Lucy Gannon

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:09

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety eight and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My Castaway this week is a script writer. She's created some of television's most successful series, including Soldier Soldier, Peak Practice, and Bramwell. In their storylines and others can be found Shades of Her Own, an unhappy childhood after her mother died, a brief spell in the army, a suicide attempt, and a violent first marriage. These events are the foundation of her writing, but she was bordering on middle age before she put pen to paper. Strapped for cash, she entered a competition to write a play. She won, and she hasn't stopped writing since. What a privilege to find a voice at the age of thirty-nine, she says. Not writing is like refusing to breathe. She is Lucy Gannon.

Presenter1:13

Had you written anything at all, Lucy, before you sat down and wrote that play eleven years ago?

Presenter1:18

Part of my personal myth is that I haven't. Um my father says I wrote very good letters, and uh um a friend from school days and and from the army has come up now and said I can remember you sitting on your bed, playing with birds, writing poems.

Presenter1:32

But um to me that that didn't happen. But your father obviously did believe you could write,'cause it was he who suggested you enter the competition, wasn't it? Yeah, he he did. He thought that um I suppose like most fathers he thinks that, you know, his children can do anything.

Lucy Gannon1:39

Yeah.

Presenter1:45

And he he wrote to me and said, You know, you're good at letter writing, give this a go. And what was the competition? It was the Richard Burton Drama Award and it was in I think it was held in eighteen nineteen eighty seven.

Presenter1:55

And um

Presenter1:56

Write a stage play.

Presenter1:58

Uh fifty minutes or more.

Presenter2:00

And you come in two thousand pounds.

Presenter2:03

I didn't really. Um my husband went down to the the Central Library in Derby and got a book of plays out so that I could see how they were set out.

Presenter2:11

And um

Presenter2:12

I borrowed a typewriter, I scrunched up the paper, and I had a go.

Presenter2:16

And it was called Keeping Tom Nice, and it was about what?

Presenter2:19

It was about um an adult with many uh handicaps, both mental and physical.

Presenter2:26

cared for at home by his parents who were approaching old age,

Presenter2:30

And it the play really was about the love between

Presenter2:34

This man and his father.

Presenter2:37

I I used to drive from once a month I used to drive from Derbyshire to Norfolk, where my my parents now live, my father and my stepmother, and um

Presenter2:44

We would pass a a small house and in the window of this house sometimes I would see a young man of about twenty five sitting in a in what I class as a geriatric chair, in a a very high backed wheelchair.

Presenter2:57

with the table in front of him,

Presenter2:59

and I wondered about the life that he led in that house.

Presenter3:02

and the life of his parents and his family, and how much love must have been involved in looking after him.

Presenter3:08

Um that very close enclosed world.

Presenter3:12

seeing the same patch of lawn, seeing the same patch of sky.

Presenter3:16

And the play came from that really.

Presenter3:18

And you won the competition. You beat, I think, a couple of thousand people, didn't you? You won £2,000 and.

Presenter3:24

You had an appointment to become a writer in residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company. That's right. Um I took the two thousand pounds and said thank you very much and I just couldn't stop writing it, so I posted that that play off and started on my next one.

Presenter3:38

and had dropped that off at the Derby Playhouse's stage door, not knowing what on earth to do with it.

Presenter3:43

and had started actually on my third one by the time I won the competition. So

Presenter3:46

I was just getting into the idea of being a writer. I was working by this time. I got a job as a care assistant. And I had a phone call from Sally Burton saying,

Presenter3:54

Lucy Burton's widow. Yes, Richard's widow. Saying, Lucy, you've been given the

Lucy Gannon3:54

Legislation

Presenter3:59

uh residency at the Royal Shakespeare Company, but you've not taken it up. Why?

Presenter4:03

And I said, Well, it's a really nice thought. Thanks ever so much, Sally. But I can't afford to because I am the breadwinner at the moment.

Presenter4:10

And she said, Fine, well, how much do you earn? and I said, Five hundred and five pounds a month.

Presenter4:15

So she said, Okay, I will pay you six months' wages, and now you've got no excuse.

