Heidi Thomas

Presenter0:01

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne, and this is the Desert Island Discs Podcast. Every week, I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. This is an extended version of the original Radio 4 broadcast, and, for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:46

My castaway this week is the screenwriter Heidi Thomas. She's the award-winning creator of the much-loved, long-running medical drama Call the Midwife, the revived upstairs, downstairs, and adaptations of classics including Madame Beauvray, Little Women, and Noel Stretfield Ballet Shoes. While she may have never written a turkey, she certainly accompanied the digestion of more than a few. She's known as the queen of Christmas TV. Call the Midwife is now a festive staple. Her skill as a writer is evidenced by the devotion of millions of fans to a programme that, on paper at least, seemed unlikely to be a hit with all the family. Putting the realities of birth for working-class women in the 1950s in the spotlight with a largely female cast, most of whom were nuns, was a gamble, but it paid off to the tune of 9 million viewers and eight series so far. Not only has she created a show that families watch together, it's one that doesn't duck the realities of its subject matter. Abortion, thalidomide, and domestic and sexual violence have all featured, plus of course, more silicon umbilical cords than you could shake a pair of forceps at.

Presenter1:50

Asked about labour of the televisual kind, she says, to be a successful television writer, you need the sensitivity of an angel and the stamina of a mule. Heidi Thomas, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Hello. One of the remarkable things about the programme is the fact that many people find it comforting to watch, despite the fact that sometimes the subject matter can be really upsetting. I mean, what do you make of that? I wonder sometimes if people find consolation in their own tears. People often say to me, oh, it was wonderful. I cried my eyes out. And I think often in life we are subject to very intense experiences that we either can't make sense of at the time or don't get the room to really feel, to allow ourselves to process these emotions. And I do get a lot of letters from people, emails, or people just tell me face to face if I meet them in the street that they were able to cry over the loss of someone they'd never been able to weep for before, or that they'd been able to have a conversation about something difficult with a close family member. That happened with members of the thalidomide community. An old man once came up to me in the supermarket and said, Are you the midwife woman? And I thought, I'm by the sausages in the fridge, in the chilled goods aisle. What's going on? But he wanted to say that since Call the Midwife had been on television, he'd been able to discuss the birth of his three children with his wife because they were all born in the late 50s, early 60s. And he'd been, as he put it, put out of the room. And he'd never been able to discuss that with his wife. And somehow, seeing this programme had completed his experience of fatherhood. It's a staple of Christmas TV now. Do you sit down to watch it as a family? Usually we do, yes, but I always get together with my brother and his family at Christmas. And we've had up to 16 of us all piled on the floor on the sitting. What's it like for you? Terrible. And it can't be that nice for them, really, because they're sitting there and I'm like, they're reaching for the quality street. Why are they reaching for the quality street? They watch the programme anyway, my relatives, and they enjoy it. And it's almost a side issue that I've written the Christmas special, I think. But it's like, oh, yes, Heidi makes the gravy, Heidi makes the Pavlova, Heidi writes the Christmas special that we all sit down and watch. So it's quite strange, but it has become part of our family Christmas, ironically. It is, of course, adored by fans who often thank you for telling their stories, as you said. I mean, lots of people hold it so close to their hearts. There's a responsibility that comes along with that, isn't there?

Speaker 22:01

Hello.

Speaker 12:15

People are

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On the city.

Speaker 13:57

They're on

Presenter4:07

Yes, you live in dread of disappointing people because I think during difficult times in my own life I've often looked forward to a television programme. Last winter I was nursing my mum through her final illness and I have never looked forward to strictly so much in my life because it was something joyful and perhaps a little shallow, superficial, but it was something that I could cling to that was normal. Having a television programme to look forward to is part of what makes life fun and enjoyable. You don't want to disappoint those people. And on a deeper level, I think it's very important to represent people who often feel as though their stories aren't told on television. I like to write about disabled characters or people who are disabled by society in some way because the show set in the East End in the early 60s we've got a constant flow of people from other cultures and other communities coming to Britain for the first time and a lot of the feedback we get is from people who feel they have never seen themselves reflected back on a television screen and that's exciting for me as a writer. We're going to dive in with your first disc now Heidi. What's it going to be and why have you chosen this?

Presenter5:15

It's You Belong to Me by the Dupree's. There's a double meaning behind this. One is it was used in the first series of Call the Midwife, and the other is it was a song that my mother was very fond of. She once said to me that this song was a song she always associated with her dancing years in the early 1950s in Liverpool, and she said, We were all there, the girls in our beautiful dresses, and all the young men were in uniform. It's very much a story of national service, I think. See the pyramids along the Nile. All these young men, often from very humble backgrounds, were travelling and seeing the world. It was opening up to them because of military service and national service during peacetime. And it strikes me that there's something in this song which is about the inequality of male and female experience at that time. You've got these young men seeing the whole world and young women who were confined to barracks, confined to the home and not travelling and not seeing things. And in a way, in Call the Midwife, was a woman I started with. It's my own mother. And now the series is further into the 60s, nine series down the line, the women are breaking bonds, they're asking questions, they're making demands of society. So in many ways, this is the song where it all began.

Heidi Thomas6:29

See the pyramids along the nile

Heidi Thomas6:36

Watch the sun rise on a dropic isle

Heidi Thomas6:43

Just remember, darling, all the while

Heidi Thomas6:50

You belong to me See the marketplace in all

Speaker 16:51

Yeah.

