People this week

Your catch-up service for those celebrities and well-known personalities to have inhabited interview chairs for the media over the past seven days.

NAME: Davina McCall INTERVIEWED BY: Janet Street Porter, Marie Claire PROMOTING: Big Brother It is perhaps telling that the woman who personifies the Big Brother brand - a showcase for characters not noted for their flashes of self-awareness - is such an advocate for counselling. She's done 15 years of twice-weekly drug and alcohol addiction recovery meetings. And Davina confides that the best thing she ever did with her husband was to go to couples therapy. As for the publicity-hungry BB participants, Davina knows they can't fill their spiritual void with celebrity. But the connection between reality TV and a widespread desire for fame isn't apparent to her. "When you ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, they simply say 'Famous'. It's like a career option. Depressing."

NAME: Jonathan Aitken INTERVIEWED BY: Simon Garfield, Observer PROMOTING: Turning 65 Why fear death, he says, since one of the transforming aspects of becoming a senior citizen is absorbing yourself in spirituality. Jailed for perjury in 1999, the former Tory MP confesses regret for that past misdemeanour. "Much more deeply than that, I regret an accumulation of insensitivities and hurts I've inflicted on people during youth." Such as? Perhaps unfortunately, his very next sentence lightens his conscience: "The great thing about a belief in God is you don't feel crushed by a burden of guilt." And Mr Aitken is plain about his role in history. "I don't think I'm ever likely to have much of a legacy except a bad one."

NAME: Jay-Z
INTERVIEWED BY: Tim Westwood, Radio 1 and 1Xtra
PROMOTING: Glastonbury, rap and the Jay-Z brand

"There's cats saying they don't want hip hop at Glastonbury," says Westwood as he loiters in Jay-Z's dressing room ahead of the rap star's lauded headline set. Noel Gallagher led those hating on Jay-Z, as they say in hip hop, but Mr Z is graciousness personified - it's good to have these discussions about music, he says, it's his turn to show hip hop in a good light, he understands Noel's personal opinion, and he's been made welcome. "I feel good about it."

He then segues into politics, saying Barack Obama proves the adage that you can be anything you want to be. "Kids in the hood and the projects now feel like they're part of the American dream." And the White House hopeful gets hip hop. "He's tuned into the culture which is fantastic, man. I feel like Frank Sinatra back in the day, when Frank was mingling with the Kennedys."

NAME: Alastair Campbell INTERVIEWED BY: Himself for My Week, Observer PROMOTING: His radio programme on singer Jacques Brel, a football match with Pele, a bikeathon, a Labour fundraising auction, The Blair Years, a forthcoming novel His career and public profile are due to his devotion to publicity. Yet before he relaxes into the expansive plugs, he mocks those who approach him for the kind of stunt he deems beneath him. He has a 19,000-word document on his computer made up of e-mails of "really stupid ideas" he's asked to take part in such as Big Brother and Strictly Come Dancing. Then there are the offers to be a celebrity dog trainer, cabbie, circus performer, shark diver, judge of a celebrity chef contest and bus conductor. As if. His favourite is being asked to take drugs to turn his skin black to help expose racism. "'Can I go back to being white?' 'We think so,' came the reply."

NAME: Deborah Voigt INTERVIEWED BY: Rosie Millard, Sunday Times PROMOTING: Ariadne auf Naxos, Royal Opera House Opera was one field of work where women in the public eye and at the top of their profession could be fat and still held in high regard for their talent alone. Until the Royal Opera sacked Voigt for being 25 stone. She's now sage about the experience, drily observing that it's hard to convince the audience, singing lines about being so light on her feet that she doesn't trouble the grass she walks on - at dress size 30. Her eating habits were shaped by well-meaning parents who always dieted and told her she was fat, "rather than 'you're beautiful, let's go for a walk'." Since the Royal Opera paid her notice (with taxpayers' money, notes Millard), she spent the cheque on a gastric bypass: "the last means to an end". Five years on and nine stone lighter, she's back in the role but says she will forever be addicted to food.