Presenter4:20

So, not only I mean, I don't think it would I would have had an excuse anyway, because I was writing all the time, just avidly, but suddenly

Presenter4:26

I didn't have to write at night. I didn't have to write in between duties. Suddenly I could stay at home and write. It was like a fairy tale, really, I you know, wasn't it? With with Sally Burton as fairy godmother, you shall go to the R S C. Absolutely. It was um

Presenter4:40

It was like Winning the Pools, and I've said this in the past and people have misunderstood and thought that that means you know, it's the money. It's not the money. The money is is a by product. The Winning of the Pools, the the huge reward, the magic fairy tale, was discovering that I had a voice, discovering I could talk and that people wanted to listen.

Presenter4:56

Tell me about your first record.

Presenter4:58

My f my first record is

Presenter5:00

Uh the plat is singing my prayer and

Presenter5:03

This is a piece of music which

Presenter5:05

was played um at the end of My Play Wicked Old Nellie.

Presenter5:09

And it was a piece of music which

Presenter5:12

Tie together the two main characters.

Presenter5:14

Right up to rehearsals I had an ending for the play in which

Presenter5:19

The main character was alone in the middle of the of the stage.

Presenter5:23

As I saw the rehearsals taking place, and saw how well these actors were together, and how they turned ordinary words into magic,

Presenter5:30

I just desperately wanted my two main characters to end up together on the stage at the end of that play. It wasn't it didn't it didn't involve a huge rewrite, it was the same emotion, but I just wanted to have them physically together.

Lucy Gannon5:48

I do the I'm sorry.

Speaker 25:55

Uh

Speaker 35:58

May they still be the same

Speaker 26:06

For a small

Presenter6:08

As we live

Speaker 26:09

Uh

Presenter6:13

The Platters singing My Prayer. Now, Soldier Soldier was based to a certain extent on part of your experience, because you were in the military police, aren't you? That's right, I was, very briefly. And the opening episode was something that happened to you.

Presenter6:24

Yeah, um I was I was the world's worst military policewoman ever. I mean I think in eighteen months I I never told anybody off, I never charged anybody.

Presenter6:33

I never arrested anybody.

Presenter6:35

There wa there was one instant where I did actually manage to detain someone. Um

Presenter6:40

At the time, I think it was the old Home Service, was sending out messages saying that a Ministry of Defence Land Rover had been stolen.

Presenter6:47

And there was a huge panic about this Ministry of Defence Land Rover, and none of us could really understand why. And I had been driving for, I think, two or three weeks. I was a a brand new military policewoman, ex-convent school girl.

Presenter6:59

And, um

Presenter7:01

I was out in Malandrova one day with a friend who was going to a hot date and it was in the sixties, so she had beehive hair and

Presenter7:09

uh tight mini skirt as we called it then but of course not particularly mini for now.

Presenter7:14

And

Presenter7:15

Winkle picker shoes.

Presenter7:16

Very thin heels, and she was feeling the business. And as we drove along one of the roads in Catrick Garrison, I saw this Land Rover, and I I

Presenter7:25

Pursued it.

Presenter7:27

And um after about ten minutes of very dangerous driving we came to a a roundabout

Presenter7:33

and to our right there was a whole depot full of identical Land Rovers to the one that was stolen.

Presenter7:39

um we we pulled up in a a scream of brakes and got out and there's my friend tottering on her high heel shoes.

Presenter7:45

and me running along, desperately trying to feel the engines of the cars to see if he had indeed parked in this lot or if he'd driven on and we'd lost him.

Presenter7:52

and we came across one that was very hot, so I ran round to the back, and there's this poor lad cowering in the shadows.

Presenter7:57

And I came upon him so suddenly that I screamed, and he screamed at the same time, and Jock outside screamed in sympathy because she didn't know what was going on. He burst into tears. I think I wasn't far off it. By this time the adrenaline was going. I was only eighteen, for heaven's sake. So you were a complete failure. I was a complete and utter failure. But it made a good yarn for Soldier, Soldier. It did. And and it uh

Lucy Gannon8:12

But it

Presenter8:16

You know, people who saw it recognised and said, well, that must be the same Lucy. It couldn't have happened twice. So you weren't cut out for the army. You decided to train as a nurse instead, and we can see medical influences in your work, you know, peak practice, obviously, and Bramwell. But your main piece of nursing writing, it seems to me, was the play that we saw Dawn French in, Tender Loving Care, where she bumped off these old patients, you know, sort of gave them a helping hand on their way or murdered them, whatever you care to call it. Is that something you saw going on?

