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. My castaway this week is Sanjeev Basker.

As a writer and performer, he's become a star by making his laugh

and bringing the British Asian experience to big audiences with shows like

goodness gracious me in the Kumar's at number 42.

He was a late starter in the fame game, aged 30, unemployed, mired in debt and depression

and living at home with his parents.

The idea of Emmy Awards, a number one hit record, and the honour of an OBE,

must surely have seemed an impossibility.

But in just 15 years he's bagged them all, and then some.

Yet very recently, he said, I had great difficulty in realizing I was successful. I had never

seen myself as successful. Everything was about falling short, about not achieving, about

unrealised potential. You've also said, Sanjee, that your initial success ultimately was founded on the toss of a coin.

What happened?

Yes, it was.

During a period of time where I was out of work and living at my parents and being very depressed,

I got together with a friend of mine, Nitin Sawney, who's a composer who had been at university with.

We'd sort of done a double-act thing at university, and we thought, well, you know, let's resurrect that.

We had time on our hands.

...