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 1998, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a script writer. She's created some of

television's most successful series including soldier soldier peak practice and

Bramwell. In their storylines and others can be found shades of her own.

An unhappy childhood after her mother died, a brief spell in the army,

a suicide attempt and a violent first marriage.

These events are the foundation of her writing but she was

bordering on middle age before she put pen to paper. Strapped for cash, she entered a

competition to write a play. She won and she hasn't stopped writing since. What a privilege to find a voice at the age of 39, she says.

Not writing is like refusing to breathe. She is Lucy Gannon. Had you written anything at all Lucy before you sat down

and wrote that play 11 years ago? Part of my personal myth is that I haven't. My father

says I wrote very good letters and a friend from

school days and from the army has come up now and said I can remember you sitting on

your bed playing with words writing poems but But to me that didn't happen. But your father

obviously did believe you could write because it was he who suggested you

entered the competition? Yeah, he did. He thought that I suppose like most fathers

he thinks that his children can do anything and he wrote to me and said you know you're good at letter writing give this a go

And what was the competition? It was the Richard Burton Drama Award and it was in, I think it was held in 18, 1987 and write a stage play,

50 minutes or more and you come in 2,000 parents.

But how did you know how to begin? I didn't really. My husband went down to the Central Library in Derby and got a book of plays out so that I could see how they were set out.

And I borrowed a typewriter, I scrounged up the paper and I had a go and it was called

...