Presenter8:44

No, but it's something that happened in Austria. It was um.

Presenter8:47

A news item that intrigued me. It w there were four nurses in Austria who were found guilty of many, many murders.

Presenter8:55

And um the the nurse who had been the ringleader

Presenter8:59

Had probably been doing it for years when they were finally discovered. And this really intrigued me: the idea that somebody who

Presenter9:04

Was outwardly an angel of mercy and was even at the time.

Presenter9:10

Her husband said, you know, she's such a good woman, he couldn't believe it had happened.

Presenter9:14

And so I started thinking about that and and from that came tender loving care.

Lucy Gannon9:16

And f

Presenter9:18

That was a single play, but Peak Practice and Soldier, Soldier and Bramwell, of course, have been long-running series. I mean, uh

Presenter9:26

You create them. We should explain that you don't always go on writing them all when they move into more and more and more series, do you? No, I don't. I find that v quite unsatisfying. But you seem to have a knack of knowing what the mass audience will watch. And those ones that I mention have had huge audiences for I T V of kind of fifteen million or thirteen million or whatever.

Presenter9:45

You have an instinct for it. That's entirely naturalism. I mean, do you try to analyze it? Can you say this is this is what you need to do? No, I I honestly think that to do something like that you just need to

Presenter9:56

be a part of the normal world.

Presenter9:59

When I first started writing, I felt at at times I felt at a disadvantage because I would be in a room full of people who I realized were all university graduates.

Presenter10:07

And I thought, Oh, here's me left school at sixteen stroke, seventeen and

Presenter10:10

M

Presenter10:12

No knowledge whatsoever. I've got my O levels, needlebook cookie and art, and a few others, and that's all I've got. I I quite often I didn't know what they were talking about, and they would refer to things they would

Presenter10:22

They would refer to Pinter, they would refer to all sorts of things, to Brecht, and I didn't know what any of these things were.

Presenter10:28

At first, I would go away feeling absolutely stupid, and in the end, I thought this is so silly because.

Presenter10:33

Here in this interview, in this meeting, wherever I was, I am the creative force. I have to know what they're talking about. So I would say, who's this Brecht?

Presenter10:41

Who's this Pinter bloke and and so we went on for ignorance. I think if you if you admit it it it isn't a problem.

Speaker 310:43

Yeah.

Lucy Gannon10:43

And make

Lucy Gannon10:47

Faith.

Presenter10:53

Second record.

Presenter10:54

It's it's a fairly recent um

Presenter10:57

Piece of music for me. It's Maxine Sullivan singing Skylark.

Presenter11:01

I was introduced to this by my agent, Sheila Lemmon.

Presenter11:04

Uh we listened to it in her little flat in um Holland Park and that was fine. It was just it was it was a nice piece of music and I thought no more of it.

Presenter11:13

And then she died last year, and at her funeral, again, we had Maxine Sullivan singing Skylark and

Presenter11:20

In that moment it came to mean

Presenter11:23

Everybody that I have known and lost, from from my mother to Sheila to my husband.

Presenter11:29

You know everybody that I have known that is no longer with me.

Presenter11:32

And when I hear Skylark know, they're there with me, the ghosts are there, and on the desert island they will be there with me.

Speaker 311:37

Oh Skyline I don't know if you can find these things

Speaker 311:48

But my heart is writing.

Speaker 311:51

On your way.

Speaker 311:55

So if you see them anywhere

Presenter11:58

What you

Speaker 311:59

Lead me there.

Presenter12:02

Maxine Sullivan singing Skylark, accompanied by, among others, Bob Wilbur, Bud Freeman, and Lou McGarrity a record that brings back lots of ghosts for you, Lucy. Your mother died of cancer when you were seven.

Presenter12:14

It obviously affected you very badly. You said academically for a start. You didn't perform well after that.

Presenter12:19

Yes, I I didn't know that it was

Presenter12:23

I knew that I had been affected by something I didn't know that it was her death.

