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 2009.

My My castaway this week is Richard Madeley.

It's 20 years since he opened the first edition of this morning with the words,

Hello, I'm Richard Madeley, and this is my wife, Judy Finnegan.

In the years since, pretty well everyone has sat on their sofa, from Madonna to Brad Pitt, from the Clintons to notoriously O.J. Simpson. Their unique selling point has always been that their on-screen chemistry is based on their real-life relationship. When they're on air, the personal and the public seem indivisible. So over the years, we found out every detail of their married life

from their experiments with Viagra to his vasectomy. I'm wondering, Richard Minkley, if you derive a

degree of comfort from knowing that it's all out there, that nobody can ever get one over on you.

I wonder if that is the reason that I, in particular, I'm so sort of remorselessly, embarrassingly

sometimes, Frank. I don't know. I think it might be actually more a reaction to the men in my

past. My grandfather, for example, very typically of his generation, spoke very little about

his emotions and his feelings and the bad things that had happened to him. And similarly, I didn't really understand until after my father had died,

and he died very young when he was 49 and I was 21,

that there were great many things about him, psychologically, emotionally,

that he kept buttoned up.

I came to realize that keeping as quiet as both he and his father had done

hadn't been particularly good for either man.

And as I moved through my twenties, I sort of unconsciously, I think, resolved to be the opposite,

...