Hi, it's Nicola Cochlin. Young people have been making history for years, but we don't often hear about them. My brand new series on BBC Sounds sets out to put this right. In history's youngest heroes, I'll be revealing the fascinating stories of 12 young people who've played a major role in history and who've helped shape our world. Like Audrey Hepburn, Nelson Mandela, Louis Braille and Lady Jane Grey,

history's youngest heroes with me, Nicola Cochlin.

Listen on BBC Sounds.

Hello, I'm Krista Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2008.

Mycasts My castaway this week is the comedian and actor Bill Bailey.

Lorded for his hugely inventive stand-up,

he's carved out a highly successful on-stage career with an altogether atypical approach.

He's also a familiar face on television from his regular appearances on quiz shows

like Have I Got News for You, QI and Never Mind the Buzzcocks.

His act, described by one critic

as a masterpiece of high concept silliness,

is short on ego and long on whimsy,

an exploration of his unending curiosity

with the world and all its contrasts

and contradictions, something of a specialist subject for the man himself. At school, he was a

gifted pupil who gave up on his education, and a pitch-perfect piano student who flunked his

music school entrance. Comics, he says, are all a bit neurotic, brilliant, strange, a bunch of egotistical lunatics.

And so Bill Bailey, I'm wondering from that quote, which particular boxes you tick are not egotistical.

I don't think, from having watched you on stage.

Perhaps I am, and I'm unaware of it.

...