Presenter12:27

And it's only in the last few years, really, as my own child has grown up,

Presenter12:30

that I've realized that it it was the loss of a mother that, um, just unhinged me, I think.

Presenter12:36

In what way? How did it manifest itself? I think I became terribly eager to please, desperate to fit in, because I felt that uh there was no longer any place for me in the world. Um

Presenter12:46

And in in fact, there wasn't any place for me in the world, of course, you know. My my father was working in the army, desperately trying to hold us together and to do the right things by us.

Presenter12:55

Um we were sent off to live with relatives in Lancashire who weren't kind.

Presenter12:59

We knew then we were there on sufferance. We were told repeatedly we were there on sufferance.

Presenter13:05

And I think that that from that moment on really, until I was twenty-eight-ish.

Presenter13:10

I was desperately trying to find a place in the world and to try and find why I was in the world and

Presenter13:16

what I should be doing. I I was eager to please everybody, desperate to fit in.

Presenter13:20

And always felt thick, you said. Yeah, very thick. Uh I was repeatedly told I was thick, so you know there were there were good reasons for it. Another of your early plays, Testimony of Child, showed a little boy who stopped performing well at school and uh who who went off his food and became very withdrawn. Uh and in his case it was because he was probably being systematically abused, sexually abused. Was that a a character drawn from your own experiences?

Presenter13:46

I think it that was a combination character, really. The BBC had asked me if I would write a a play about child abuse, and as part of the research, I read

Presenter13:54

the whole transcript transcript of the uh Cleveland uh abuse trial, the inquiry. And what I tried to do was to simplify it tremendously and just put it into the life of a little boy.

Presenter14:06

And I don't think I referred it back to me. I mean, I I don't feel that I was ever that little boy. I w I was far more boisterous and noisy and troublesome. But you had known what it was like to suffer a kind of cruelty, as you said, with your Lancashire relatives. I mean, how cruel were they?

Lucy Gannon14:15

Yeah.

Presenter14:21

They were miserable years. I mean, I mean, I I

Presenter14:24

I don't see the point of of um

Presenter14:27

going back and

Presenter14:29

torturing either myself or my family or

Presenter14:33

Their family was was

Presenter14:35

details, but they were miserable years.

Presenter14:37

And when my father remarried it was

Presenter14:41

It was like, um

Presenter14:43

Being rescued from from prison. I mean, it was it was as bad as that.

Presenter14:49

Third record. Third record is Placido Domingo. I find myself listening to opera all the time when I am working late into the night.

Presenter14:59

If I'm working during the day or if I'm working on

Presenter15:02

Sort of light pieces, if you like, then I find that I've put pop on, I put on Annie Lennox or whatever.

Presenter15:08

But if I'm writing something that's heavy and if I'm on a roll and if it's the middle of the night and the rest of the world is asleep and I'm working, then it has to be Placeo.

Speaker 315:19

Hello Chavell.

Lucy Gannon15:22

Yeah.

Speaker 315:22

Yeah.

Lucy Gannon15:30

Ah Valate!

Lucy Gannon15:39

Emposphiora Valarena.

Lucy Gannon15:48

Rabai Lafrahan.

Presenter16:08

Placido Domingo as Cavaradossi singing a Lucevan le Stelle from Act three of Puccini's Tosca with the orchestra of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentini and the orchestra of the Rome Opera, conducted by Zubin Meita.

Presenter16:20

You wrote a play, Lucy Gannon, a couple of years ago called Trip Trap. It starred Kevin Wakely as a junior school headmaster who battered his wife behind closed doors. You've said it's one of the the plays that people mention to you all the time. It's the one they remember, isn't it? It is. Do you think it's your best piece of writing?

Presenter16:38

No, my best piece of writing is the one I'm doing now. Um I think it I think it was a uh a good piece of writing. I think it was well directed and and very well produced. But you've called it the most demanding thing you ever did. Why so?

Presenter16:50

It was demanding at every stage in the process because I couldn't just sit down and write the story. I then had to.

Presenter16:59

take responsibility for how much violence we saw, how we saw it.

