2025-09-14
49 分钟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 cast away this week is the broadcaster and former rugby player Maggie Alfonso.
She's been described as the best female rugby player of her generation and her trajectory as a star athlete has followed the changing fortunes of her sport.
She started out at her local club,
playing in kit handed down from the men's team and only getting on the pitch when the men didn't want to use it.
By the time she retired, she'd won 74 caps for her country.
was part of the England team that won the 2014 Women's Rugby World Cup and had been awarded an MBE for services to rugby.
Her sport, meanwhile, had acquired a global audience.
Her achievements are all the more remarkable, considering the obstacles she's had to overcome.
She was born with talapies, the disability commonly known as clubfoot,
raised in a single-parent family facing challenging circumstances and had to hold down a day job throughout much of her sporting career.
Ten years on from retirement,
she's established herself as a commentator and will be part of the BBC's broadcast team for the Women's Rugby World Cup,
which will see England compete on home soil.