Speaker 16:57

See the marketplace

Presenter7:00

The Dupree's and you belong to me. So, Heidi Thomas, one of the perhaps unanticipated side effects of Call the Midwife is a spike in the number of people applying for the job, people wanting to be midwives after watching the programme. Yes, that was completely unexpected. There was not an equivalent spike in people wanting to become nuns.

Presenter7:21

Which was a source of disconsolation to the community of St. John the Divine, who are the surviving members of the Order of St. Raymond the Natas is based on. And I find it very exciting, actually, because one of the things that I think Call the Midwife does, it was unwitting at first, is it shows young women at work constantly meeting professional challenges and very much defined by the jobs they do. A lot of the feedback we got was that young women found it inspiring. And I would have thought older women who'd done the job then would come back to you with quite specific feedback, did they? Yes, they did. A very common thing when the first couple of series went out was that we would be contacted by perhaps middle-aged women who said, my mum was a midwife in the East End or possibly a similar city like Liverpool or Glasgow at that time. She would love to talk to someone about her memories. And that was actually a godsend because very sadly, Jennifer Wirth, whom I adored, died just before we started filming the first series. And her work was finite. She produced a trilogy of memoirs. And we had really used up almost all of the material in the first series. You weren't necessarily anticipating that it would go on. No, not at all. I mean, one always hopes there'll be a sequel, but I think the general idea was it would just be a gorgeous six-parter that was a fairly straight adaptation of her work. So we started to interview these lovely old retired midwives who brought us their experiences. And it could be a tiny detail, like catching fleas with a bar of soap. And I don't think we used that until series five. But wonderful stuff, in addition to the material we already had from Jennifer. It's a programme about working women, about motherhoods in prime time, and they are heroes. Did it feel like you were doing something different, like you were telling stories that hadn't been told before?

Speaker 18:22

So

Speaker 28:24

No, not at all.

Presenter8:59

I think stories about women at this particular point in history hadn't been told. And I found it fascinating because I'm from a working class background in Liverpool. I would say probably upper working class. By the middle of the 20th century, my family had shops and small businesses. But I was never very far removed from that notion that women's lives were incredibly difficult on a practical level. It involved hard physical work, great challenges. I mean, for me...

Presenter9:27

All of my grandmothers worked. This idea of women going out to work in the 60s and 70s wasn't surprising because working class women have always worked. And I think there's also perhaps a middle class preconception that all working class lives are miserable. But they're not. They're full of joy, gorgeous clothes, profundity, excitement, optimism. And I wanted to get those colours, as it were, onto the screen. Because lives can be small by definition, but filled with enormous things. And I felt those stories were grand enough and important enough to have a light shone on them. Talk me through some of the practicalities of making the programme. They do say never work with children and animals. You've got live babies and a dizzying array of props, including silicon umbilical cords or pig umbilical cords on occasion. Well, it was actually a pig's placenta when we first started making the series. The nearest thing to a human placenta was a pig's placenta, which used to arrive from the butcher's on the morning of filming. And when you're filming in high summer, that's not, you know, you can't really show it in close-up anyway. It's not very suitable pre-watershed. But it does smell and it's not very hygienic. So we now have a silicon afterbirth. And a selection of umbilical cords, what I didn't realise, but our consultant midwife told us is

Speaker 110:16

When we first started making this

Speaker 110:28

Very suitable.

Presenter10:40

Babies are all different sizes, therefore the umbilical cords are different sizes as well. So she looks at the baby we've hired for the day and then looks in the drawer at the umbilical cords and chooses the most appropriate one. Your husband Stephen McGann plays the GP in the series, so Call the Midwife is a family affair in in many ways. What's it like working together?

Presenter10:58

It's great actually. We met working together years and years ago in 1986 in the theatre. And then it was a couple of years before we became an item. And thereafter, we were never able to work together again because people would say, oh, you just want him to play this part because he's your boyfriend, stroke fiancée, stroke husband. And with Call the Midwife, it was the first time we'd worked together for 25 years. It was initially a tiny role for him. He'd actually taken a career break so I could concentrate on my own work and was studying for a master's degree at Imperial College. So he came in and did a few days' work on it, which was lovely for both of us and felt very novel. But then his role has grown over the years because the role of the GP practice has grown within the series. So it's brilliant. I think it must be quite boring for our son, like being a member of the Clark's family and coming home and while anybody talks about his shoes. But.

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Member of the

Presenter11:50

I think, you know, he understands what we do and that we're passionate about it. It's time for your second disc. I think this one takes us back to your hometown. Yes, Penny Lane by the Beatles. I was born in 1962 in Liverpool. I lived in Sheffield for the first few years of my life because my father had obtained a position as the manager of a disinfectant works in a place called Ecclesfield. But Liverpool was where my family were. It was where everything happened. But I particularly love Penny Lane. I've got a lovely memory of a picnic in our back garden in Liverpool when I was about six with Penny Lane blaring out on the Donset and eating a potted beef sandwich and just being so happy. So there's one specific memory. But I think there's the line about blue suburban skies that always resonates with me because I grew up in the suburbs. I love a suburban landscape. I love nature, but only in its proper place. You know, I like my trees in lines. I like my flowerbeds fully coordinated. I live in the countryside now and it never sits well with me. There's animals in the way and mud and things. But I just love the suburbs and I think the suburbs have inspired me as a writer. All those tiny houses, you know, packed with secrets like wheat in a barn. And whenever I hear this song, it takes me back to my childhood in a sort of an architectural and geographical sense.

