Sharon Horgan, writer, actor, producer

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 26 July 2020

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sharon Horgan is a writer, actor and producer best known for co-writing and co-starring in the Channel 4 series Catastrophe with US comedian Rob Delaney. Sharon was born in 1970 in east London, where her parents Ursula and John were running a pub. They moved to Ireland when Sharon was three and eventually set themselves up as turkey farmers. Sharon went to a convent school, then art college in Dublin, before moving to London in 1990, hoping to become an actor. Following six years working at a job centre, she decided to get a degree and enrolled on an English course at Brunel University. She reconnected with Dennis Kelly, who she had acted with previously, and they started writing together. Their breakthrough was the BBC Three series Pulling, first broadcast in 2006, which chronicled the lives of three single women leading unfulfilling lives in an unfashionable part of London. Sharon appeared in films while continuing to write and, in 2014, set up her own production company. In 2015, together with Rob Delaney, she co-wrote and starred in the critically acclaimed Catastrophe, about a couple who discover they're expecting a child after a short affair. Sharon was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Female Comedy Performer and she and Rob won the BAFTA TV Craft Award for Best Comedy Writer in 2016. Catastrophe ran for four series, ending in 2019. Sharon's other writing credits include the acclaimed series Motherland, Divorce and This Way Up, while her most recent film role was in Military Wives, opposite Kristin Scott Thomas. Sharon is divorced from her husband, Jeremy Rainbird, and lives in London with her two daughters. DISC ONE: Rock n Roll Suicide by David Bowie DISC TWO: The Queen is Dead by The Smiths DISC THREE: Kid's Song by Mic Christopher DISC FOUR: Telephone Thing by The Fall DISC FIVE: The Only One I Know by The Charlatans DISC SIX: Everything Goes My Way by Metronomy DISC SEVEN: The Suburbs (continued) by Arcade Fire DISC EIGHT: Moments of Pleasure by Kate Bush BOOK CHOICE: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway LUXURY ITEM: A solar powered word processor CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Moments of Pleasure by Kate Bush Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Cathy Drysdale

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts
0:04.4	Hello, I'm Lauren LeVern and this is the Desert Island Disks Podcast. Every week I
0:09.7	ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them
0:14.4	if they were cast away to a desert island. For right reasons, the music is shorter than
0:19.5	the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.
0:30.0	Music Music
0:42.4	My cast away this week is the actor, writer and producer Sharon Horgan. As co-creator of TV
0:48.5	comedy hits Catastrophe, Motherland, Pulling and Divorce, she's made an internationally
0:53.7	successful career out of training the spotlight on the very darkest corners of our emotional
0:58.9	lives. The characters she writes are complex, conflicted, sometimes unsympathetic and
1:04.2	often crackling with anxiety. They are painfully recognizable and painfully funny. Growing up
1:10.5	on a turkey farm in Ireland, she was and told a competent plucker. Perhaps that's why
1:15.3	she's so adept at removing the carefully constructed plumage we cover ourselves
1:19.4	in to reveal the scabourous truth beneath. Her own stellar career seems a world away
1:24.6	from where she began and the characters she writes today. But she says, if I was to
1:29.1	track my life and someone was to track the programmes I made alongside it, I think there
1:33.4	is a massive overlap. I had nothing and now I have something and I managed to cobble
1:37.8	together a family along the way. But at the heart of it, I'm still a mess. And there's
1:42.2	still just a mess at the heart of all my work. Sharon Horgan, welcome to desert island
1:46.7	discs. Hi, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. So let's start with the mess then, Sharon
1:52.3	and the appeal of writing about it. Why are you drawn to it? Oh, well, I don't know
1:58.3	that I'd know what else to write about, really. I've never been that great at working
	...

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