A A Gill
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 20 August 2006
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the critic and columnist A A Gill. His witty, first-person articles have earned him a whole host of awards and a loyal following. But his life as a successful writer was preceded by more than a decade that was spent living in squalid squats, taking drugs and existing in an alcoholic haze. It was the unplanned intervention of a GP that made him face up to his alcoholism and seek treatment. It's now 21 years since he last had a drink and he has been given, he says, the chance to start again and live a second life.
He abandoned his early hopes of becoming an artist, for a while he ran cookery courses in his own home and, at the same time, he started writing. Despite suffering from dyslexia so severe that he has to dictate all his columns to copytakers he found his voice immediately - as soon as he began writing his articles, he says, he felt he had come home.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Love Song from Sanders of the River by Paul Robeson Book: Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor by Mervyn Peake Luxury: My children's pillows
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 2006 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a writer. For the last 20 years or so he's entertained the middle classes with his |
| 0:34.3 | witty newspaper columns on food, television, travel and many other things besides. |
| 0:39.2 | A Serbic and astute, he's also capable of turn his hand to serious stuff and he's written a couple of novels too. |
| 0:45.9 | Life before this award-winning career was a rather different story. |
| 0:49.6 | Until the age of 30 he drifted around London and sometimes America in an aimless alcoholic existence. |
| 0:56.4 | But he turned all that around to become the celebrated columnist he is today. |
| 1:00.6 | There's a feeling, he says, that the rest of the world has a script that I wasn't given, a way of behaving that I wasn't told about. |
| 1:08.0 | He is AA Gill. Is that, if you'll forgive me, Adrian of the words of a recovering alcoholic you're |
| 1:14.8 | looking for another excuse. |
| 1:16.0 | Well I am a recovering alcoholic yes I don't think I do look for excuses I'm |
| 1:21.3 | not terribly interested in in why I drank. I'm much more interested in how I |
| 1:27.9 | avoid drinking again. I mean I think I think what it is that makes drunks drunks is interesting in an academic sense |
| 1:35.4 | it's not terribly useful if that's your problem. |
| 1:39.3 | And the way you avoid drinking again is to remind yourself about how awful it was when you were drinking is it? |
| 1:45.0 | Yes, but the further away you get from that the harder it is. I mean I can't conjure up as |
| 1:51.8 | graphically as I used to be able to. |
| 1:54.0 | Oh, I don't know, you've written some strong. |
| 1:56.0 | We'll come to it anyway. |
| 1:57.0 | But is it as if you've had two lives, you know, the life until you were 30 |
| 2:01.0 | and the life, this award-winning life successful life since. |
... |
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