Heidi Thomas13:17

Beneath the blue, superb skies I sit and mean while back at Penny Lane there is a fireglass.

Heidi Thomas13:29

Mark is a portrait of a queen.

Heidi Thomas13:34

Sky or engine.

Heidi Thomas13:38

Machine

Presenter13:41

The Beatles and Penny Lane. Heidi Thomas, you described your upbringing in Liverpool once as a bit bay window.

Presenter13:48

If you are from or have roots in the working class, people always assume you come from, you know, a two-up, two-down terrace with a toilet at the bottom of the yard. But my family had worked their way up. They were ambitious. They had shops. I mean, one of my grandfathers was a butcher. One had a medicinal herbalist. My grandma was a hairdresser. So I grew up in a three-bedroom semi-garden front and back bay window. And nets, presumably. Absolute nets. And in fact, when we were clearing my mum's house, she died in January. And when we were clearing her house over the summer, the last thing I did was take the nets down. And it was the drawing down of blinds, as Wilfred Owen would say. No, it was a strangely affirmative experience because she had lived in that house for 52 years. So every Hyde Ranger bush had a story to tell. And what was your mum like? I think you described her once as someone who in another life might have been at home on stage. She would have been very at home on stage. She wanted to be an actress and in actual fact was offered a position as what was called an acting stage manager at Liverpool Playhouse when she was 15. That would have been doing props and walk-on parts and it was how you trained as an actor in those days. But her father wouldn't let her take up the job. And I think...

Speaker 114:07

And

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And it will

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Bunch

Heidi Thomas14:44

Uh

Speaker 114:44

Uh

Presenter14:53

It was mentioned so often when I was a child, I can't believe it wasn't a source of huge resentment and frustration for her. She was glamorous, she was angry, she was combative, she was totally admirable without ever being lovely in a way. She was just so strong. I think she needed to have lived her life on a greater canvas. I have nothing but admiration for her. I can remember when she was 78, she asked for an axe for Christmas. I think you can't have an axe for Christmas. She's 78, and she said, I want to chop those trees down at the bottom of the garden. So I bought her an axe and I wrapped it up like, so it looked like an axe with a bow on under the Christmas tree. And she chopped the trees down. She was doing her own painting and decorating at 80. She mowed her own lawn a week before a terminal diagnosis. And she just burnt through life with this sort of fire. She had the bluest eyes you've ever seen. But she was permanently furious. Permanently furious. I think I would have liked a quieter home. I like to read. My parents were very, very sociable. They were always having parties. My brother and I, brothers and I, the third one came along a bit later. We'd be put to bed with a bottle of Tyser and a bag of crisps. And downstairs, the bass of the radiogram would be thumping. You know, the Dubliners. My dad loved soul music, so it would be the Detroit Emeralds and feel the need of me pulsing underneath the bed. And all I wanted to do was read. So your dad was incredibly gregarious and vivacious, too? Yeah, my dad had a tangerine-coloured BMW. I mean, he had a sequence of loud, terrible cars that maybe he couldn't get on the drive, which was too narrow. But we also had bright orange curtains and the house was painted purple. We had like purple guttering because it was the 70s. So everything was very loud. But my dad was just this.

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Beep.

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Every

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Bink!

Presenter16:44

He was a sort of

Presenter16:46

Free spirit, I suppose, is the word. He always had a scheme or a plan. Like at one point he had a mushroom farm under some railway arches, or he had a scam involving industrial diamonds, or a job a contract cleaning the drains at the Golden Wonder crisp factory. So he'd go out in the middle of the night and come home with boxes of crisps that he got with the night watchman's compliments. Would there be something slightly wrong with them or were they the the ordinary ones?

Speaker 217:09

But well on

Presenter17:10

The crisps were always fine, so we were quite pleased with those. But what was really exciting were the club biscuits, because sometimes he had a contract cleaning the drains when they became blocked at the Jacobs Biscuit Factory in Liverpool. And I remember once a box of club biscuits, orange clubs, but they'd forgotten to put the biscuit in, so it's just like slabs of orange chocolate. Fantastic. That was really, really good, yeah. You had happy years as a child, but when you were just 18, you lost your dad. I mean, that must have been an incredibly shocking thing to go through. Well, it was terrible.

Presenter17:41

He committed suicide, which at that time, in a predominantly Catholic culture that we lived in Liverpool, was something that could scarcely be discussed or spoken of. Was it a case that people would say to you, you know, I can't believe that this would happen. He seemed to be so happy, so full of life. Yes, and even this summer, when I was clearing out my mum's house, I found this battered old satchel in the wardrobe that contained all the letters my father had ever written to her. And they fell into two broad categories. When they were first courting, he was still in the army, so he wrote to her every week.

Speaker 117:54

What happened?

Presenter18:12

And then she had a spell in hospital with a slip disc and he again wrote to her. And some of the letters they're just lovely, they're like Stambasto novels. You know, there's references to trams and pubs and sports coats and they seem like period pieces. But what I also found in the letters was a profound anxiety in my father. Whether that was as a result of his experiences in the Korean War, I don't know. They're referenced very briefly. But it was almost not a final piece of the jigsaw puzzle, because I accept that the jigsaw puzzle of loving my father will never be complete. But it was a piece of the jigsaw puzzle. And I think for the first time I realised that he was a man who felt things so deeply that maybe he was always going to come to that end.

