Hello, I'm Kirstie 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 1979, and the presenter was Roy Plumly.

Plumley. The presenter was Roy Plumley. This week our cast away as the novelist and television writer, you'll remember

Z-Kars and softly softly, it's Alan Pryor. Alan could you adjust yourself

to extended lenders?

Well I've got a fair bit of practice at it, Roy, because I've been a professional writer for 25 years,

and all professional writers have to sit at desks turning the

stuff out and you've got to do that on your own. Yes, seven days a week. Seven days

a week as a rule. If you can fit seven and a half in that's what

you do. And somehow you get used to it. You live with your characters. They people

the room for you and you come out of it after the given number of hours and the given

number of pages back into the real world.

So I think I could get used to it fairly quickly.

Is music an important thing in your life well it is but I have a very low

standard of popular song that's the kind of thing I like, I suppose mainly because I was brought up

with people who were, some of them in the music hall and they sang to themselves or rehearsed

the popular ditties of the day and I suppose I got infected with them and I always like popular pieces and I like them sung I like the human voice.

What's the first one you've chosen? The first one I've chosen is a very old music hall song.

It's Lily Morris singing, Why Am I Always the Bride's Made?

Why Am I Always the bride made never the blanking a bride?

D'A bride.

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