Next week BBC World Service will offer a special broadcast of the BBC program “Desert Island Discs.” The episode’s guest is Bill Gates. It’s available for broadcast from February 11-24.
Program Description: “Desert Island Discs: Bill Gates”
Bill Gates tells presenter Kirsty Young which 8 tracks, book and luxury he’d want to take with him if he was to be castaway on a desert island.
Bill Gates sat at his first computer while still at school in Seattle, wrote his first computer programme aged just 13 and went on to co-found the company Microsoft, becoming one of the key figures of the technological revolution. In 2000, he and his wife, Melinda, launched the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which has to date given over $34 billion to projects aimed at reducing health inequality around the world.
Born into a professional family – his father was a lawyer, his mother a former teacher who later became involved with volunteer work – he was introduced to the idea of ‘giving back’ at an early age. An avid reader as a child, he attended Harvard where he and Paul Allen developed software for the first micro-computers. The company would go on to achieve huge success with its Windows operating system.
By 1987, Gates had become the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, then worth $1.25 billion. Consistently listed as the ‘Richest Man in the World’, he stepped down as CEO of the company in 2000 although he remained as Chairman until 2014.
Today his primary focus is his philanthropy. In 2010, Gates and his friend Warren Buffett announced the Giving Pledge, which aims to inspire the wealthy people of the world to give away the majority of their net worth to worthy causes.
Broadcast Details:
First airing: February 11, 2016, at 2:00am ET (replacing “The Thought Show”).
Duration: 49 minutes 30 seconds (23 minutes & 26 minutes 30 seconds) or 59 minutes including the News Bulletins, billboards & promos.
Broadcast window: February 11-24, 2016.
Download availability on www.bbc.co.uk/partners: from Thursday, February 11, at 09:00 GMT for 14 days.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/partners/english/programmes/desert-island-discs–bill-gates