Private Passions

Private Passions episodes:

• 04.28.2024

  Edith Hall

  Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at Durham University – and her passion for her subject reaches far beyond the lecture hall or seminar room. She wants us all to understand how the writing and thinking of ancient Greece still...

  
• 04.21.2024

  Sathnam Sanghera

  Sathnam Sanghera is a best-selling writer and journalist. He grew up in Wolverhampton to Punjabi parents in a home where, in his words, “no one read books or owned them, let alone wrote them”. When he started school, he couldn’t...

  
• 04.14.2024

  Professor Sue Black

  Professor Lady Sue Black is one of the world’s leading forensic scientists. She says “I have never been spooked by the dead. It is the living who terrify me. The dead are much more predictable and co-operative.” Her painstaking work and...

  
• 04.07.2024

  David Mitchell

  David Mitchell is the author of nine time-traversing, genre-bending novels. His first, Ghostwritten, was published 25 years ago, and his third, Cloud Atlas, made his name around the world, and later became a Hollywood film. It follows six interlocking lives...

  
• 03.31.2024

  John Krebs

  John Krebs is a zoologist who has specialised in the behaviour of birds. Although he was the son of a Nobel prize-winning chemist, ornithology was a very early passion: he hand-reared birds as a child and allowed them to...

  
• 03.17.2024

  Helena Newman

  Helena Newman has many strings to her bow, She is the Chairman of Sotheby’s Europe and the Worldwide Head of Impressionist & Modern Art. She is one of only a handful of female auctioneers and presided over the bidding of...

  
• 03.10.2024

  Mark Cousins - Sound of Cinema Sunday

  Michael Berkeley’s guest is the film-maker, producer and writer Mark Cousins. His documentary work includes The Story of Film, an epic 900-minute journey through the history of cinema, from the earliest moving images in the late 19th century to the...

  
• 02.25.2024

  Michael Winterbottom

  Michael Winterbottom is one of Britain’s most prolific and eclectic film directors: his work encompasses political thrillers and pop culture, reworkings of classic novels and retelling real events. He’s made three films based on the novels of Thomas Hardy, including...

  
• 02.18.2024

  Ray Cooper

  The percussionist Ray Cooper is often referred to as the ‘father of rock and roll percussion’. He is renowned for his exuberant stage presence and for incorporating unusual instruments, including cowbells, glockenspiels, timpani and tubular bells to name but a...

  
• 02.11.2024

  Raymond Blanc

  Raymond Blanc is one of the finest chefs in the world and he is completely self-taught. He grew up in post-war France in Besancon in the Comte region of eastern France between Burgundy and the Jura Mountains with his four...

  
• 02.04.2024

  Louise Welsh

  Louise Welsh worked in a second-hand bookshop in Glasgow before she took the plunge to become a writer, bursting onto the scene in 2002 with her prize-winning crime novel, The Cutting Room. As the author of seven novels and the...

  
• 01.21.2024

  Lorna Dawson

  Professor Lorna Dawson is one of the UK’s leading forensic scientists. She examines soil in order to solve crimes. For over thirty years her pioneering techniques, using soil evidence on shoes, clothing and vehicles, have led to numerous high-profile convictions....

  
• 01.14.2024

  Merlin Sheldrake

  Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and writer with a mission: to make us look at and understand fungi. While we’re familiar with mushrooms, truffles and toadstools, there are millions of varieties of fungi all around us; in the soil, in...

  
• 01.07.2024

  Nina Stibbe

  Nina Stibbe was fifty when she first became a published writer with Love Nina, a collection of letters she wrote to her sister in the 1980s about her time working as a very inexperienced young nanny for Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor...

  
• 12.31.2023

  Johnny Flynn

  Johnny Flynn is a polymath – as comfortable as an actor on stage and screen as he is writing and performing songs. You have perhaps seen him as Mr Knightley in the film Emma or as Ian Fleming in...

  
• 12.10.2023

  Dame Ottoline Leyser

  Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser first realised plants are extraordinary and astonishing at school, when introduced to the round and wrinkled peas of Gregor Mendel. She is fascinated by plant genetics and as Regius Professor of Botany at the University...

