Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My castaway this week is the writer Sally Wainwright. TV is her chosen medium.

And if like millions of others you've been hooked on Last Tango in Halifax, Happy Valley or Scott and Bailey.

You'll know that her ear for dialogue and talent for storytelling place her among the

cream of small screen dramatists. She majors in whip-smart phrasing and plot lines that

twist the innards with their tension, but never strain plausibility. Her passion for

everyday drama was honed at her mother's knee.

In the 60s and 70s as Mrs Wainwright watched Corrie, Little Sally tuned in too, developing

an affinity with the power of the portrayal of language as it is spoken and life as it is lived.

She would later go on to write for the show.

She says, when I was seven I started writing down things that people said.

It was something I just had to do. I think I was

born with it. It's like being able to draw or paint. Some artists though Sally

Wainwright give us a sort of surreal version or a sexier version or a stylized version of life.

You seem very much to be in the figurative tradition.

If I can say that of writing, you want reality on television.

I really do. It's something that has always

controlled my imagination. However, imagine it if I am, it has to be based in

something very, very, very real. This idea of having to do it in the same way that someone might have to play the piano or paint,

that sounds like it comes easily to you as though even if nobody was buying it you'd be writing it.

...