Desert Island Discs

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the actor and writer Meera Syal. She was born in the sixties after her parents had immigrated here from the Punjab and brought up in Essington, a Staffordshire mining village five miles north east of Wolverhampton. She studied English and Drama at Manchester University. Her one woman show One Of Us went to the Edinburgh Festival where she was spotted by a director from the Royal Court Theatre in London and offered an immediate equity card. Meera gave up her academic plans and moved to London to act in the theatre. She wrote and starred in 'My Sister Wife' for BBC2 and moved on to write and perform in the popular Goodness Gracious Me and to play the flirtatious granny in the Kumars at Number 42. She has written the script for the London musical Bombay Dreams which will be going to Broadway.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]Favourite track: Young, Gifted and Black by Bob and Marcia Book: Hindi-English dictionary Alternative to Bible: Bhagvadgita - ancient Hindu text Luxury: A piano

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Derek Brown the Director of the Michelin Red Guides which are the French bible for restaurants. The original Guide was invented in 1900 to help travellers in France find good food at reasonable prices. These days the annual publication always creates a stir with restaurateurs and gourmands alike, all waiting on tenterhooks to see who has been awarded the prestigious Michelin stars - or who has had them taken away. In recent years some high profile chefs have created controversy by sending back their stars, although Brown says the stars don't belong to the chefs but are awarded to the restaurant itself and judged purely on the experience of the meal on the day.Derek Brown himself comes from a middle-class Portsmouth family and his first ambition was to be a history teacher. After spending a summer earning pocket money as a waiter he realised that hotel management was his path in life and cherished a dream of owning his own hotel. At twenty-seven he saw an advert for Michelin inspectors and gradually worked his way up to the top job.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]Favourite track: 2nd Movement of Symphony No.7 in A Major by Ludwig van Beethoven Book: The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens Luxury: A steamer chair

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the director Franco Zeffirelli. He was born the illegitimate son of a philandering businessman and a successful fashion designer, both of whom were married to other people. Unable to give him his father's or her own name, his mother plucked a word out of a Mozart opera - 'Zefferetti', meaning 'little breeze' - and gave it to her son. Somewhere along the line a slip of a pen transformed it into Zeffirelli, and Franco has gone by it for 80 years. He was only six when his mother died of tuberculosis. His father was reluctant to take care of Franco but was shamed into palming him off onto an aunt, and later his English secretary Mary O'Neill. Mary belonged to a society of English ex-pats in Florence and young Franco grew up under their extraordinary influence. His experiences were eventually fictionalised into his 1999 film Tea With Mussolini, starring Joan Plowright, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Cher. In the war he fought as a partisan and twice faced a firing squad before he met up with the 1st Scots Guards and became their interpreter. As well as using his linguistic talents, the Scots Guards gave him an early opportunity for theatrical creativity, and he made an open-air auditorium from 30 army trucks and some camouflage netting. After the war he studied art and architecture and was drawn into the worlds of theatre and film, working as assistant to the Marxist director Luchino Visconti initially but soon designing and directing his own films, plays and operas. His filmography runs to some 20 movies from the ground-breaking, and at the time shocking Romeo and Juliet of 1968 to the brooding Jane Eyre of 1996 via his stunning seven-hour Jesus of Nazareth for television in 1977, not to mention his 1990 Hamlet with Mel Gibson in the leading role. On stage he is famed for his opulent productions at the opera and he has worked with the titans of the art including Maria Callas, Placido Domingo, Joan Sutherland and Herbert Von Karajan.He is in London to direct Pirandello's Absolutely! (Perhaps) starring Joan Plowright and Oliver Ford Davies, which opened at Wyndham's Theatre on 7th May.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]Favourite track: Casta diva (from Norma) by Vincenzo Bellini Book: Inferno by Dante Alighieri Luxury: A hammock from Hermes