Presenter18:55

Or certainly he was always going to suffer from a nervous breakdown at some point because

Presenter19:01

He was easygoing and generous and funny and

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compassionate and incredibly kind to others.

Presenter19:10

And if you take a step back from all of those qualities, obviously they're qualities that can involve some pain for the person who is living life in that personality. Let's go to the music ID. What's it going to be? It's your third disc.

Presenter19:23

Oh, it's Dean Martin Gentle on My Mind because this reminds me of my dad and my childhood in the best way. This is my dad in his tangerine coloured BMW with the window down, his elbow out of the car window, a cigarette, sometimes a flat cap, and Dean Martin playing on the 8-track. He had a cartridge player in the car with lots and lots of easy listening. And the thing I love about Gentle on My Mind is on his 8-track, it always stopped halfway through with a clunk, and then he had to turn it over and push it in again. So every time I hear Gentle on My Mind, I'm waiting for that clunk where it cuts off halfway through the 8-track.

Heidi Thomas20:03

And it's known I'm not shackled by forgotten words and bongs, And the ancient things that have dried up on some line

Heidi Thomas20:16

Keeps you in the back rose by the rivers of memory. It keeps you ever drilled on the mind.

Heidi Thomas20:28

It's not a clinging to

Presenter20:30

Dean Martin and Gentle on My Mind. So Heidi Thomas, you mentioned that you were a voracious reader as a child. No surprise then that you went to study English at Liverpool University. Did you want to be a writer or was it just the reading at that point? I think it was just the reading. And one of the interesting things was I do remember vividly because I had two younger brothers, Jonathan and David. And there was one point when I was about 14 where both of them were in the children's hospital at the same time. My brother David was having treatment related to his heart condition and my other brother Jonathan had fallen off his skateboard and slipped three discs in his back. He was only 11. But I was at the hospital all the time because they were. There was no one at home. And I can see the desire to become a nurse. My headmistress, when I went for my careers talking sixth form, I said, I want to be a nurse. And she said, oh, you're far too clever to be a nurse. And I said, well, I'll be a doctor then. And she said, you're not clever enough to be a doctor. So that was that. My sort of medical career just fell neatly between two stools. Although I refute that you don't need to be clever to be a nurse. I must make that quite clear. But she gave me very good advice. She said, you should go and do a degree in a subject that you really, really love. And by the end of that three-year period, you'll know a great deal more about what you have to offer the world and what the world has to offer you. And very soon after my English degree, I did start writing for the theatre. So I didn't have a game plan at that age. I've never looked very far into the future. So you're not a naturally organised person.

Speaker 121:50

The matte

Presenter21:56

Terrible. I love cleanliness. The smell of bleach in a butcher's shop on a Saturday morning I just associate with great security and happiness. I'm always cleaning, but I'm just not very tidy. But I think the first job I ever earned money for was washing the plastic parsley in my uncle's butcher's shop, which always had to be washed on a Saturday. I used to stand on a chair and wash the parsley with squeezy and a washing up brush and get, I don't know, 20p or something. Yeah, you worked when you were at uni as well, didn't you? I did. And it was unusual for people to work their way through university at that time because there were decent grants and people would sign on in the summer or work. But

Presenter22:33

My father died at the beginning of my second term of my first year and there were two brothers younger than myself at home and David, the younger one, was severely disabled, so my mum couldn't go out to work. And my brother Jonathan was 15 and he got a job washing pots in a pub. And I worked in a department store in the ladies' underwear department and I did that through. I'd been there as a Saturday girl in sixth form, but I worked throughout university. I've read you talking about your time in the department store and I have to say it sounds like a drama within itself. It's all there. You've got intrigue, rivalry, snobbery. Oh, everything. I mean, I learned so much about women, human interaction, good dialogue, the sexual politics of a department store. Always knock before you go in a stockroom. I never knew what that was all about and that I suddenly twigged there might be people having assignations among the cardboard boxes. But I actually loved retail. I did once win a prize for selling girdles. I sold more girdles than anybody else in the department, but the prize was a girdle.

Presenter23:40

At nineteen, I just thought that was so hilarious. And I had my flatmates and I burned it on a barbecue, laughing. And I'm like, I'd love that girdle now. It was a Miss Mary of Sweden, and they don't make it. It's a lot of ferts. Yeah, with a big zip up the sides that you could sort of compress all your flesh into it. It's time for your next diss, Cody Thomas. What's it going to be?

Speaker 123:50

And they don't make it.

Presenter23:58

It is Who Will Sing Me Lullabies by Kate Rusby, and I think it's just a beautiful song. I love her voice. For me, this is a song that always makes me think about my youngest brother, David, who had Down syndrome, and he died when he was fifteen.

Heidi Thomas24:14

Lay me down gently.

Heidi Thomas24:18

Lay me down low.

Heidi Thomas24:22

I fear I am broken

Heidi Thomas24:26

Won't men I know There's one thing I ask when The stars alight the skies Who now will sing me goodbyes?

Heidi Thomas24:45

Oh, who now will sing me?

