Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A script writer who created television series including Soldier Soldier, Peak Practice, and Bramwell.
On the island
Eight records
This is a piece of music which was played um at the end of My Play Wicked Old Nellie. And it was a piece of music which Tie together the two main characters.
In that moment it came to mean Everybody that I have known and lost, from from my mother to Sheila to my husband. You know everybody that I have known that is no longer with me.
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.
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. So I'm getting it in abundance here.
The BestFavourite
Record number five is is George's favorite, George's girlfriend really, Tina Turner. ... if I play this on the desert island then George will be there with me.
This is just purely at Nuttalley for me. ... 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.
Record number seven is uh the the track that will forever remind me of my daughter. ... Every time I play this I will see her dancing across the courtyards at the barns where we used to live.
I don't know how long I'm going to be on this desert island and Um, if I die there, then I want to die there to the right accompaniment, really. I want to choose my own um soundtrack.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:13Had you written anything at all, Lucy, before you sat down and wrote that play eleven years ago?
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. But um to me that that didn't happen.
Presenter asks
12:36How did [the loss of your mother] 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. ... And I think that that from that moment on really, until I was twenty-eight-ish. I was desperately trying to find a place in the world and to try and find why I was in the world and what I should be doing.
Presenter asks
18:50Why do women put up with [domestic violence]?
I don't know. I don't know why. 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. ... 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. My husband's response was, It's you, it's not me.
The keepsakes
The book
John Carey
I thought the Faber Book of Reportage, edited by John Carey, because it's um reports of sort of first-hand accounts of things that have happened throughout history: big things, small things, great events. I just thought that it would give me thousands of characters to think about. Full of good stories.
The luxury
I think every writer who is caught up on this desert island should automatically have their word processor with them, anyway. Strapped to their chairs. ... Knowing that I've got that, I think my luxury would be the top-of-the-range Jaguar XK eight.
Presenter asks
24:32Why [are you worried about watching other people's drama]?
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. a director's art as part of writing, which I think should never be.
Presenter asks
30:31If your mother hadn't died, if you hadn't had cruel relatives in Lancashire and if you hadn't had learning difficulties at school, you wouldn't have been a writer. Are you sure that's true?
Yep, absolutely. ... I feel that my writing has come out of observing the world and of feeling that I wasn't a part of it. And of, if you like, having to love people that I found were unlovable who or who didn't want to love me. ... How would I have grown compassion, if you like? How would I have grown understanding or tolerance? How would I have grown any of the things that I need to be a writer?
“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.”
“I think if you if you admit it it it isn't a problem.”
“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.”
“I'm preoccupied with death anyway. I I love the idea of death. I think about it a lot.”