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the composer George Fenton, whose work includes music for Groundhog Day, Shadowlands, Cry Freedom, The Company of Wolves and The Fisher King. Born George Howe in South London in 1950, he taught himself to play the guitar at the age of eight and by the age of 14 was playing the organ - "dreadfully"! He wanted to be an actor, and got an early break in Alan Bennett's play Forty Years On. As time went on, however, he found directors were always asking him to play an instrument, so he switched to music as his main focus. He got his first job as composer and musical director for a production of Twelfth Night at the RSC in Stratford in 1974. Eight years later, and still almost entirely self-taught, he was nominated for an Oscar for his score for Richard Attenborough's Gandhi. It was only his fourth attempt at film music.Since 1982 he has been nominated for four more Oscars (for Cry Freedom, The Fisher King and Dangerous Liaisons) and three Golden Globes; he's won three BAFTAs, two Ivor Novello Awards and an EMMY and written music for more than 100 television productions including Bergerac, The Jewel in the Crown, Talking Heads and The Blue Planet. In addition he cornered the market in jingles for daily news bulletins across the BBC. George Fenton is a visiting professor at the Royal College of Music in London, and regularly appears on television arts shows and documentaries as an authority on music.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]Favourite track: On Going to Sleep from Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss Book: Short Stories by Anton Chekhov Luxury: A piano or, failing that, for comfort a tin of condensed milk & tin opener

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the sociologist and Oxford Emeritus Professor A H Halsey. Prof Halsey played a key part in the switch to comprehensives as an adviser to Labour Education Secretary Anthony Crossland in the 1960s. Born in 1923 to working class parents he grew up convinced that intelligence wasn't dependent on class. Chelly, as Halsey was universally known, won a scholarship to grammar school but started his career inauspiciously as a sanitary inspector's apprentice, where he became intimately acquainted with such delights as the putrid lungs of diseased cattle. During the war he trained as a fighter pilot and perfected the 'aerial handbrake turn' that would keep him out of the way of the Japanese Kamikaze pilots. It was practising this manoevre that very nearly cost him his life as his plane took a nose dive, recovering only yards from the ground. After the war he went to the LSE and on to make a name for himself in the rapidly expanding discipline of sociology, and for some 40 years has held a professorship at Nuffield College, Oxford. Along the way he's taken on the grammar school system, the class system, the establishment and feminism. As he turns eighty, he talks to Sue Lawley about his life and times.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]Favourite track: Benedictus by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Book: Utopia by Thomas Moore Luxury: Solar-powered radio

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the impressionist and satirist Rory Bremner. He was born in Edinburgh in 1961. A self-confessed show-off, he started doing impersonations at primary school, sending up teachers, sports commentators and Moira Anderson! Entertaining his school friends inevitably developed into performing on stage and he worked as a stand up on the comedy circuit, and notably at the Edinburgh Festival. Following his sell-out run at the Festival in 1986 the BBC offered him his first television series, Now Something Else. It ran on BBC2 for seven years. In 1993 he moved to Channel 4, where his show Rory Bremner - Who Else? developed a much more hard-edged, satirical and political bite. It also picked up more than 10 major awards including Baftas for himself and fellow writer-performers John Bird and John Fortune. His meticulous research and observation of the politicians he mimics inevitably led to his fraternising with them and ultimately led to being awarded the final accolade for a satirist: he was banned from Labour's battle bus in the 2001 election campaign.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]Favourite track: Have I Told You Lately? by Van Morrison Book: The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon Luxury: Radio

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the writer Margaret Atwood. Born just after the outbreak of the Second World War, Margaret Atwood spent much of her childhood in the Canadian outback where her father's work involved studying insects. She grew up mostly without television, cinema, mains electricity or even a proper road to civilisation. For company she had only her parents and her brother, with whom she wrote "serials, mainly about space travel".It wasn't until her teens that the urge to write struck seriously, an event she describes as "a large, invisible thumb descended from the sky and pressed down on the top of my head. A poem formed." After University, a spell in England and a period teaching early morning classes to engineering students she had her first novel, The Edible Woman, published. Since then she has written nine more novels, four of which were Booker nominated with The Blind Assassin finally winning in 2000. Three of those novels have been made into films: Surfacing, The Handmaid's Tale and The Blind Assassin. She has also published some dozen books of poetry, five collections of short stories, four books for children and assorted non-fiction titles. Her latest novel, Oryx and Crake, set in a genetically engineered, post-apocalyptic landscape is published on May 5th this year.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]Favourite track: Shepherd's Hymn from Pastoral Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven Book: Stories from 1001 Arabian Nights - traditional Luxury: A huge vat of Culpepers Rose Geranium bath salts