Presenter24:52

Kate Rusby, who will sing me lullabies. Heidi Thomas, that's especially for your youngest brother, David. You're the oldest of three, you and your brothers, Jonathan and David. So, as you mentioned, David had Down syndrome. How did you get along when you were little? I think you've described him as absolutely the centre of the family. Well, he was. I was seven when he was born, and Jonathan, who came in the middle, was four. So, I do remember life before David came along. And I think up to a point I can remember how family life changed when he came along. My parents were always very happy-go-lucky. They'd known each other since they were children. And David was nothing but a joy to Jonathan and I as siblings. But of course, as a mother myself, I have one son who does not have a disability, he's in perfect health. I do appreciate that my experience as a sibling was not the same as my parents' experience as parents. It wasn't just that he had Down syndrome, because that in its way was a doddle. He was charming and funny, but he had a very severe heart condition called Phallot's trilogy that meant his life was permanently hanging by a thread. And although he had some surgery when he was six, which gave him a little bit of a lease of life, he was really pretty much wheelchair-bound and not able to socialise independently or really join in anything very much, even at school. So, his life had great physical and some would say intellectual and social limitations, and yet he filled up our whole house. He brought so much with him. And when he died, sadly during an operation, when he was 15, the church was packed. I remember walking into the church and thinking, How can someone whose life has been so circumscribed and lived in such a limited way? I mean, he never left the home without my mum or my dad or even me and my brother as we got older. And yet, somehow, he touched every life that crossed paths with his. He was a wonderful person. I do remember the day he died. He died in the operating theatre, and we sat together at home, me and my mum, my brother Johnny, my mum's second husband, because she married again very happily to the most lovely man, Arthur. And we sat round, and all we could think of to say was, What are we going to do without him? And I think that's the most wonderful epitaph, and it has coloured my

Presenter27:13

approach to everyone with a disability that that I've ever met because you just think everybody has a role to fulfil and David's role was to bring our whole family together. We were never demonstrative with each other but we used to constantly kiss him, hug him, touch him. He had lots of catchphrases, lots of jokes. We would always laugh and I think one of the reasons I chose who will sing me lullabies to make me think of him is when you have a sibling like David, they are more than just a sibling. You're obviously Jonathan and I were always encouraged to defend him in all things. But he taught us so much and he was so reliably always there for us. What did he teach you?

Presenter27:56

He taught me patience, he taught me kindness, he taught me.

Presenter28:02

that life isn't just about development. It's actually about something much more profound. It's about the ability to live within a moment. It's not something that I do particularly well myself, but I've seen it done incredibly well.

Presenter28:17

By somebody I love very much who was David. And I think.

Presenter28:21

He has remained a sort of touchstone in my life for that very reason. I like to think.

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I'm a better person. I I don't know who I would have been without him. I only had seven years without him, but

Presenter28:36

You know, being David's sister shaped me in a way that loss cannot erase. I think of him, I still think of him every day. He was born in 1970 and at that point in history, it's something I have touched upon in Call the Midwife, it was not a foregone conclusion that he would be raised at home. He was really one of the first generation of children with what were then called handicaps, whether they're physical or, as with Dan's, more of a genetic condition, to be raised at home. So my mum, I think, and dad were incredibly courageous and they were advised to put him in an institution and they decided against that. But that wasn't always deemed acceptable. And I can still remember the vicar, a Church of England vicar, coming to our house and saying to my mum that the other mothers in the church playgroup didn't want David to participate. I can still see his face as she drove him from the room. She was like, boudica. I've never seen anybody so angry in my life. And then she just sat with her face in her hands. And I have never forgotten that. It took extraordinary courage to do that. And she was constantly taking on educational authorities, medical authorities. I think my father grieved more quietly for the situation they were in. And I think it probably contributed to his state of mind. I think their experience must have been a very lonely one. It's time for your next disc. Why have you chosen this one? Well, I chose first time ever I saw your face, really for my husband, Steve McGand, who does play Dr. Turner in Call the Midwife, because I met him.

Presenter30:11

A year after David died, I think it was love at first sight. In fact, we now look back and say yes, it was love at first sight, but we didn't do anything about it for two years, so I'm not sure if that qualifies.

Presenter30:21

Love at first sight that we didn't do anything about is a bit of a grey area perhaps. But we've been married now for twenty nine years. Steve is my touchstone, my rock. Everything begins and ends with him. Yes, we've had mad romance, mad passion, we've had all of those things. We've reared a child, but he is absolutely my best friend.

Heidi Thomas30:48

Ever I saw you

Heidi Thomas30:52

He is.

Heidi Thomas30:58

Thought the sun.

Heidi Thomas31:04

Rose in your eyes

Presenter31:16

Roberta Flack and the first time ever I saw your face for your husband Stephen McGann. Your first writing break came about because of a bout of illness? Yes, immediately after I graduated I fell ill with just viral hepatitis which is a weird illness because it doesn't make you really really ill but it goes on a long time and so I wasn't able to apply for jobs as probably I would have been doing at that point. And I entered a playwriting competition and won a prize and got an agent, which all sounds very glib. It was much more extended and agonised than that. But I did get a foot in the door of playwriting because it seemed to work as a ploy. I wrote another play for another competition which didn't win a prize but it was picked up by the Royal Shakespeare Company and went into the rep at Stratford. So within a very short space of time I got off the ground as a playwright. And how hard was it to make a living? I was earning a living but it wasn't probably a full living until I went to work for television. So I used to do a bit of journalism on the side. I wrote features for the Telegraph and Vogue. I travelled quite widely in what was then the Soviet Union. Was your move into TV that saw your career begin to cohere? Yes. Is it true then at the time you thought you were selling out? Well I think I was told I was selling out because theatre was very much revered and television was not. I think there's a different take on television now and that is partly because of television's relationship with cinema and the way we digest screen drama now because we have the box set culture and streaming and everything is changing very rapidly. But certainly in the early 90s when I turned my attention to tele it was thought of as something that you did if you'd failed in the theatre and I actually found it much more challenging and because I love a challenge within a couple of hours of my first TV meeting I'm like there's so much to learn there's so much skill and craftsmanship and structure. It really excited me in the way theatre had never excited me. So you've got a gig on Soldier Soldier. What did you learn? What was the challenge? On the simplest possible level, writing a 58 minute script. In theatre you can say what you want to say and carry on until you've finished. And I'm not sure I ever finished what I wanted to say in theatre.