Presenter17:03

Why it was there, which bits should be taken out, which bits shouldn't. Because you don't like gratuitous violence. I don't. I don't think that violence is drama, just as I don't think that bad language is drama. I think that, for example, I I have a a film coming up in which there is, in the whole ninety minute script, there is one instance of ba of bad language, or what people would call bad language. I don't think in that instance it is, because it's it's the very heart of the film, it's the crux of the film, it's a man driven to extremes. But people might argue that violence and you know consistent bad language is is real, that's the way it is. It certainly is real, and and I think if that's if that's the world you're portraying, then you have a duty to to show that. But for example, with Trip Trap showing a a middle class couple

Presenter17:44

Where the story is one of violence, you have to show the violence. You absolutely have to show it, but I think it should be.

Presenter17:50

It should be so so

Presenter17:52

tenderly, so delicately handled.

Presenter17:55

that it doesn't become the main context of the film, because in fact that isn't it you know, it's the symptom, it's what's going wrong in the family is showing itself in the violence. But it what is going wrong is far more interesting than the violence itself.

Lucy Gannon18:03

Uh

Presenter18:07

Again, this was something that was of your experience because you were battered by your first husband. A young marriage. You were 19, I think. Yes, I was 19.

Lucy Gannon18:14

The answer was ninety

Presenter18:15

He was a he was a very handsome man. He was he was a good catch, you know, six foot two, blonde, handsome, and all the rest of it. And uh I think I was just um bowed over by him and

Presenter18:27

naive and um willing to be um seduced really, and desperate to have a home of my own, desperate to have a place of my own in the world, and felt that I could find one with this man.

Presenter18:38

And it had only been a few we had only been married a few weeks when

Presenter18:43

things started to go seriously wrong. Um

Presenter18:46

Subsequently I discovered that he had a history of violence.

Presenter18:50

And I now know that he went on to be violent with other people. But you stayed with him for two years. I mean, it's the old question, and it's the question that your play poses. Why why do women put up with this? Absolutely. I don't know. I don't know why.

Presenter19:00

I didn't assume going into a marriage that there would be problems like that. They came as a shock, I mean, an absolute shock.

Lucy Gannon19:05

I mean an hour

Presenter19:06

And because of my history, because of the educational problems and all the rest, I immediately thought it had to be me. And of course.

Presenter19:13

My husband's response was, It's you, it's not me. It's not. Which is exactly what was in the play, isn't it? The Kevin Waitley character talks about having rescued this woman, having mended her. She was broken because of her background. That that's the line you were given, is it? Yeah, absolutely. And you believed it. Absolutely. If if I don't have you, who will?

Lucy Gannon19:15

Which is exactly what

Lucy Gannon19:24

You were given it?

Lucy Gannon19:26

Can you

Presenter19:29

What is interesting in that play, though, is that we do have some compassion for the batterer. We we we hate his violence, but we kind of begin to understand why he does it.

Presenter19:40

Well, I hope so, because you know, I walked away from that marriage, and I feel now I am unscarred by it. But I know that my first husband is still scarred by it. I know that his violence has pursued him all through his life, that he is the true victim.

Presenter19:53

Next record.

Presenter19:54

My next record is

Presenter19:56

Well, I can't imagine being on a desert island and not having um

Presenter20:01

A human voice around me.

Presenter20:03

One of the things when my husband died, one of the things I found I missed most about an all female household is the sound of the male voice.

Presenter20:10

So I'm getting it in abundance here. I've chosen Richard Burton, Reading Under Moatwood.

Speaker 220:15

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible black, the cobbled streets silent and the hunched, quarters and rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the slow black.

Speaker 220:28

Slow

Speaker 220:29

Black

Speaker 220:30

Crow black fishing boat bobbing sea

Speaker 220:35

The houses are blind as moles, though moles see fine to night in the snouting velvet dingles, or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the welfare hall in widows' weeds, and all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town.

Speaker 220:54

Are sleeping now.

Speaker 220:57

Hush.

Speaker 220:59

The babies are sleeping the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobblers, school teacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot, cockle women, and the tidy wives.

Presenter21:15

Richard Burton, reading the opening of Dylan Thomas's Under Milkwood. We don't make your life sound all bleak, Lucy. You did have this very happy second marriage to George. What did he do, George? George, he was an engineer, a mechanical engineer.