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. Gilmour grew up in Cambridge, where his father was a senior lecturer in zoology and his mother was also a lecturer and film editor. He was educated at a private school, in the hope that he would shine academically, but he really wanted to be playing music with his friends at the local state school, the County. At 16 he left and went to the Cambridge Tech where he became friends with Syd Barratt, the legendary founder of The Pink Floyd Sound, as they were originally known. Pink Floyd went on to become one of the most successful bands of all time with albums such as Animals, Meddle and Wish You Were Here, and most famously, The Dark Side of the Moon and, later, The Wall. Dark Side of the Moon has remained in the best-selling albums chart ever since its release 30 years ago and has racked up some 35 million copies sold worldwide. The records were as groundbreaking in their presentation as their music, and the covers, designed by Storm Thorgerson, became iconic in their own rights: the man on fire on Wish You Were Here, the flying pig over Battersea power station on Animals, the black gatefold with a prism streaming light on Dark Side of the Moon. Pink Floyd concerts became a byword for spectacle through the 1970s and 1980s with lights and lasers and special effects. Since the seventies, David Gilmour has also worked solo and guested with Bryan Ferry and Paul McCartney among others. He has several charitable interests, recently selling his mansion in Maida Vale to Earl Spencer and donating the £4.5 million to Crisis, a homelessness and housing charity. In 2001 he performed a mainly acoustic selection of his and Pink Floyd's songs at Robert Wyatt's Meltdown on the South Bank. He lives on 300 acres of land in Sussex with his second wife, writer Polly Samson and four of his eight children. [Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]Favourite track: Dancing in the Street by Martha and the Vandellas Book: An English translation of the Koran Luxury: An acoustic Martin D.35 guitar

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the actress Kristin Scott Thomas. She was born in Redruth, Cornwall in 1960. Her father, a Naval pilot, was killed in a crash when she was five. Her mother married another pilot six years later, but he was also killed under similar circumstances. Kristin moved around the country with her parents and four siblings until she went to Cheltenham Ladies College at the age of eight, where she was 'always bottom of the class'. On leaving school she didn't go to drama school, but took up a teaching course instead. When she tried to move over to the acting course she was told the only way she'd get to play Lady Macbeth was if she joined an amateur dramatic society. Stung, she moved to Paris where she was encouraged by the family she was working for to enroll at a Parisian drama school, which she did. She has worked almost constantly since, in France, England and America, on stage, television and film. Her first starring film role was opposite Prince in his film Under the Cherry Moon and others soon followed. Among her most famous roles are Lady Brenda in A Handful of Dust, Fiona in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Katherine Clifton in The English Patient. She has lived in Paris ever since moving there at the age of 19 and is married to a French obstetrician, Francois Olivennes. The couple have three children aged 14, 10 and two. Kristin Scott Thomas is in London to appear in Chekov's Three Sisters at the Playhouse in the West End. This is her first British stage appearance.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]Favourite track: Morgen, Op.27.No 4 by Richard Strauss Book: Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen Luxury: A pair of mules by Christian Louboutin

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the composer of the hit musicals Les Miserables and Miss Saigon, Claude-Michel Schönberg. Claude-Michel always knew he would be a composer. As a small boy growing up in Brittany he would play the piano and compose pieces for his mother. He dreamt of getting away from his little village on the French coast and going to live in Paris and compose operas.To please his mother Claude-Michel went to University to study mathematics, but whilst he was there he formed a band and began writing songs. They caught the attention of an EMI A&R man which resulted in two singles and a job for Claude-Michel as an A&R assistant. Claude-Michel enjoyed a brief career as a pop star, when he had a huge hit in France with Le Premier Pas (The first date) - a song that is still played on the radio there today. During this time he had met lyricist Alain Boublil who had been impressed with his pop songs and both were keen to take on a bigger project. The result was La Révolution Française which did moderately well in France. The duo perfected their skills when they went on to create the hugely successful musicals Les Miserables, Miss Saigon and Martin Guerre.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]Favourite track: Beim Schlagengehen by Richard Strauss Book: All the Little Live Things by Wallace Earle Stegner Luxury: Grand piano