Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4.
Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks,
book and luxury that they'd want to take with them
if they were cast away to a desert island.
For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast,
but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds.
Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else.
I hope you enjoy listening.
My castaway this week is the comedian Ramesh Ranganathan.
He's a BAFTA winning broadcaster, a stand-up...
actor and writer who's been a fixture on British TV screens for the past decade.
His travelogues have taken him from the Arctic to the Sahara and he's tried everything from wrestling to opera singing with his good friend Rob Beckett in Rob and Ramesh Versus.
He starred in his own sitcom and in 2021 followed in the footsteps of Anne Robinson to host The Weakest Link.
That's before we even get to the international comedy tours,
best-selling books and bringing his love of hip-hop to radio too.
It's almost as if he's making up for lost time and who can blame him?
He was born and raised in Crawley and came to stand up in his 30s after a career as a maths teacher and starting a family.
The early days were a struggle.
At one point he was too skint to retrieve his car from the pound after it was repossessed.
Eventually his star began to rise.