Presenter33:22

The interesting thing for me is that I am a perfectionist by nature. I love attention to detail and in television there always comes a point when you sign off on your work, when it's edited, when the music is on and it is what it is, it becomes stable. Theatre can be absolute chaos. The audience are also part of the energy in a theatre and they can respond very differently and that can affect the energy of the actors. And I think some people find that motility of the theatrical experience very enervating and exciting. I just find it petrifying and I do love the idea that television, even every episode of Call the Midwife, and we've done 70 odd episodes now, there's always a point where we say that is complete. And then, other than when I'm watching the Christmas special with my family, I don't have to sit with the audience while it's being performed. This might be your penchant for cleanliness and order coming through. Yes, I think so. I just like to polish things. I like them to be as bright and as perfect and as precise as they can be. And I think every story, certainly Called the Midwife, where a lot of stories are rooted in truth or fact or history of some kind, there is a sense that they're a rough diamond and what you have to do is work on that story in an almost geometric way to make sure it deflects the light correctly and to the best of its ability. Time for your next track, Heidi Thomas. What is it?

Presenter34:39

It is Finishing the Hat from Sondheim's Musical Sunday in the Park with George. I love musicals. I've really bonded with my son over musicals over the years. My son Dominic has a lovely voice and has pursued musical theatre as a hobby for years. So many, many musicals are tied up with lovely memories of him and our relationship and time together. But we both love Sondheimer and I particularly love Sondheim because I think he is one of the greatest dramatists of the 20th and 21st centuries, not just the greatest writer of musicals, but there is something about his work where he understands about a motif which will often play out musically, but it might also be a phrase of lyrics or dialogue. And I just feel as a dramatist, I've learned so much from him about structure and about the rewards of creating a narrative that contains repeated beats. And I particularly love Finishing the Hat because the first time I heard it, I thought it was a song about an artist painting. But what you realise, it's a song about an artist creating. So it slips out of just being a song about painting, about the artist musing as he paints, but this idea that you have to sit and wait for the details to come in through the window. There's a lovely line that things come in through the window. And it's about inspiration and craftsmanship and how you have to try and meld the two things together. My father was an engineer by profession and I sometimes think I am an imagineer because I have to work at the craft, at the literal nuts and bolts of drama. But there's always a magical element that you can't dictate to. You simply have to wait for. And I think Finishing the Hat is all about that for me.

Heidi Thomas36:20

Finishing the hand.

Heidi Thomas36:24

How you have to finish the hair?

Heidi Thomas36:27

How you watch the rest of the world from a window while you finish the hand.

Heidi Thomas36:34

Mapping out the sky

Heidi Thomas36:37

What you feel like planning the sky?

Heidi Thomas36:41

What you feel when voices that come through the window go until they distance and die until there's nothing but

Presenter36:50

Josh Groban finishing the hat from Sunday in the Park with George by Stephen Sondheim. Heidi Thomas, in 1996 your son Dominic was born. It was just over a year later that you became seriously ill though. What was wrong?

Speaker 137:04

Bel

Presenter37:05

Quite out of the blue, I developed an obstructed bowel, an obstructed intestine. Not realising what the symptoms were, I sort of soldiered on at home thinking I had a touch of food poisoning. And in actual fact, I developed gangrene of the bowel and sepsis. So when I was finally admitted I was ill enough to send for the doctor and go to hospital, I had to have emergency surgery and a large piece of my bowel was removed and then of course I had to deal with the sepsis. So I was very, very poorly for quite a few weeks and

Presenter37:36

Then I came home and made a full recovery. I think being a relatively young age, I think I was about thirty six was probably on my side. But it was a brush with death that I do think changes your perspective. What did it give you? It gave me a sense of how much there was to lose. You know, my son was fourteen months old at the time and I

Presenter37:55

For years and years afterwards I would have this sort of shudder the idea of Steve being left alone with a baby the idea that certainly Dominic would never have remembered me at all. Not that that's the most important thing, that's an egot centric thing to say, but

Presenter38:09

I look at what I've done since. I didn't even really begin my best work as a writer until.

Presenter38:15

I was recovering from that illness. I did an adaptation of Madame Bovary and that certainly began my career in adaptation. But I just think as a woman, as a person, I think of all the growing I've done since I recovered from that illness and all that may never have happened. And I think if I had died then, if they hadn't been able to save me.

