One on One | All stories

Over the course of the year we have interviewed a great many interesting and unusual people in our informal interview programme One on One. For today's programme Rob Cameron, Ian Willoughby, and Jan Velinger chose excerpts from some of the year's most interesting interviews, including a special contribution Pavla Horakova, who interviewed Vaclav Klaus in February, just weeks before he was successfully elected Czech president. At the time Pavla asked Mr Klaus what kind of a presidency he envisioned if he won.

In just over a week's time Ireland takes over the presidency of the European Union. It will be a momentous presidency, culminating on May 1 with the accession of ten new members to the EU, among them of course the Czech Republic. Ahead of the Irish presidency, I travelled across the city to the Irish Embassy in Mala Strana to talk to the Irish ambassador to Prague, Joe Hayes. I began by asking him about his background, and why he had become a diplomat.

Yes, the holiday season is upon us! My guest in this edition of One on One is Katharine Butler, the charming founder of Sparkys toy emporium here in Prague. In the interview we discuss favourite Czech toys, what it was like to start a business on the Czech market and what ultimately brought Mrs Butler to Prague in the early 1990s.

In this week's One on One I'm joined by Melvyn Clarke, a Czech-English translator from the British city of Manchester. Melvyn's grandfather was a Czech who settled in the UK before World War I after meeting an English girl in rather unusual circumstances. Throughout the 1980s Melvyn visited Czechoslovakia and he has been living here permanently since 1990. In our interview he discusses the Czech language, translating former president Vaclav Havel's farewell speech, translating into a language which is not one's mother tongue and the internet forum for translators he set up four years ago.

There was little cause for optimism on World AIDS Day this year - according to the World Health Organisation and UNAIDS a record number of people were infected with HIV in 2003. The Czech Republic is described as a country with a low-level incidence of HIV - the official numbers are in the hundreds, rather than thousands. But the real number could be ten times higher. I've been speaking to Marie Bruckova, from the National Reference Laboratory for AIDS, part of Prague's National Institute of Public Health.

There aren't many people who can claim to have known six United States Presidents. Eliska Haskova-Coolidge is one of them. She spent no less than eighteen years working in the White House, and as a diplomat has had an impressive career by any standards. But, amazingly, only a few years before joining the White House team, she had arrived in the United States as a ten-year-old refugee without a word of English. Her family had fled Czechoslovakia after the communist coup of 1948, despised by the regime for their middle-class background and their

In this edition of One on One Jan's guest is Hana Kulhankova, a specialist in American avant garde and experimental cinema, and a fifth year major at Brno's Masaryk University. Hana is also is the head organiser of the important Mezipatra Gay and Lesbian Film Festival that kicked off in Brno last week and is now on its second leg in Prague.

Rob Cameron's guest this week is Josef Zieleniec, senator, former Foreign Minister, and one of the three Czech representatives on the Convention on the Future of Europe, the body which drew up the draft EU constitution. Josef Zieleniec has been involved in Czech politics since the fall of Communism, and is sometimes described as an "eminence grise".

In today's One on One Jan's guest is Ondrej Hrab the director of Prague's most cutting edge Archa Theatre. Mr Hrab sat down with Radio Prague to discuss the direction of Archa today as well as Questioning Heaven in Despair - one of its gorgeous flagship performances. Jan began by asking Mr Hrab about Archa's beginnings, including the period of the Velvet revolution that preceded its founding.

My guest today is Noel O'Brien, an Irish photographer and musician who has been living in Prague on and off for the last 12 years. Welcome to the programme, Noel - could you first tell little bout background, what first brought you to Prague?