Desert Island Discs

Kirsty Young's castaway is the creator of Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes. He won an Oscar for his screenplay for Gosford Park and went on to write other feature films including The Young Victoria and Vanity Fair. Downton Abbey, which he created and writes, has been an enormous TV success with a huge audience. "Of course" he says, "if I had a clear understanding of why it had done so well, I would continue to write shows that attracted record viewers for the rest of my life." Producer: Leanne Buckle.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the journalist and former editor Eve Pollard. She was groomed for success by Rupert Murdoch, but made an editor by Robert Maxwell. Her career has spanned glossy magazines and tabloid journalism, breakfast television, biographies and novels. When she first worked on Fleet Street, she says, women were such a rarity that the male reporters didn't know what to make of her. "Any woman who has a high flying job, they don't know who to compare you to - you're not their mum, you're not their sister, you're not their wife - so they make you a sort of monster-nanny figure."Producer: Leanne Buckle.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the businessman Sir Martin Sorrell. He's been called "the world's most influential ad man," and is the founder and chief executive of the world's biggest advertising agency, WPP. He was 40 when he left Saatchi and Saatchi to be his own boss, he says: "When I started off, what I wanted to do was to build a company and manage it - I wanted to be an entrepreneur and be a manager." Producer: Leanne Buckle.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the adventurer Bear Grylls. His first career was with the SAS, but he was forced to leave after a parachute jump went wrong and he broke his back in three places. As he recuperated, he rekindled his childhood ambition of climbing Mount Everest - he went on to become the youngest Briton to reach its summit. His TV series, Born Survivor, has a global audience of more than a billion people who regularly watch him eating the apparently indigestible and risking his life by pitting himself against nature. Married with three young sons, he says: "The unresolved struggle in my life is the fact that I have a job that has an element of danger to it and at the same time I have a gorgeous family - three young boys that are the pride of my life." Producer: Leanne Buckle.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the actor Robert Hardy.He became a household name as the vet Siegfried Farnon in the hit TV series All Creatures Great and Small and, to a younger generation, he is the Minister of Magic in the Harry Potter films. But the role he is best known for is Winston Churchill - he won a Bafta for his performance in Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years. He believes actors are born rather than made and his own ambitions crystallised when, as a very young boy, he was a page boy at a wedding: "I walked down the aisle with my head held high and as I went, every eye was turned towards me and something inside me said, "That's it, get every eye on you".Producer: Leanne Buckle.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the drama teacher Anna Scher. It's more than forty years since she set up her theatre school and it has launched the careers of Kathy Burke, Martin Kemp, Pauline Quirke and Patsy Palmer to name just a few. It started out as a lunchtime drama club - and very quickly grew. Anna Scher says: "There were enormous classes - about seventy in a class - and a lot of those pupils were non-readers and so I fell into improvisation by chance. I found that it was a very effective way of character training." Producer: Leanne Buckle

Kirsty Young's castaway is the children's author Francesca Simon. Educated at Yale and Oxford she initially thought she'd pursue an academic life - but within weeks of her son's birth, found that ideas for children's stories started flowing. She's now written twenty books featuring her creation Horrid Henry and they sell in their millions. She sees Horrid Henry as sitting within the long tradition of anarchic characters in children's literature. She says: "Everyone responds to Henry because I think everyone feels - however conventional they seem on the outside - that they are rebellious and unconventional, and Henry really taps into that." Producer: Leanne Buckle.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the crossbench peer and social entrepreneur Lord Victor Adebowale. For the past decade, when not in the House of Lords, he has devoted his time to overseeing services for people who are homeless, suffer from drug or alcohol addiction and have mental health issues or learning disabilities. To many, they are the most disadvantaged people in society, but he says that's not a term he finds useful: "I find it very difficult when people use words like 'bottom of the pile' and 'disadvantaged' - you'd be amazed that the veneer that separates people who don't think they're at the bottom of the pile from people who are is quite thin." Producer: Leanne Buckle.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the writer and actor Mark Gatiss.His childhood passions have fuelled his adult creative life. As a boy he says he was drawn towards the macabre and gothic - while his teachers remarked that his school essays resembled scripts for Hammer horror films. He has written for - and acted in - Dr Who, was one of the creators of The League of Gentlemen and his re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes for a contemporary TV audience was a huge success. He says: "When I was a kid, anything supernatural drew me, I would try and find it in anything - Gardeners' Question Time - I would look for something." Producer: Leanne Buckle.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the athlete Michael Johnson.He is the only person ever to hold world records in the 200 and 400 metres at the same time and, by the time he hung up his legendary gold trainers, his haul of medals included five Olympic golds. His upright running style earned him the nickname 'the duck'. He says: "They called me a really fast duck! I was ranked number one in the world - I'm so far ahead of the other people, why am I the one that's wrong?"Producer: Leanne Buckle.