Desert Island Discs

Gillian Reynolds spent 42 years as the radio critic of the Daily Telegraph before she was headhunted by the Sunday Times at the age of 82. Born into a working class family in Liverpool, her mother ran a market stall and her father was a seaman, but also a gambler. Her mother was determined to ensure that Gillian had a good education, and she was the first in her family to go to a grammar school. She went on to study English at Oxford. She took up an internship in America, where she met her husband, and they returned to Liverpool when she became pregnant with the first of her three sons. She first worked as a radio critic for the Guardian in 1967. She became the first female controller of a commercial radio station when she joined Radio City, Liverpool, in 1974. She moved to London in 1975 when she left her troubled marriage, and secured the job of radio critic for the Telegraph, as well as working as a journalist in television and radio, at one point even co-presenting the Today programme.She chaired the Sony Radio Awards for four years, the only woman to have done so, and the Radio Academy Festival for a decade. She lives alone, but with around two dozen radios, in Notting Hill.Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

David Baddiel is a comedian and writer. Known both for his solo work and for his comedic collaborations with, among others, Rob Newman and Frank Skinner, he has also written a screenplay, a musical and several books. Born in 1964 to Jewish parents, the second of three boys, he was brought up in Dollis Hill, London. His father was a scientist from Swansea and his mother was a refugee, whose family had to flee from Nazi Germany. When David was 13, his older brother Ivor played him sketches by Derek and Clive which kindled his appetite to become a comedian. He read English at Cambridge and became vice-president of the Footlights before starting out on the London comedy circuit. Together with Steve Punt, Hugh Dennis and Rob Newman, he was part of The Mary Whitehouse Experience for Radio 1 and later BBC 2. Rob and David went on to create Newman and Baddiel in Pieces, and were the first comedians to sell out Wembley Arena with a gig in 1993, prompting newspapers to declare comedy "the new rock 'n' roll". David then formed a comedy partnership with Frank Skinner and they hosted Fantasy Football League and later Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned. They co-wrote the lyrics to one of the best-known football songs, Three Lions.In 2005, David took a break from performance and concentrated on writing novels for adults and children's books as well as the script for a film, which became a musical, The Infidel. He returned to stand-up in 2013 with a show about fame. He recently mined his parents' idiosyncrasies and the rare form of dementia from which his father suffers for a stand-up show entitled My Family: Not the Sitcom. His partner is fellow comedian and writer Morwenna Banks. They have two teenage children. Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Dr. Sue Black is a computer scientist, academic and social entrepreneur. She was instrumental in saving Bletchley Park, the home of vital codebreaking during the second world war. Currently an honorary professor at UCL, she founded BCS Women for women in science and the social enterprise Tech Mums, which teaches parents about computing. She is also on an advisory board for the government's digital services.Born in Fareham, Hampshire, she was 12 when her mother died of a brain haemorrhage. She left school and home at the earliest legal age, 16, and by the age of 20 she was the mother of three children. She returned to education by taking a maths access course at night school which led to a degree in computing from London South Bank University in 1993. She gained a PhD in software engineering in 2001 and became a lecturer. She was Head of Department of Computing Science at the University of Westminster before leaving in 2012 to become a technology evangelist. In 2016 She was awarded the Order of the British Empire for services to for services to technology.Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Sir Peter Lampl is a philanthropist who has given over £50 million and worked for 20 years to combat educational inequality. In 1997 he founded the Sutton Trust with the aim of improving social mobility. The Trust has funded over 200 research studies, and it initiates and supports a wide range of programmes, covering everything from early years education to access to the professions. The son of a Viennese émigré, Peter Lampl grew up in modest circumstances in Yorkshire until the age of 11, when his family relocated to Surrey. He attended grammar schools, Oxford University and the London Business School. He worked as a management consultant and businessman in the USA and Europe, and in 1983 he set up the Sutton Company, an international private equity firm. His first move into philanthropy came in the wake of the Dunblane school shootings in 1996, when he funded the campaign which led to a complete ban on the private ownership of handguns in the UK. His interest in social mobility was sparked by his realisation that in recent years "a kid like me had little chance of making it to Oxbridge", noting that his school was now "all fee-paying" and his Oxford college "used to have lots of ordinary Welsh kids, but they're not coming through any more."He received an OBE in 2000 for services to Access to Higher Education, and was knighted in June 2003. Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Abi Morgan is a screenwriter and playwright best known for TV dramas The Hour, River and The Split and the films Shame, Suffragette and The Iron Lady. She won two Emmy Awards for The Hour, as well as two BAFTAs for Best Single Drama for White Girl and Sex Traffic, and Meryl Streep won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. Born into a theatrical family - her father was a theatre director, her mother is an actress - she only began to write during her university days at Exeter. After graduating, she kept herself afloat by waitressing while continuing to write and had her first play performed professionally in 1998 when she was 30. She's become known for her gritty storylines in the dramas Murder, Sex Traffic, and Tsunami, but has also adapted several books for both the small and the big screen including Brick Lane, The Invisible Woman, and Birdsong.Abi lives in London with her long-term partner, the actor Jacob Krichefski, and their two teenage children.Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Anne-Marie Duff is a stage and screen actor.Born in 1970 to Irish parents, she grew up in a working class household in west London. A shy child and a voracious reader, she took acting classes from the age of 11, but failed to get into drama school on her first attempt. Her second application to the Drama Centre in London was successful and she's barely been out of work since.She started off on stage, but gained more widespread recognition when she took the role of Fiona Gallagher in Shameless, the acclaimed Channel 4 comedy drama. She has since played dozens of roles, both in the theatre and on screen, which range from Queen Elizabeth I to John Lennon's mother, from a penniless suffragette to a retired police officer with skeletons in the cupboard, and from Joan of Arc to Lady Macbeth on Broadway and at the National Theatre. Her performances have been described as having a "multi-faceted, diamond-hard intensity". Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Sarah Taylor.

