Desert Island Discs

Updated: 04 May 2025 • 2109 episodes
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qnmr

Eight tracks, a book and a luxury: what would you take to a desert island? Guests share the soundtrack of their lives.

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Kirsty Young talks to actor Warwick Davis, in a programme first heard in 2016.

34 min
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34:55
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27 Apr 2025 • EN

Lindsey Hilsum, journalist

Lindsey Hilsum is a multi-award-winning journalist who has been a foreign correspondent for the past four decades. She has been Channel 4’s international editor for the past 22 years and has reported on every continent except Antarctica. After studying French and Spanish at University, she worked as an aid worker in Me

50 min
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50:59
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20 Apr 2025 • EN

Donna Ockenden, midwife

Donna Ockenden is a former clinical midwife who led the Ockenden Review which revealed, at the time, the biggest maternity scandal in NHS history. Published in 2022, the review highlighted serious failings in maternity care at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust which contributed to the deaths of more than 20

50 min
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50:58
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Professor Carl Jones is a conservation biologist who is best known for saving the Mauritius kestrel from extinction. He is the scientific director of Mauritian Wildlife Foundation, chief scientist at Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and an honorary professor in ecology and conservation biology at the University of E

52 min
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52:52
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Cyndi Lauper is a multi-award winning singer and songwriter. She has sold more than fifty million records, won an Emmy for acting and her musical Kinky Boots earned her a Tony and an Oliver award. Born in 1953, Cyndi grew up in a blue collar neighbourhood in New York. Her mother loved music and art and took her childre

49 min
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49:15
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30 Mar 2025 • EN

William Boyd, writer

William Boyd is the author of eighteen novels, five short story collections and numerous screenplays. His first published novel, A Good Man in Africa, was inspired by his childhood in West Africa. He is well known for writing ‘whole life’ novels including Any Human Heart which he adapted as a BAFTA-winning television s

50 min
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50:52
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