Hello, I'm Krestey 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 1990, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a journalist. For the past 18 years she shared her life with the millions of readers of her national newspaper column.

Forthright but always amusing, she hacked her way to the top from the provincial retreat of the Sheffield Telegraph,

via Fleet Street's tempestuous tabloids. the Provincial Retreat of the Sheffield Telegraph

via Fleet Street's tempestuous tabloids

to her present perch at the Daily Express.

She claims to be the highest paid woman journalist in Britain

and love her or loathe her,

and there are plenty of people who do both

she remains one of the last and the most famous example of that disappearing

species the star columnist money and fame, though, saved her from personal tragedy.

Over the last three years she shared with her readers her experiences of breast cancer and

widowhood.

She is the self-styled first lady of Fleet Street, Gene Rook.

Well now there's an introduction, Gene.

That's good.

Begs a lot of questions. What about for starters, how do you know you're the highest paid woman in Fleet Street?

Highest paid columnists now because there are two women editors now, you know, two editors,

women editing papers and there was this myth for years, you know, that I wanted to be the first woman to edit a national

paper and if I had edited any paper so it would have folded in a fortnight I'm a

lousy executive I'm surely a person who likes to write I'm surely a person who likes to write, I'm

...