Hello, I'm Krestey 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 1994, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My cast away this week is a broadcaster. Most of us have at some time heard her tell about the world's great events.

She reported from Tiananmen Square one of her most terrifying experiences where she was grazed

by a bullet. She went to the Gulf War, one woman among 2,000 men, and most recently

she's been in Bosnia, where her cool, crisp voice and graphic eyewitness accounts have served

to bring home to millions of viewers the tragedy of the

conflict.

She's worked for the same organisation nearly all her life, rising from local radio to where she

is today, the BBC's chief news correspondent. She is Kate

Adi. Are you surprised Kate to find yourself where you are doing what you are? I mean

it wasn't exactly planned, it very surprised not at all

planned no I left school which had trained me or had hoped that I would leave in order to

fill in a year or two learning a little bit of light cookery or perhaps some useful

nursing before marrying a missionary and going out to minister to the empire.

And even when I left school the empire had somehow disappeared so I had to knuckle

down, go to university where I read an extremely

interesting but not terribly practical degree in old Icelandic and Swedish and

come out and find a job and in desperation Icelandic and

in desperation applied to the BBC and at the first interview and I think it's still on a bit of

paper somewhere around this building was asked what are you prepared to do for the BBC and apparently replied,

anything?

...