Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
3 appearances
Bestselling novelist known for romantic tales of toffs, horses, dogs, and sex, set in the Cotswolds; her books have sold in the multi-millions.
On the island
Eight records
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:08You always wanted to be a journalist, didn't you? What started that?
My great-great-great-grandfather founded the Leeds Mercury, which came the Yorkshire Post, and then my great-great-grandfather was editor too. And I used to see all these marvellous men in Macs at airports running round celebrities, and that was what I wanted to be always.
Presenter asks
0:24Did you start on the school magazine?
Well, they wouldn't have anything I wrote on the School magazine. I think it was a bit wild. I think I've always been a bit outrageous, but the difference I get paid for it now.
Presenter asks
0:33What was your first job?
Well I got onto a local paper in Brentford, down by the docks.
Presenter asks
1:20What was the big story that you remember?
Well it was a terribly silly. I had this very wild editor and we didn't like going out very much and one day it got very, very dark and so we … He said, 'Go and interview people whether they think the world's coming to an end' and so I went and asked a few yokels whether they thought the world was coming to an end and then there was a big story. 'People of Brentford think the world is coming to an end.'
The keepsakes
The luxury
Well, what I'd like is I'd like a great big sack of nuts coming in, so I could tame the monkeys.
Presenter asks
2:24You were making notes and writing love letters — when did you start writing seriously?
Well I went to a party in London and I met a very nice man and I was wearing a very low black dress. … He turned out to be the editor of the colour supplement of the Sunday Times. … He said, why didn't I write about being married? … And I wrote a piece about it … and he liked the piece and he bought it and he paid me a hundred pounds for it.
Presenter asks
7:10You once left fifty thousand words of a novel on a bus. Did you get it back?
Yeah. That was the most awful thing I think ever happened to me. It just sort of disappeared and I even advertised and spent my time hanging around outside the lost property office, but it never came back.
Presenter asks
6:24Tell me more about playing Little Muck.
Enormously.
Presenter asks
8:20Is it true that you could read and write before you were five?
But I think my mother tried to do it.
Presenter asks
14:37Tell me about the nickname, The Unholy Terror.
Well, I just got bored, you know, and and I used to always be sent out of Sance, and my best friend used to be sent out of Sance too. So we used to meet round the back and chat. I was very undisciplined, and we used to have midnight feasts and things like that.
Presenter asks
27:03Fifty two years is a long time to be with one person. What do you put the great success of your marriage down to?
Well, luck. We married a very nice man.
“My great-great-great-grandfather founded the Leeds Mercury, which came the Yorkshire Post, and then my great-great-grandfather was editor too. And I used to see all these marvellous men in Macs at airports running round celebrities, and that was what I wanted to be always.”
“I used to marry people to the wrong people a week early and things like that.”
“I think before I got married I was so and also afterwards I was so busy being in love and out of love that I didn't sort of you know, I think that's a full-time occupation and you don't do really much else.”
“I'm a very conservative person underneath … I like staying with the same husband and I like being sort of married to the same paper too.”
“I write romantic fiction all the time really because it's a very good if you're married, if you write romantic fiction it keeps you on the straight and narrow because you have this glamorous hero to fantasize about and so you don't have to go scampering off after other people.”
“Enormously.”
“Very bitchy.”
“Gotcha.”