Presenter21:29

And um

Presenter21:30

You were very happy, but you were broke until you wrote the play. He was obviously very supportive through all of that. He he loved the fact that you wrote that play. He was tremendous. Uh for a man of his generation coming from Glasgow,

Lucy Gannon21:38

Yeah.

Presenter21:42

Not one of the arty farty ones, you know, not a a university man, to discover that his wife had this strange talent that was suddenly

Presenter21:50

Reaching out and demanding great things of him as well as of me. In what way?

Presenter21:56

Well, he took over he took over the house, really. He took over Louise. He said he knew who was it yeah, my daughter.

Lucy Gannon22:01

You know who is it?

Presenter22:03

He yeah, our our daughter. He knew he was a tr truly liberated man when it was up to him to choose the washing machine.

Presenter22:08

And um

Presenter22:09

That was he was he was just tremendous and he would s he would stand in the window of our uh council house and

Presenter22:17

Watch people on the road when Soldier Soldier was on and say, Why are they on the road? Don't they know Soldier Soldier's on?

Presenter22:23

He would stop people in the street and introduce me and so proud just so proud. Everybody needs someone like that in their lives.

Speaker 322:29

Hmm.

Presenter22:30

And obviously, then having that success, earning the money, changed the quality of your lives. What did you have for those years that you hadn't had before, as it were? What did you do?

Speaker 322:38

Did you do it?

Presenter22:40

Georgios used to liken it to a a drain pipe in which, you know, you poured work at one end and gradually, eventually, some money would come out of the other end.

Presenter22:49

He lived for about three years after I'd started writing, and during that time we were beginning to feel the the benefits of of my new career.

Presenter22:58

And we'd moved from the council house to

Presenter23:01

what always described as a brookie house, a a brand new house on a very large estate in in Derbyshire and uh at the age of forty I got my first car, which was a bright yellow Astra, known throughout the council estate as the Banana.

Presenter23:12

Um

Presenter23:13

So he knew that, you know, we we were we were getting there, but he died within three years.

Presenter23:19

How did he die?

Presenter23:22

Record number five.

Presenter23:24

Record number five is is George's favorite, George's girlfriend really, Tina Turner.

Presenter23:31

It's only recently that I've been able to listen to this track again.

Presenter23:34

Uh he used to play this in the car all the time and um

Presenter23:38

I picked it up.

Presenter23:39

A few months after he died and put it in the car and just couldn't listen to it at all, had to stop the car, was absolutely destroyed.

Presenter23:46

But in the last couple of months I started listening to it and I thought I have to be brave today and I have to choose this and uh if I play this on the desert island then George will be there with me.

Presenter23:58

Your eyes, I get lost, I get washed away

Presenter24:07

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 324:08

As long as I'm here in your arms, I could be in no better place.

Speaker 324:15

You simply

Presenter24:20

Tina Turner and the best. How how much do you watch other people's stuff on the Tilly Lucy? I I try not to watch drama too much. If there is something particularly good coming up which I know

Presenter24:32

uh will interest me, then I do make a point of watching it, but I don't sit down every night and watch why because you're worried about becoming formulae.

Lucy Gannon24:37

Is your way?

Presenter24:39

I'm worried about becoming formulaic. I'm worried about it having an effect on me that I'm not aware of. And I'm worried, too, about absorbing.

Presenter24:47

a director's art as part of writing, which I think should never be. You know, I think

Presenter24:52

I think that a writer has to guard against presenting a scene in such a way that the director has nowhere to go with it. You destroy your own spontaneity in that sense.

Lucy Gannon24:59

Yeah.

Presenter25:00

Isn't that also the problem if you're working with a small team, that they're constantly perhaps bringing ideas to you or asking you to write things or suggesting things, that you're going to get funnelled channelled by them and you're not going to go on being you? Yeah, I think that's true. I think that the secret is to have lots of things on the go at the same time. At the moment, I'm.

Presenter25:19

I'm doing a um a film with one team, a series with another team, and and um a mini series with another team. They're all people I've worked with before, but that

Presenter25:28

I I I go from one project to another. I usually have two or three things on on the go at the same time. So you keep moving so that you can remain yourself, and not be too influenced by any few people.

