Paul Abbott

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2007

⏱️ 34 minutes

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the screen writer Paul Abbott. He has written some of the most controversial and successful television programmes of the past decade. Shameless, Clocking Off and State of Play all flowed from his pen and have won him bags of awards.

But he was driven to write as a response to the chaotic and traumatic childhood he'd suffered. One of eight children, both parents had left the family home by the time he was 11, leaving his older sister to bring them up. They had a near-feral existence, and lived, says Paul, like rats. At 15 he attempted suicide and ended up in a psychiatric ward. After that, without wanting to or really being aware it was happening, he wrote as a way of letting out the rage he felt inside him.

He was quickly able to turn this writing into short stories, radio plays and film scripts and to sell them. Now he is credited with making television the 'new National Theatre'. But it's not his greatest achievement - he is proudest of his successful marriage to Saskia, his wife of eighteen years, and of their two children.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Town Called Malice by The Jam Book: Complete Works by Arthur Miller Luxury: Writing pad and pencils.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.2	The program was originally broadcast in 2007. My castaway this week is the writer Paul Abbott. He is the defining TV dramatist of his generation, responsible for hits
0:35.8	including clocking off, state of play and shameless. The quality of his output and his outstanding
0:41.5	year for dialogue have seen him credited with helping to make
0:44.7	our TV the new national theatre. They've also won him armfuls of awards. He lives a conventional
0:50.9	happy family life in a big house in Manchester with a wife and two children,
0:55.0	which is remarkable considering where he came from.
0:58.0	One of eight children, his mother, walked out on the family when he was a young boy.
1:02.0	A short while later, his father did the same,
1:04.0	leaving Paul's pregnant teenage sister, penniless and in charge. His upbringing was
1:08.7	chaotic, feral and plagued by trauma. The reason he became a writer was to deal with his past.
1:15.0	I think everybody should write, he says. You can shout really effectively if you write.
1:20.0	You're clearly then Paul Abbott very accomplished at shouting. What sort of
1:24.4	sound is it you're trying to make on the screen? Well I think it's the sound of
1:27.3	your own voice quite often. What staggers me still, age 46, is that you know I write
1:32.4	things that I realize that my voice is coming back at me.
1:36.0	I'm often surprised by things that I see coming back at me, that I'll me, and I didn't know I'd put them out for adjudication.
1:42.0	It's a really weird thing and I see
1:44.3	across five dramas I see things that are common that I didn't know I was doing. You know it's
1:49.2	not cerebral, it's totally emotional and you kind of dig it out your spleen from somewhere when you're writing it apart
1:54.3	Does the process then of writing change you? I mean you said there you dig it out so do you each time that you've finished a big piece
	...

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