Desert Island Discs: Archive 2011-2015

Kirsty Young's castaway is Chris Hadfield.He was the first Canadian commander of the International Space Station and took part in three space missions spending a total of 166 days orbiting the Earth. He has spent over 14 hours doing two space walks. He flew his first eight day mission into space in 1995 during which he visited the Russian space station Mir. In 2001 he paid his first visit to the International Space Station to help install Canadarm2, a robot arm helping to build the station which was launched three years previously. In 2012 he began his final five month stay in space on board the ISS. It was on this mission that his videos of life in space - including a film of him singing David Bowie's Space Oddity and accompanying himself on guitar - led to him enjoying a huge following on social media. Chris was born in 1959 in Ontario, the second of five children: his father was a pilot and the family lived on a farm. He mapped out his future career aged nine when he watched Neil Armstrong become the first person to walk on the moon in 1969. In pursuit of his dream Chris first become an Air Cadet, then attended military college, becoming a fighter pilot and then a test pilot, as well as an aeronautical engineer. He finally achieved his ambition of becoming an astronaut in 1992. He went onto become the Chief of Robotics at the NASA Astronaut Office and Chief of International Space Station Operations at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas. Following his final space mission, Chris retired from the Canadian Space Agency in July 2013. Amongst the awards he's received are the military Meritorious Service Cross, NASA's Exceptional Service Medal and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the surgeon, author and former Reith lecturer, Atul Gawande.A general and endocrine surgeon in Boston, he is professor in both the Department of Health Policy & Management at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Department of Surgery at Harvard Medical School.Born in Brooklyn, he is the son of two doctors who came to the US to study medicine. After graduating from Stanford and studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, he embarked on a brief political career, working for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign and on his health and social policy in the White House following his election. When Clinton's health policy reform floundered, Atul returned to Harvard to finish the medical degree he'd started after Oxford.During his surgical residency he began writing for the online magazine Slate and he's been writing for the New Yorker since 1998. His 2009 article "The Cost Conundrum" was cited by President Barack Obama during his attempt to get the healthcare reform legislation through Congress. Atul has published four books to date about the achievements, but also the limitations, of medicine.In 2014 he presented the BBC's Reith Lectures, delivering a series of four talks titled The Future of Medicine.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is filmmaker Gurinder Chadha.Writer, director and producer behind the films Bend it like Beckham, Bhaji on the Beach and Bride and Prejudice, she began her career as a BBC news reporter.She was born in Kenya to Sikh parents and grew up in Southall in West London. Her political awakening came in her teens in the 1970s against the backdrop of the National Front and race riots in the capital. The bands she listened to, including the Clash, the Jam and the Specials, were fixtures at the Rock Against Racism concerts which galvanised her desire to make a difference.Bend it Like Beckham, which launched the career of Keira Knightly, is now a hit musical on the West End stage. Her next film, Viceroy's House, tackles the Partition of India in 1947.She was awarded an OBE in the 2006 Queen's Birthday Honours List for her services to the British Film Industry.Producer: Paula McGinley.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the broadcaster and religious leader, Lord Indarjit Singh. Creator of The Sikh Messenger newspaper and co-founder of the Inter Faith Network he also has the distinction of being the first member of the House of Lords to wear a turban. He was appointed as a crossbench life peer in 2011. He has contributed to Radio 4's Thought for the Day from a Sikh perspective for more than thirty years and arrived in Britain in 1933. He began his career as a mining engineer and in later life has been involved in inter-faith community work. In the New Year Honours 2009 he was awarded the CBE for services to inter-faith and community relations.Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Keith Richards, member of the Rolling Stones, is interviewed by Kirsty Young for Desert Island Discs.Keith was born in Dartford and grew up as an only child. He and Mick Jagger went to the same primary school, but then lost touch until meeting again at Dartford train station in 1961 and discovering they shared a taste in blues music. Keith picked up his love of the guitar from his grandfather and honed his skills whilst at art college.If one single, living person could be said to personify rock n' roll then it is surely him. He's been making music and causing havoc for over half a century and counting. His song writing, singing and guitar playing have helped to make The Rolling Stones a stratospherically successful group and his early and single minded dedication to the triumvirate pursuits of sex and drugs and rock and roll made him a counter-culture icon. No surprise then that as a boy he would go to sleep at night with his arm around his first guitar. Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Lemn Sissay.As a poet, writer and playwright, much of his work tells the story of his search for his birth parents. Born to a young Ethiopian woman who wanted him temporarily fostered while she completed her studies, he was with a family until he was 12. He would spend the next five years in a number of children's homes where he began to write. On leaving care at 17, he self-published his first book of poetry while on the dole. Several poetry collections, plays and programmes for radio and TV followed and his work has taken him around the world. He was the first poet to be commissioned to write for the 2012 London Olympics and his success has also brought him two doctorates and an MBE for services to literature. He is about to be installed as Chancellor of the University of Manchester, an elected post he will hold for the next seven years. He takes writers' workshops for care-leavers and set up Culture World, the first black writers' workshop.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaways this week are the comedy writers Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran. They've been at the rock-face, mining for laughs, for over 40 years and they've given us plenty of gems ... amongst them monologues in the '70s for Frankie Howerd, the era-defining character Alan B'Stard MP, star of The New Statesman, and now the successful revival of their long running and much loved sitcom "Birds of a Feather".Grammar school boys from North London they first met as ten year olds at a youth club, growing up to have 'real jobs' in the civil service and journalism, before finally embarking on the precarious business of making a living from putting words into other people' mouths.Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Dr Bill Frankland.Frequently referred to as the "grandfather of allergy", his achievements include the introduction of the pollen count to the British public and the prediction of increased levels of allergy to penicillin. Born in Cumbria in 1912, Dr Frankland turned 103 in March. He studied medicine at Oxford and worked at St Mary's hospital in Paddington, London, before war intervened. He signed up to the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), but spent over three of the six years he spent in the army as a prisoner of war in Singapore.After the war, he began work in the dermatology department at St Mary's, but quickly switched to allergy which became his passion. During the fifties he served as a registrar to Alexander Fleming who had discovered penicillin back in 1928. In 1954 he published a seminal research paper about a double-blind randomised trial proving that pre-season pollen injections greatly reduced the symptoms of hay fever sufferers. He has treated high profile patients including Saddam Hussein and given evidence in court - possibly the oldest expert witness to do so. He continues to work in a private practice and has remarked, "I really don't know what people do when they retire at 65.".