  
• 12.03.2023

  Walter Murch

  Walter Murch is a Hollywood legend. He’s won three Oscars for his sound and editing work on Apocalypse Now and The English Patient, and his credits include some of the most acclaimed and discussed films of the past half century...

  
• 11.26.2023

  Kevin O'Hare

  Kevin O’Hare is the director of the Royal Ballet and he probably finds it hard to remember a time when dance wasn’t part of his life. He started young, and joined the Royal Ballet School at the age of eleven....

  
• 11.19.2023

  Daniel Handler

  The best-selling American writer Daniel Handler is perhaps better known by his pen name, Lemony Snicket. Lemony is the cynical narrator of a thirteen book saga called A Series of Unfortunate Events. It’s the tale of three unlucky orphans,...

  
• 11.12.2023

  Mali Morris

  The abstract painter Mali Morris is fascinated by colour and light, and has been exploring their possibilities in her work for more than 50 years. She was born in Wales and studied at the University of Newcastle, where...

  
• 11.05.2023

  Abdulrazak Gurnah

  Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, honouring a career in which he’s written ten novels, and many short stories and essays. He’s an Emeritus Professor at the University of Kent. He was born in 1948...

  
• 10.29.2023

  Chris Addison

  Chris Addison has built his career on laughter, as a stand-up comedian, a panellist on shows such as Mock the Week, and as an actor and director. You perhaps saw him as Ollie, the hapless junior Whitehall adviser in...

  
• 10.22.2023

  Black History Month

  A special edition for Black History Month celebrating the lives and music of black women. Michael Berkeley revisits some of the many inspiring guests from the last few years who chose music written or performed by black women, and who...

  
• 10.15.2023

  Brian Cox

  Brian Cox has enjoyed a prolific career in theatre, film and television over the last sixty years, working with the most esteemed theatre companies and renowned Hollywood and TV directors. Born in Dundee, he was obsessed by film from an...

  
• 10.08.2023

  Fay Dowker

  Professor Fay Dowker is a theoretical physicist fascinated by space and time. She was obsessed with maths from a young age and went on to study at Cambridge University. There Professor Stephen Hawking became her mentor and a very close...

  
• 10.01.2023

  Olivia Harrison

  Olivia Harrison is a prizewinning film producer and charity director. Last year she published Came the Lightening, a poignant collection of twenty poems dedicated to her late husband George Harrison of the Beatles. George died in November 2001, at...

  
• 09.26.2023

  Peter Frankopan

  Peter Frankopan is a historian who likes to take on big ideas, sweeping across many centuries and national boundaries. In his acclaimed book The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, published in 2015, he argued that the...

  
• 09.17.2023

  Rhiannon Giddens

  Rhiannon Giddens has won two Grammy awards for her folk music albums, and a Pulitzer Prize for her opera, Omar, proving that she’s a musician who can’t be quickly categorised. She grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, and as...

  
• 09.10.2023

  Jeremy Deller

  Jeremy Deller is a difficult artist to pin down. He’s won the Turner Prize and represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, but you’re just as likely to find his work on our streets as in a gallery. In 2016,...

  
• 09.01.2023

  Raynor Winn

  Raynor Winn is a writer whose first book, The Salt Path, followed the remarkable 630-mile journey she and her husband Moth made around the South West Coastal Path. It was a story of endurance as they had lost...

  
• 08.20.2023

  György Ligeti

  2023 marks the centenary of the composer György Ligeti's birth, and in this programme, first broadcast in 1997, he joined Michael Berkeley to share some of his musical passions. They include piano music by Beethoven, player piano music by Conlon...

  
• 07.09.2023

  Isabella Tree

  Isabella Tree is an author and travel writer. Her award-winning book Wilding: the Return of Nature to a British Farm, describes how she and her conservationist husband Charlie decided after many generations of intensive dairy and arable farming to undertake...

  
• 07.02.2023

  Alexander Polzin

  Alexander Polzin is a German sculptor, painter, costume and set designer. He began his career as a stonemason, but is now well known for his collaborations with writers, composers, choreographers and scientists. He has created sets, often drawing on...

