan Ferry

BOOK CHOICE: Ray Mears Essential Bushcraft: A Handbook of Survival

Presenter Lauren Laverne

Jack Thorne, screenwriter and playwright, shares the eight tracks, book and luxury item he would want with him if cast away on a desert island. With Lauren Laverne.

Sue Lawley talks to the actor Dame Joan Plowright in a programme first broadcast in 2006. Dame Joan died in January at the age of 95.

Kirsty Young interviews writer Colm Toibin in a programme first heard in 2016.

Lauren Laverne talks to crossbench peer Dame Louise Casey in a programme from 2021.

Lindsey Hilsum is a multi-award-winning journalist who has been a foreign correspondent for the past four decades. She has been Channel 4’s international editor for the past 22 years and has reported on every continent except Antarctica.

After studying French and Spanish at University, she worked as an aid worker in Mexico and Kenya before becoming the East Africa stringer for the BBC World Service.

After realising her calling was journalism she devoted her career to covering events around the world including the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the 2003/4 war in Iraq.

She also spent two years in Beijing as the China correspondent for Channel 4 News.

Among her many awards for her work, she has been named Amnesty International Journalist of the Year, RTS Specialist Journalist of the Year and has received the Charles Wheeler Award in recognition of her outstanding contribution to broadcast journalism. She is also the author of three books.

When she is not abroad reporting, Lindsey lives in London.

Presenter: Lauren Laverne

DISC ONE: Dancing in the Dark - Bruce Springsteen

BOOK CHOICE: Collected Poems by W H Auden

Donna Ockenden is a former clinical midwife who led the Ockenden Review which revealed, at the time, the biggest maternity scandal in NHS history. Published in 2022, the review highlighted serious failings in maternity care at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust which contributed to the deaths of more than 200 babies and nine mothers.

Donna grew up in the village of Aberaman in the Welsh Valleys. She experienced a complicated childhood which included a period living in a homeless shelter along with her mother and four siblings. She is also a survivor of sexual abuse and believes her background helped her develop a tenacity and determination which she went on to apply to her work.

She completed her nursing training in Swansea and Neath and trained as a midwife at the Portsmouth School of Midwifery. In 2015 she became Senior Midwifery Adviser to the Chief Executive of the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC).

In May 2022 she was appointed chair of the independent review into maternity services at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust which will be published next year. It is already the largest investigation into a single service in the NHS, hearing evidence from over 2,000 families so far.

Donna lives in Chichester with her two cats.

Details of organisations offering information and support with child sexual abuse or child bereavement are available at bbc.co.uk/actionline.

DISC ONE: We’ve Only Just Begun - The Carpenters

BOOK CHOICE: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Presenter Lauren Laverne

Professor Carl Jones is a conservation biologist who is best known for saving the Mauritius kestrel from extinction. He is the scientific director of Mauritian Wildlife Foundation, chief scientist at Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and an honorary professor in ecology and conservation biology at the University of East Anglia.

He was born in Carmarthen in Wales and was fascinated with animals from an early age, rearing rescued common kestrels, owls and hawks in his back garden. He studied biology at North-East London Polytechnic and, after learning about the plight of the Mauritius kestrel, he was determined to go out to the country to try to save the bird.

He arrived in Mauritius in 1979 when there were only two known breeding pairs left in the wild. By the time he left in 1999 he’d established a captive breeding programme and today hundreds of Mauritius kestrels fly over the islands where he spent decades pioneering his, sometimes controversial, methods. Today the Mauritius kestrel is the national bird.

He is also responsible for saving from extinction three species of reptiles, a fruit bat and several plants.

He was appointed an MBE for his work in 2004 and in 2016 he won the prestigious Indianapolis Prize – the world’s leading award for animal conservation.

Carl lives in Carmarthen with his wife and two children and assorted animals including two Andean condors called Carlos and Baby.

DISC ONE: Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf Opus 67 - The London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult

BOOK CHOICE: The Collected Works of Dylan Thomas

Presenter Lauren Laverne

Cyndi Lauper is a multi-award winning singer and songwriter. She has sold more than fifty million records, won an Emmy for acting and her musical Kinky Boots earned her a Tony and an Oliver award.

Born in 1953, Cyndi grew up in a blue collar neighbourhood in New York. Her mother loved music and art and took her children to free exhibitions in New York which inspired Cyndi. As a very young girl, Cyndi listened to her mother’s extensive record collection and mimicked the voices she heard from musicals and operas.

After a difficult family home life due to her mother’s turbulent marriages, Cyndi found solace in music and began writing songs when she was ten.

She left home at seventeen determined to make it in the music industry. She started out as a singer in bands, whilst supporting herself doing a series of jobs. Early in her career, she lost her voice for almost a year after trying to make herself heard over amps which were too loud. Success eventually came when she released her debut solo album She’s So Unusual in 1983 – the first album by a female artist to spawn four consecutive US Top 5 singles.

Cyndi lives in New York with her husband, David who is an actor. They met on a set of a film and rock legend Little Richard officiated their wedding.

DISC ONE: Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. Composed by Claude Debussy and performed by The Orchestre National de Lyon

BOOK CHOICE: Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

Presenter: Lauren Laverne