Desert Island Discs

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the ballerina Tamara Rojo.On stage she is a principal dancer for the English National Ballet and when the curtain comes down she performs the role of the company's artistic director. World-renowned as a stunning, emotional and dramatic performer, it must surely be a very different set of characteristics she employs off stage, marshalling her company of dancers and propelling the organisation's creative journey.She was just five years old when, sheltering from the rain she found herself in the school gym, instantly beguiled by the peace and order of a dance class. Despite her father's attempts to widen her horizons with music, sport and art lessons - her path in life was set.She says, "Life on stage is like nothing else. I've never done heroin but I'm sure that's what it's like. Every feeling and sense exploding. Every nerve in your body complete awake".Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the TV producer and former Blue Peter editor Biddy Baxter. In charge of Blue Peter for 23 highly successful years, she was responsible for the coveted Blue Peter badges, the multi-million pound charity fundraising appeals and a nationwide lust for something called sticky-backed plastic. Her masterstroke was getting the young audience involved; although the programme's weekly postbag of around seven thousand letters must have given her a few headaches.In spite of some early careers advice that, "no one from Durham has ever got into the BBC", her determination to make a career in broadcasting won out and across the decades her steely reputation kept the show at the top of the ratings and steered it through quite a few mishaps and the odd spot of 'scandal'.She says simply, "It was an exercise in trying to make children feel as if they belonged.".

Rene Redzepi, Danish chef, is interviewed by Kirsty Young for Desert Island Discs.His restaurant, Noma, in Copenhagen has been named 'best in the world' for a fourth time, and holds two Michelin stars. His cooking captures not just the essence of his homeland - using ingredients like reindeer tongue, sea buckthorn or fish scales - but also a strong flavour of 'now'. He believes traditional notions of luxury are outdated. A sense of 'time and place' are his kitchen's guiding principles.His childhood was split between Denmark and Macedonia, where he spent his summers foraging in the woods. He as good as stumbled into catering, because he couldn't think of anything better to do, but pretty quickly realised that cooking allowed him to dream.He says, "The day when there is no more to do is the day when you're burned out. There are endless possibilities - it's just whether you can see them or not ... and right now I see plenty.".

Kirsty Young's castaway is the singer, Alison Moyet.She's won three Brit awards, sold tens of millions in record sales and her career has spanned over 30 years. It all kicked off in 1981; just three months after forming her first band "Yazoo" she was on Top of The Pops performing her first hit. Given that remarkably smooth start it might be tempting to think her achievements have come easy - they haven't. She found growing up tough, had prolonged agoraphobia and depression and weight problems cast their shadow.Now in her early fifties she says, "I was always an odd girl, I managed to alienate a lot of people. I felt like a square peg in a round hole in the music industry and created a lot of neurosis for myself."Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the comedian, Jack Dee.Comedian, actor and writer, his persona is that of the laconic miserabilist - his hit sit-com was called "Lead Balloon" and his autobiography entitled "Thanks For Nothing". That is only part of the picture: even though show business was in the family - his great grandparents were in music hall - his early working life ranged all over the place. From grafting in the kitchens of The Ritz to working in an artificial leg factory - at one point he even seriously considered the priesthood.He says his caustic, ironic, sarcastic comedy comes from "a sort of realism. You can't escape the dark stuff in life ... and my way of dealing with that is to absorb it into my life so that it's no longer worrying for me."Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Professor Sir Andre Geim.Born in the Soviet Union, his early years were spent in Sochi with his grandmother, a meteorologist. And it was perhaps her small weather station on the beach that sparked an early interest in science. As a student his intellect was rigorous but his timing was also spot on:"glasnost", the political movement that swept open the Iron Curtain, enabled him to travel and study throughout Europe, finally settling at Manchester University.It was his work developing the substance graphene that won him science's highest prize. Graphene has many exciting properties: it is the thinnest and strongest material ever discovered; using it, electricity can travel a million meters a second; it has unique levels of light absorption and is flexible and stretchable.Of his research he says, "It's like being Sherlock Holmes but being a detective of science. It's trying to find things out using very limited information ... like a hair on your coat, or dirt on your shoes, or some lipstick - the winner is the one who needs the fewest hints to get the answer".Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the nurse & humanitarian Dame Claire Bertschinger.She's worked for The Red Cross in over a dozen countries including Sudan, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Liberia amid the sort of raw human suffering that most of us find - even on the TV - almost unbearable to witness. It was through Michael Buerk's landmark news reports of the Ethiopian famine 30 years ago that she first grabbed our attention. We saw her as a young nurse surrounded by thousands of starving people and forced, daily, to make the truly terrible decision of choosing who to feed.Throughout the years she's won numerous plaudits and awards: her Florence Nightingale Medal is given "to honour those "who've distinguished themselves in times of war by exceptional courage and devotion to the wounded, sick or disabled."She says, "I don't live just to eat and sleep and get money to have a nice house ... I have to create value - I have to do something in life."Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the broadcaster Murray WalkerHis commentating career began in 1948 and he finally hung the lip mic at the end of 2001. His trousers-on-fire style of delivery brought excitement, emotion and fanatical obsession to Formula 1 - for many motor racing fans he was motorsport.He was a petrol-head before the term had even been coined; his father, one of the top motorbike racing champions of his day, ignited his son's life-long love of big noisy engines.He's talked British fans through so many of the sport's greatest victories - Damon Hill crossing the finish line to win the World Title brought an audible lump to his throat. But also, inevitably, there have been great tragedies too - his live commentary on Ayrton Senna's fatal crash in 1994 was possibly his most professionally demanding.He says, "I have always believed that Formula One, with its highs and lows, is the ultimate distillation of life."Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Lord Richards of Herstmonceux, former Chief of the Defence Staff, is interviewed by Kirsty Young for Desert Island Discs.He was a soldier for 42 years, rising through the ranks to the very top becoming the principal military advisor to government. Shrewd, swashbuckling and outspoken, he is now retired from one of the most successful military careers of modern times: so illustrious he's been knighted twice.The campaigns he led in East Timor, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan are well documented and most recently his counsel against military intervention in both Libya and Syria helped guide the Government through the most complex of international strategic defence decision-making.He is possibly less well known for his private passions - tennis, skiing, sailing and the action man credentials must surely be further boosted by the fact that he once spent an evening as Joan Collin's bodyguard. He's also partial to a spot of karaoke.Born in Egypt into a military family he grew up with some understanding of the very particular strain that comes with a life in the forces. Just as well because in 35 years of marriage he and his wife have moved home 29 times.He says: "I see myself as a moral soldier. I do not associate the military with wars and bloodshed in the narrow sense. I associate the military with doing good, bringing down tyrants, with releasing people's ambitions for their children."Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the author and illustrator Mairi Hedderwick.Her most famous creation is a little red-haired character called Katie Morag who - in wellies and a kilt - has skipped her way through fourteen books and a 26-part TV series. Katie lives on the imaginary Isle of Struay with her parents, siblings, cousins, granny and prize-winning sheep Alecina. Like her creator she relishes the rhythms and freedoms particular to life on a wee Scottish island. But that's where the similarities end - the author was born and brought up an only child on the mainland of the lowlands. She lost her father when she was just twelve and says she was never part of a close-knit family.As a grown-up, all she wanted was to quit the rat race and be an island crofter, but after a decade she left her dream behind in favour of a more stable income and a secondary school for her children.She says, "I have a notion that children's writers explore unresolved questions in their own childhoods. I certainly do."Producer: Christine Pawlowsky.