Lucy Gannon25:32

So you keep moving

Speaker 325:35

Absolutely.

Lucy Gannon25:36

Uh

Speaker 325:37

Yeah.

Presenter25:38

You've moved, it would seem very happily between the BBC and I T V, although it was definitely for I T V that you wrote those blockbuster Peak Practice and Soldier, Soldier. How much difference would you say there is between working for the one and the other?

Presenter25:52

Working for ITV in some ways is very good because you get you get decisions very quickly. If if you have a good idea and go to them with it, then it will be commissioned very quickly. But then you said working with ITV, you know, you never quite felt and I quote you here, I think that never quite felt the series were mine.

Presenter26:09

Particularly at the beginning. I think when I worked with ITV at the beginning, then it was a case of give them the script and they'll run away with it and they would give it to whatever director they wanted and they would treat it in whatever way they wanted. BBC has its own problems. The BBC can take as long as six months to come up with a yes, by which time you've gone off the boil, the idea's gone cold and you're doing something else. If you're any sort of writer at all, you don't sit around for six months waiting for the phone to ring.

Speaker 226:35

More music.

Presenter26:37

This is just purely at Nuttalley for me. It's uh uh Leon Redburn singing seduced uh

Presenter26:43

I know that sitting on that desert island I am going to want to be seduced, so in the evenings when the sun is setting I shall play myself this.

Lucy Gannon26:50

I want to be sedue

Lucy Gannon26:54

Want a woman to take me out to dinner for two Like to see her eyes get moody Floodin' with the thought of what floodin' ought to do Like to be real cool

Lucy Gannon27:11

Let us think about getting bit of me and bed Has a chat about Magna Card

Presenter27:18

Leon Redbone and Seduced. Your recent play, The Gift, starring Amanda Burton, Lucy, is about a woman who takes her own life rather than let her daughter see her die a slow death of cancer. Again, presumably part of your own experience.

Presenter27:35

It it's an odd one, is um

Presenter27:37

I think a lot of uh journalists and and the publicity of the film certainly honed in on the fact that, you know, it's it has o uh overturns from our own life. But

Presenter27:48

In fact, uh I wrote I wrote the play because I was asked to to write a a play about euthanasia and I originally said no, I wouldn't. But when I went away and started thinking about it, I think like a lot of writers and

Presenter27:59

Um well, a lot of people generally. I I'm preoccupied with death anyway. I I love the idea of death. I think about it a lot. You love the idea. I love the idea of death, yeah. Well, you like the idea of dying. Yeah, going home.

Lucy Gannon28:05

Lovely

Presenter28:11

Absolutely. I I love the I don't particularly want to die now. I've got a lot to do.

Presenter28:15

And I I don't want to leave my daughter. But the actual

Presenter28:19

The actual act of dying ho holds no

Presenter28:21

Terrorists for me at all. I mentioned in the introduction that you'd once attempted suicide and that was when you were really very young, wasn't it? I mean, just after you were in the the the military police.

Lucy Gannon28:27

Yeah.

Presenter28:30

Do do you ever think about that time? Do you ever think, What if I'd succeeded? No, I don't really. Um

Presenter28:38

I think I've gone past the stage of of um longing for death actively. I mean, I I don't um I don't want to be dead. I I have no I have no desire to be dead, but I am intrigued by death and I have no fear of death either.

Presenter28:54

And I think that death will be a going home. Um when it comes, if the time is right, then I shall welcome it.

Presenter29:00

And so I I was thinking about euthanasia versus death and um

Presenter29:05

I couldn't I couldn't help but write a a play.

Presenter29:08

That has

Presenter29:09

my own perspective in it. And my own perspective is very much that of a a daughter who lost her mother and a mother who wishes to be around as long as possible for her daughter. So there's an awful lot of emotion in there. Um

Presenter29:22

I found it very hard to write, very very emotionally draining to write. Record number seven. Record number seven is uh the the track that will forever remind me of my daughter. My daughter is uh tall and blonde and gorgeous and um

Presenter29:34

Every time I play this I will see her dancing across the courtyards at the barns where we used to live.

