Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Highland Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My customers My castaway this week is the TV news correspondent Alex Crawford. She has won the

Royal Television Society's Journalist of the Year Award an unprecedented four times reporting from the

world's worst war zones and hotspots. Where most people would frankly do anything to

stay well away from trouble, she seems drawn to danger. Whether it's covering the Ebola crisis in Liberia,

hunting for rhino poachers in South Africa, or being first on the scene as the drama of

Libya's revolution unfolded. Maybe Chaos and Flux are

comfortingly familiar. She did after all spend the first five years of her life in

Nigeria where her family survived two political coups. Most swashbuckling board reporters will extol the virtues of keeping

a cool emotional distance from the story. By contrast, she says, you've got to be able to

feel the pain.

If you become desensitized, you need help.

It's like putting your hand into a fire.

If you don't feel it, you're going to get burned up.

And so welcome, Alex Crawford.

That's a very interesting thing to say that you have to be able to feel the pain. How much pain is safe to feel?

I think when it gets too painful you'll realize that you can't cope. And I remember one of my editors, my

foreign editor told me right at the beginning when I was just starting my sort of foreign

correspondency stint of my career. He said you've got to be careful because you will fill up.

And so that's filling up with the emotional impact and the sadness, presumably

...