Katie Melua, Nigel Havers, Tom Kerridge, Alex Wheatle

Midweek

Singer-songwriter Katie Melua, chef Tom Kerridge, writer Alex Wheatle and actor Nigel Havers join Libby Purves and the audience in the BBC Radio Theatre.

Katie Melua, the singer and songwriter, was born in Georgia, when it was part of the Soviet Union, and moved to Belfast when she was nine. She returned to her homeland to make her new album, In Winter, working with the Gori Women's Choir. Katie recalls her early years in Georgia, and the very different life she found in Belfast, and she and the 24 members of the Choir perform two songs.

Writer Alex Wheatle won this year's Guardian children's fiction prize for his young adult novel Crongton Knights, set around an inner-city estate. Born in 1963 to Jamaican parents living in Brixton, Alex spent much of his childhood in care, and says that a short stint in prison after the 1981 Brixton riots led to a passionate interest in literature, thanks to the advice of a fellow prisoner.

Actor Nigel Havers rose to fame as Lord Lindsay in the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire, and is renowned for playing charmers, cads and conmen. He's currently playing the Lord Chamberlain in panto at the London Palladium, and his varied career includes roles in Coronation Street, Downton Abbey and a high-profile cameo earlier this year in The Archers.

Tom Kerridge is chef and co-owner of The Hand and Flowers pub in Buckinghamshire - the first pub in the world to receive two Michelin stars. He is about to publish Tom Kerridge's Dopamine Diet, which draws on his own experience: he found himself very overweight, a result of the late-night lifestyle of the professional kitchen, and lost more than eleven stones after he devised a diet which remained true to the ideas which underpin his cooking.

Producer Paula McGinley.