Presenter29:40

showing me how to be sexy, which was just, you know.

Presenter29:43

A lost cause, if ever there was one, and she would be shimming along to the rhythmics and right by your side.

Lucy Gannon29:52

All of us need slaughter

Lucy Gannon29:57

Everybody needs to

Lucy Gannon30:01

Uh

Speaker 330:01

Every single day can drive us down, down, down But there's nothing left to fear

Presenter30:19

Eurythmics and right by your side. What do you think, Lucy Gannon, on a desert island? Could you hack it?

Presenter30:25

I think I would love it. I love being on my own. No mobile phones, no faxes, no letters, no it'd be great.

Presenter30:31

You said before now something that just strikes me as rather odd. If my mother hadn't died, if I hadn't had cruel relatives in Lancashire and if I hadn't had learning difficulties at school, I wouldn't have been a writer. Are you sure that's true? Yep, absolutely.

Lucy Gannon30:43

Yeah.

Presenter30:44

Why, aren't you a natural writer? Wouldn't you simply have found something else to write about?

Presenter30:49

M

Presenter30:51

I I feel that my writing has come out of observing the world and of feeling that I wasn't a part of it.

Presenter30:57

And of, if you like, having to love people that I found were unlovable who or who didn't want to love me.

Presenter31:04

I think that my writing comes out of a tangle of emotions and

Presenter31:07

I have friends who have been who are my age and have never had a death in their lives.

Presenter31:11

whose lives have been untroubled.

Presenter31:15

The surface has never been rippled, and I find it difficult to know how if that had happened to me.

Presenter31:22

How would I know what to write about? How would I know anything? How would I

Presenter31:26

How would I have grown compassion, if you like? How would I have grown understanding or tolerance?

Presenter31:30

How would I have grown any of the things that I need to be a writer?

Presenter31:33

Last record.

Presenter31:34

My last record, well, I thought I don't know how long I'm going to be on this desert island and

Presenter31:39

Um, if I die there, then

Presenter31:42

I want to die there to the right accompaniment, really. I want to choose my own um soundtrack. So I have chosen the soundtrack to die to.

Presenter31:49

And it's from Sejong Passion.

Speaker 331:52

From Fanta.

Speaker 331:58

He took her on to his own home.

Lucy Gannon32:08

After this, as Jesus knew that oh

Speaker 332:15

Yeah.

Lucy Gannon32:16

Uh

Lucy Gannon32:17

Uh

Lucy Gannon32:20

The scripture might be fulfilled.

Lucy Gannon32:34

There was there a vessel full of vinegar, They filled therefore the sponge with the vinegar, And put it upon his song, And put it there upon

Presenter32:53

Peter Pearce and Gwyn Hall singing part of Bach's Saint John Passion with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Benjamin Britton.

Presenter33:00

What about if you could only choose one of those eight records, Lucy? It would have been Tina Turner, only the best.

Presenter33:06

Memories of George. Memories of George, as ever. What about your book?

Presenter33:11

Um, I thought the Faber Book of Reportage, edited by John Carey, because it's um reports of

Presenter33:17

Sort of first-hand accounts of things that have happened throughout history: big things, small things, great events.

Presenter33:24

I just thought that it would give me

Presenter33:26

Thousands of characters to think about. Full of good stories. Full of good stories. And the luxury.

Presenter33:32

The luxury well now.

Presenter33:35

I'm wondering if I can have a deal coming on, because you see, I thought if you have a singer on, then they bring their voice with them.

Lucy Gannon33:38

There's a deal coming up.

Presenter33:43

And you don't say, Well, you can't have your voice. So I think that every writer who is caught up on this desert island should automatically have their word processor with them, anyway. Strapped to their chairs. Strapped to them. Well, I thought it would it would be waterproof and it would be solar powered and I would jump over the side of the boat with that on me. So

Lucy Gannon33:52

Chest and I thought it would.

Lucy Gannon33:56

Or just

Presenter33:58

Knowing that I've got that, I think my luxury would be the top-of-the-range Jaguar XK eight.

Presenter34:04

Lucy Gannon, thank you much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you.

Speaker 334:16

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co. uk slash radio four.