Presenter38:36

What would I have accomplished? What would I have left behind? I was just like a little an unflourished bulb. There was so much not done, I think. You were well enough to return to work with your adaptation of Madame Beauvray, as you say. It was on our screens in 2000. And that would be the first of many adaptations for you. Talk me through the challenges and pleasures of taking on a task like that. Interestingly, it was the only time I've ever adapted anything written by a man. And I used to have nightmares about Floba standing at the end of my bed. I think because what I became aware of, the further I got into that novel, the more you realise it's an incredibly complex piece of work. And it's a bit like being given free rein in an extraordinary garden. And then what you end up with is a flower arrangement because you choose the most outstanding moments and gather it together. But my next one was Cranford. And that was, I think, where I started to understand how I could make adaptation work in terms of serving the book in the best possible way, but also giving a little bit of vent to my own creative voice. Because Cranford is a perennial book, but it's also slightly imperfect. It's a memoir, very similar to Call the Midwife, actually. I used some of the same techniques when I moved on to Call the Midwife later, because half a page can give you an hour of really satisfying drama, but then there might be three chapters that give you an aside or a tiny comic subplot. And the other thing about Cranford, something that I now actively look for when I'm offered books to adapt, is there isn't a lot of dialogue in it, but the lines of dialogue there are are so rich and so indicative of where you should go in terms of creating a register of language for your characters. You at once have free rein and a firm platform on which to stand. And so that's what I always look out for now. We've got to make room for the music now. What are we going to hear next? I've chosen Agnes Day from Fare's Requiem. I haven't attended church or a place of worship consistently over the years, but somehow faith in something greater than ourselves has always been there for me. It's sustained me through difficult times and it's intensified my joy in happier times.

Presenter40:39

I do love sacred music, often just as a backdrop to ordinary mundane things, but I think that's the essence of religion, isn't it? Sometimes it's a backdrop to ordinary mundane things. And there are other times when I've wanted to stop everything I'm doing and just listen to what can sound like angels singing. And I find great consolation in that. So certainly The Desert Island would not be complete for me unless I had some sacred music to listen to. And this is a favourite piece.

Heidi Thomas41:13

On your story's bread of you.

Heidi Thomas41:30

All the praise, Lord.

Presenter42:05

Agnes Day from Foray's Requiem, sung by Tenebray, accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra Chamber Ensemble, conducted by Nigel Short. A quote from you, Heidi Thomas. Don't ask why period dramas are successful. Ask why the audience is considered to want an endless diet of serial killers, gangsters, murders, and meming. So why?

Presenter42:27

The thing about it is, what strikes me as a consumer of drama, because I love watching drama obviously, I love to receive my stories in the dramatic form, is the primary role of a woman in modern drama is usually to be found dead.

Presenter42:40

And the primary role of a child is to go missing. Call the Midwife slightly turns that on its head because it's not about women dying, it's about women living, it's not about children going missing, it's about children arriving. And that's not to say these things are all purely positive and don't come with a degree of violence and bloodshed. I mean, childbirth is a bloody and violent business. But I do wonder. I don't worry per se because humanity seems to hobble on one way or another. I do wonder at the fascination with violence and with the damaged psyche and why that is considered to be so marketable. Because you only have to look at the latest roster of dramas that have been bought or commissioned by such and such a streaming channel. And it's so often about crime and very often about rape and very often about the most debased instincts that humans have. And I naturally recoil from that slightly. I'm not saying those dramas shouldn't exist. I think they are considered to be the more popular dramas. And oddly, they're also considered to be the more realistic. And Call the Midwife is considered to be a sort of fantasy. And I find that a very fascinating comment on our own point of view as a society. One of the drawbacks of its huge success is that Call the Midwife doesn't give you much more time to follow other passions. Can you foresee a time when you might one day hand the programme over to someone else and move on? We do have guest writers on Call the Midwife, and I always like to work with writers that I admire. So, you know, there'll be a number of episodes in each series, which I storyline but then hand over to other writers. But I think as long as I can do that and give other writers a voice, give them a chance to come and work on a show, which is very popular, that takes a little bit of pressure off me and enables me to focus on the overall structure of the series and on my own work. And that feels like a good balance. But I think nine years in, with two more series commissioned, I haven't felt ready to let it go yet. But what I might do is share the burden a little bit more with others. But I will stay with this show till the end because it's too important in the scheme of things. It tells women's stories. And I think it's been life-defining for me. There is a loneliness to being a long-distance writer. That if every time I sit down at my computer, I'm forcing myself to tell stories, there's no joy in it. You know, and ultimately, I think we all want to be joyful in our lives. But with Call the Midwife, I'm not always joyful, but I sit down and I can be filled with passion or anger, or I want to share people's stories. The thalidomide story arc was very important to me because I learned so much, but I was able to pass so much on to others and develop friendships with people who are thalidomide survivors. So I think it's just given me the person I am now, standing on the brink of old age. I'm 57. I would not be who I am without Call the Midwife, and I don't want to give that up. One more disc to go. What's it going to be, Heidi Thomas? I've chosen Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell. For me, this is a classic song in the way a book is a classic, in that you can come back to it time and time again throughout your life and find something different in it. I think I was first aware of it. I was maybe six or something like that. And the line, I scream castles in the air, I thought that was fantastic. It was such a visual image. I'm quite a visual thinker and it captured my imagination. It's a song that never goes away. You hear it several times a year. I'll always hear a new line in it or a new resonance that I haven't heard before. And what I now hear in it is maturity and regret. It's interesting that she wrote the song as a relatively young woman, but it really speaks to me as an older woman at a point in my life where I've had reason to reflect. And regret as well. I think regret is a major component of the lived life. You have to look back and you have to... I mean, my regrets are like the stars. They're numberless and all the more beautiful because of their distance from me, I suppose. But.

Presenter46:32

If you don't regret things in life, it means that they haven't touched you in some way. And I think this song reminds me of all of those things.

Heidi Thomas46:43

Rows and flows of angel hair, And ice cream castles in the air, And feather canyons everywhere.

