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 2001, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a lawyer and a writer. In a career at the bar he often defended the right of free speech

but as a writer he's found himself trembling as he awaits the critics verdicts.

He must tremble a lot because his output is

phenomenal. He wrote his first play for radio the dock brief which went out on stage

and screened small and big in 1956 and his series Rumpole of the Bailey was a mainstay of British television in the

late 70s and 80s. He's written novels, screenplays, adaptations and

translations from Paradise Postbone to Tea with Mussolini.

And he sleeps these days in the bed in which the subject of one of his most famous plays

died, his father.

Aerodite witty, affable, and approaching 78 now he observes

fear of death like arthritis and failing eyesight sets in around 70.

There are however if not cures, at least painkillers,

placebo's and periods of remission. He is of course Sir John Mortimer. What are they

John these painkillers and placebo? Well I think mainly work. I mean you know living at home is a huge

pleasure watching the children grow up being married,

Benny, but I think work is the thing which produces events and I have a very low

threshold of boredom. So you keep going and you are surrounded by this enormous

family. It's difficult to count the number of children and grandchildren.

Do you know the numbers off the top you had?

It's very difficult to say because my first wife had poor children

...