Kirsty Young's castaway is Monica Grady, Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open University.Well-known in scientific circles, at NASA and the European Space Agency, she came to the attention of the general public with her enthusiastic celebration when, as part of the Rosetta project, the probe Philae became the first-ever spacecraft to land on a comet - 67P - in November 2014. The spacecraft had taken ten years to journey through space and a decade was spent on the preparations.She was born in 1958 in Leeds as the eldest of eight children. She studied chemistry and geology at Durham University and did her PhD on carbon in meteorites at Cambridge, where she worked closely with Professor Colin Pillinger on the Beagle 2 project to Mars. She first worked at the OU in 1983 before joining the Department of Mineralogy of the Natural History Museum, becoming Head of the Meteorites and Cosmic Mineralogy Division. She is married to Professor Ian Wright who is one of the lead scientists on the Rosetta cometary mission and they have one son. She was awarded a CBE in 2012 for services to space sciences and asteroid (4731) was named "Monicagrady" in her honour.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the poet and artist, Imtiaz Dharker.Winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for her work, her life seems a perfect reflection of the inter-relatedness of The Commonwealth. Born in Pakistan she was no more than a few months old when the family packed up their belongings and flew four thousand miles to start a new life - exchanging the blistering, dusty lanes of Lahore for the blustery, rain-slicked roads of Glasgow.Her father worked hard and, from scratch, built a big, successful business and a comfortable life for his children. But the immigrant fairytale came undone when his restless, well-educated, westernised daughter married in secret, running away to Bombay. Her parents disowned her and she would never see her mother again.Her work centres on themes of freedom, cultural intolerance, everyday life and gender politics.

Kirsty's castaway this week is the conductor and composer Harry Rabinowitz.His list of credits and collaborations read like a Who's Who of 20th century music - Gracie Fields, Charles Aznavour, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Matt Monro & Barbra Streisand are only a handful of the stellar names who've benefitted from his talents. He's conducted a lot of movie scores too, including Chariots of Fire and The Talented Mr Ripley; indeed the late director Anthony Minghella described him as "the UK's best kept secret".It wasn't an illustrious start; his first job was playing sheet music for prospective customers in a Johannesburg department store - he was fired after 6 weeks. His first go at conducting was enhanced not by an elegant baton of the finest Maplewood but a rolled up old newspaper. He's almost a hundred years old now, still plays the piano every day and only retired from the concert platform six years ago at the age of 94.Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Rebecca Adlington - Britain's most successful female swimmer.A multiple medal winner and record breaker she's packed a lot in at a young age, first grabbing the nation's attention by winning two golds at the Beijing Olympics and breaking a world record into the bargain. When she got back home she was granted the Freedom of Mansfield and the Mayor gave her a pair of golden shoes. The Queen opted for the more conventional approach, bestowing an OBE.She went on to win two more medals at the London 2012 Olympics and when all the cheering and flag waving had died down and the games were over she announced her retirement. She's hardly been a slouch since - appearing regularly on TV, getting married and in recent months getting ready for the birth of her first child, a daughter, who was born Monday 8, June, 2015. She's only 26.One of three sisters, family life was dominated by early morning training session at the local pool and it wasn't long before little Becky was out of the shallow end and heading for the fast lane ... The Sherwood Baths are now renamed The Rebecca Adlington Swimming Centre.Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway is Pamela Rose.Now aged 97, she was a Bletchley Girl who spent her war years working in total secrecy, painstakingly indexing snippets of information that would prove vital to the the war effort. Alan Turing and his fellow cryptanalysts would eventually break the Enigma Code and it's said that this breakthrough shortened the war by two years.Born into a musical family, she first took to the stage at boarding school. Pamela's lifelong ambition to be an actress was interrupted by the war and the invitation to work at Bletchley. Despite finding the work in the indexing section of Hut 4 something of a disappointment at first, she and her fellow workers still managed to have fun and she met her husband Jim at a hop when he asked her to dance. They married after the war and it wasn't until nearly sixty years later and after Jim's death that she would finally achieve her dream of acting on the West End stage. Producer: Cathy Drysdale.