  
• 06.18.2023

  Naomi Alderman

  Naomi Alderman is a writer who likes to question established ways of thinking. In 2017 her novel The Power won the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for fiction. It imagines a world where women develop the ability to emit electric shocks from...

  
• 06.11.2023

  Beccy Speight

  Beccy Speight has been the chief executive officer of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds since 2019. It is the UK’s largest nature conservation charity with over a million members and manages more than 200 nature reserves providing...

  
• 06.04.2023

  Kit de Waal

  Author Kit de Waal was brought up in a working class family in the Moseley suburb of Birmingham in the 1960s and 70s. She talks to Michael Berkeley about how reading wasn’t part of her childhood; she didn’t discover a...

  
• 05.28.2023

  Sarah Lee

  Sarah Lee is a photographer, who was first given a camera on her 18th birthday. She taught herself how to use it by taking photographs for the student newspaper while studying for a degree in English Literature at University College...

  
• 05.21.2023

  Norman Ackroyd

  Artist and printmaker Norman Ackroyd was born in Leeds in 1938. He fell in love with the landscape of the Yorkshire Dales, riding around on his bicycle as a young boy and studied art despite his father believing it was...

  
• 05.14.2023

  Mary-Ann Ochota

  Mary-Ann Ochota is an anthropologist and broadcaster. She is fascinated by what it means to be human and why we behave as we do. Her work has taken her around the world from the poorest parts of Dhaka...

  
• 05.07.2023

  Ben Watt

  Musician and writer Ben Watt released his first single when he was just 19. In 1981, on his first day as a student at Hull University, he met Tracey Thorn and together they formed the duo Everything But the Girl...

  
• 04.30.2023

  Isabel Wilkerson

  The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson was born in Washington DC. Her parents moved there in the Great Migration – when six million African Americans left the rural south to escape poor economic conditions and discrimination. Isabel later wrote about...

  
• 04.16.2023

  Libby Jackson

  Libby Jackson is the head of Space Exploration for the UK Space Agency. She has turned a childhood passion for space into a wide-ranging career. She was flight instructor and controller at Europe’s Mission Control Centre for the International...

  
• 04.09.2023

  Steve Rosenberg reveals his all-time musical highlights

  Steve Rosenberg is the BBC’s Russia editor. After studying Russian at university, he moved to Moscow in 1991 and since then has charted the transformation of the country – from the conflict in Chechnya and the Beslan school...

  
• 03.28.2023

  Robert Powell

  Robert Powell is one of our best-known actors, with a career that began in the late sixties and exploded into almost instant fame; since then, there have been some fifty films, including “The Thirty-Nine Steps” and “The Italian Job”, numerous...

  
• 03.19.2023

  Helena Kennedy

  Helena Kennedy is one of Britain's most distinguished lawyers. Brought up in a Glasgow tenement flat, she was the first in her family to go to university. But instead of going to Glasgow University to read English and becoming a...

  
• 03.12.2023

  Peter J Conradi

  Back when he was studying English at UEA, Peter J Conradi had a friend who ran the student literary society, organizing writers to come to Norwich and speak. He went along to a meeting and the speaker there changed the...

  
• 02.21.2023

  Susie Boyt

  The novelist and journalist Susie Boyt tells Michael Berkeley about her lifelong passions for music, theatre and dancing. Whether she’s writing black comedies about dysfunctional families or about her intense love of Judy Garland, Susie Boyt is unafraid to...

  
• 02.12.2023

  Simon Thurley

  The historian Simon Thurley tells Michael Berkeley about his passion for ancient buildings and the music associated with them. At the age of seven, Simon Thurley dug up what turned out to be Roman remains in his back garden...

  
• 01.29.2023

  Joanna Scanlan

  Joanna Scanlan is one of our great comic actors; she’s best-known for “The Thick of It”, where she plays the obstructive civil servant Terri Coverley. But her range is much wider than comedy. She’s extraordinarily moving in “After Love”, Aleem...

  
• 01.23.2023

  Hugh Brody

  Brought up in a comfortable suburb of Sheffield, Hugh Brody has spent his life travelling to the most inhospitable corners of the world. For more than ten years he lived among the peoples of the Arctic and sub-Arctic, learning their...