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 1994, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a writer. She comes from Liverpool and began her professional life as an actress playing in rep for six years and in Brian Rix's Whitehall Farses.

But acting bored her and she crossed the line to the writer's chair since when she's never

looked back. Prolific and highly successful too, she's the author of popular and admired television

series such as Widows, Civies and Prime Suspect.

She's also written five novels and even though the work keeps coming admits to a fear of not being able to do it again.

She is Linda La Plant. I don't know about not

being able to come out with another story, Linda. I mean I gather your office and

your study and all the places you work are littered with unfinished manuscripts, unpublished,

unproduced bits and pieces. You must have a mass of it.

Yes, do you remember more come and wise and he used to say,

oh, I'll just go right to play in five minutes.

I don't know how to do it in five minutes but I think the

fear is that I will be caught out that somebody's going to say, wait a minute, this isn't as good as everybody said.

And that is the fear that generates this energy and me.

But haven't you proved it to yourself by now?

I mean, you really have had a string of hits.

Perhaps it's because it's all happened in such a short period of time.

I mean, you've only been writing for 12 years.

No, I think, there's that wonderful thing I remember somebody telling me about John Gilgood, who had these incredible

reviews about a play. And they went into his dressing room and he said, oh, I'm so depressed,

...