Heidi Thomas46:57

I have looked at clouds that weave.

Heidi Thomas47:02

But now they only block the sun They rain and snow on everyone So many things

Presenter47:14

Joni Mitchell and both sides now. So, Heidi, it's time to send you off to your island. What sort of place are you hoping for? Well, I was on the Isle of Harris earlier this year, and that was absolutely beautiful. It's not a desert island with palm trees, but there's a desolation to the Isle of Harris. So, maybe somewhere Hebridean or Celtic. Oh, lovely. Speaking to my genes, I'll give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. Lovely. You can take another book of your own choice. What would it be?

Speaker 147:31

Yeah.

Presenter47:40

I would take Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, which is a collection of interviews essentially from the mid-19th century done in the poorest areas of London. Henry Mayhew was a journalist who would often venture out into the poorest parts of London with Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens gathered a lot of his own research, his characters, his voices from these people. But Henry Mayhew was much more forensic and journalistic. He would interview crossing sweepers, dairymaids, street clowns, peddlers, prostitutes. And when you turn the pages of this book, which is quite thick, it's a couple of inches thick, even in paperback, it's like a babel of voices, but every one is a life-lived. I think with a copy of that to hand, I could never feel lonely. And every time I pick it up and flick through, I hear a voice I've never heard before or am told a story that I've never been told before. So that would be my choice. You can also have a luxury item. What would you like? Well, given that I quite fancy the Hebrides, it has to be a hot water bottle. Oh, yeah. I think a hot water bottle is the foundation of a happy life. That is a great thing. I always travel with a hot water bottle. And I remember being in Washington, D.C. once during a cold snap. Thinking, I'll get out my hot water bottle. And there was no kettle in the room because they don't do kettles in America. But they have coffee machines, so I fill my hot water bottle with coffee.

Speaker 248:43

Time is a great call.

Speaker 148:44

Yeah.

Presenter48:58

Does that wake you up or send you to sleep?

Speaker 149:01

Because

Presenter49:05

Finally, if you could only save one disc from the waves, which of the eight would it be? I think it would be Joni Mitchell both sides now, because I will always go back a bit like with Henry Mayhew, London Labour, and the London Poor. I'll always find something new in it-the resonance of a line, or even just a note of music. And I think because it's a song I first heard as a child and I still love now, it gives me that sense of context. And I think if you have a sense of context, you'll never feel entirely lost or alone. Heidi Thomas, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you.

Presenter49:50

I really hope you enjoyed that interview with Heidi Thomas and I wish her well on her island with her hot water bottle. You'll have heard her mention her reasons for choosing Stephen Sondheim's song about creativity, Finishing the Hat. In 2000, Sue Lawley cast Stephen Sondheim away and the piece means so much to him, he included it in his own collection of eight discs to take to his island. You can listen to his Desert Island Discs programme via BBC Sounds. Here's a clip of him talking to Sue about what makes him tick as a dramatist.

Speaker 250:19

As far as performance of your work is concerned, Stephen, you prefer, I think, in the main, actors to singers, don't you?

Heidi Thomas50:26

Yeah. I uh it's not preferring actors to singers, but uh if if I'm if I have to decide between an actor who sings all right and a singer who acts all right, I think I prefer the actor who sings all right for most of the shows. That's not true of all of them.

Speaker 250:40

But does all of that indicate that you are I mean again, I'm asking you to define yourself and I know you don't like doing it but but but are you as much a playwright as you are a songwriter, a writer of musical theatre? Does your theatre happen to be musical?

Heidi Thomas50:56

Well, yeah, I consider myself a playwright who writes in song. I get attracted to stories. I do not get attracted to themes or theses.

Speaker 251:05

There are themes and theses.

Heidi Thomas51:06

Yes, but but they they they are never in the forefront of my head and I never think of anything except telling the story, creating suspense, making laughs and and dealing with character. Because playwrights are essentially actors and when I write a song, I'm really an actor.

Speaker 251:19

What

Heidi Thomas51:22

And that's what a playwright really is.

Speaker 251:22

But it's also being created by you and it's born of you. And of course, you know, what people would say about your themes are that there are and you've talked about the the miserableness of your parents' divorce and that sort of thing there is divorce, there are kind of strange breakups, there are relationships that can't last.

Heidi Thomas51:33

Yeah.

Speaker 151:33

Uh

Heidi Thomas51:36

Strange

Heidi Thomas51:38

Relationship

Heidi Thomas51:40

And that's true of virtually every play. 90% of the plays ever written by anybody deal with relationships. They deal with things like revenge, with anger, with all these things that you can say, oh, yes, you see, that's traceable back to the breakup of the home. So many players deal with breakups of homes, including King Lear. I mean, you know. So these are...

Presenter52:02

Next time, my guest will be the comedian, writer and actor Stephen Merchant. I do hope you'll join us.

Heidi Thomas52:21

Henry Aikley disappeared from his home on the edge of Rendlesham Forest somewhere around the end of June 2019.

Heidi Thomas52:34

What we uncovered is a mystery that has sent us deep into England's past.

Heidi Thomas52:40

To an area steeped in witchcraft, the occult, secret government operations.

Speaker 152:45

Now we have multiple sites of five lights with a similar shape and opportunity.

Heidi Thomas52:49

And something that might indeed be altogether.

Heidi Thomas52:54

Otherworldly.

Heidi Thomas52:57

This is the Whisperer in Darkness.

Speaker 253:00

Available now on BBC Sounds.