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 1986, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson. Our castaway this week is an actress with the priceless gift of being able to make people laugh.

She's been described as a female Woody Allen or the Lucille Ball of Muswell Hill.

She's been a member of the National Theatre and the Raw Shakespeare Company,

and she's won awards for her work in productions in the West End Theatre.

On television, she became best known for her role in the series about an agony columnist called

Agony. She's also a writer who chronicles... about an agony columnist called agony.

She's also a writer who chronicles a life which seems to me to be, to say the least, chaotic.

She is Maureen Littman.

Maureen welcome reading your book and your articles about just the process of living for you, I don't think in fact you

would last more than a minute on this desert Ireland.

No, no, you're absolutely right, and the sooner I get off it the better.

When you were a child in Hull, were you interested in music?

As such as what?

We didn't have what you'd call a musical house. We had some of those old 78s,

but we used to melt them down to make fruit bales out of them. And then it's difficult to get the right sound, isn't it?

So there wasn't a great deal of music around except on the radio, Housewife's choice I remember

and music while you work being played.

The first, I suppose, knowledge of music as it affected me was when I heard the records of Al Macogan

which had a kind of incredible effect on me, this girl with a laugh in her voice.

And I suppose maybe because she was a nice Jewish girl or something she was big in our house

...