Hello, I'm Kesti Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive

for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The program was originally broadcast in 1991,

and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

My cast away this week is a playwright. Like a lot of this country's best post-war writers of drama,

he comes from the north. In his case, it's Liverpool, where he still lives and who's

character's people his most famous plays. He respects them, but he still makes them funny.

He loves their city, but he's not afraid of showing its warts. And Liverpool, which has produced

so many entertainers, is now thanks to boys from the Black stuff and G.B.H. and Entertainment

in itself. Their author is Alan Blesdale. And Liverpool is home, Alan, where you live and work,

and which you hate leaving, is that right? Yeah, it's, I don't want to give the impression that I'm

running around town, flaunting myself. You know, I go to Marxist Bences, and I go to the theatre

when there's something worth seeing, but basically Liverpool is a hideaway, and the hideaway is our home.

Home is where you hide away with all the family noise around you, and it's where you do all your work.

For 15 years, I worked out of what was the top attic in a terrace house,

then a top attic in a rather nice end of cottage, like three cottages together.

And the house removed into six or seven years ago, because our eldest boy then was, was just in his

teens, I regrettably, I'm afraid and foolishly gave him the attic, because I knew that one day

he'd want to have a life of his own with us. And I wish to God have happened, because I ended up

in a converted toilet outside the house. And it was, it's very noisy. My father, we work in an

old refinery for all his work in life, tends to equate work with noise, and he doesn't feel he's

justifying his work and capacity if he isn't making a noise. And for his 69th birthday, we asked him

what he wanted, and he said he wanted to cement mixer. Well, we got rid of him. And basically,

...