David Byrne was a founding member of the band Talking Heads. Born in Dumbarton, Scotland, he emigrated first to Canada and then to the USA before the age of ten. He started playing in bands at school and, when art school didn't work out for him, he founded Talking Heads with a couple of friends. They played their first gig, opening for the Ramones, at the legendary New York club CBGB's, in June 1975. Eight studio albums later, cracks were beginning to show in the relations between band members, and by 1991 Talking Heads had officially split up.Since then, he has enjoyed a solo career, and also made films, published photographic books, composed scores for musicals, created art installations and written books. He has received an Academy Award for Best Original Music Score, as well as a Golden Globe and a Grammy, for his soundtrack to the 1987 film The Last Emperor. He and his fellow Talking Heads members were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. He lives in New York and has a daughter in her late twenties from his 17 year marriage to Adelle Lutz.Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

John Gray is a philosopher. His academic career included professorships at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, and visiting professorships at Harvard and Yale in the USA. He retired from academia in 2008, and has dedicated himself to writing full time since then. He is the lead book reviewer of the New Statesman and a regular contributor to the Guardian.Born in 1948 in South Shields, his father was a Tyneside dock worker, his mother a homemaker. A voracious reader as a child, and encouraged by his history teacher at his grammar school, he won a scholarship to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford. Initially of the political Left, he became an advocate of the policies of the Right before the advent of Thatcherism. He then moved again to the Left. He supported the Leave cause in the Brexit referendum. John contends that history is not progressive, but cyclical, and that any improvements other than certain scientific discoveries can be easily lost or reversed. He cites the use of torture against terror suspects as an example. John has written several influential books, including False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998), which predicted the global financial crisis; Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002), which attacked philosophical humanism; and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), a critique of Utopian thinking in the modern world.Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Matt Smith is best known as the eleventh Timelord in the BBC One series, Doctor Who. At 26, he became the youngest actor to take the part. His future looked set to be in football: he played at youth level for Northampton Town, Nottingham Forest and Leicester City until a serious back condition ended his highly promising career prematurely. His drama teacher encouraged him to take up acting and he joined the National Youth Theatre and studied drama at the University of East Anglia. He played Lockwood in the National Theatre's touring production of The History Boys and was nominated for an Evening Standard Best Newcomer Award for his performance in Polly Stenham's That Face. He also appeared as a political researcher in the BBC Two parliamentary drama, Party Animals. Despite being a surprise choice to play The Doctor in 2009, he became the first actor to be nominated for a BAFTA television award for his performance in this role, and has won two National Television Awards. When he left Doctor Who at the end of 2013, he appeared on stage as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho: The Musical. In 2016 he took the part of HRH Prince Philip Mountbatten, The Duke of Edinburgh, in the Netflix series The Crown, and received great acclaim, leaving the role at the end of the second series in late 2017. Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Dame Minouche Shafik, Director of the London School of Economics and former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, discusses the importance of clear communication, the significance of small interest rate shifts, finding love and parenthood, debating no platforming and safe spaces on university campuses, and choosing a favorite album.