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 TV producer Beryl Virtue. In the famously fickle world of

telly where last year's hero is this year's zero, she has stooped the test of time indeed in TV circles the noun

virtuosity is defined as the ability to make enormously successful sitcoms for

British television and then sell the formats to the American market.

The cast list of her working life is a who's who of dazzling quality and includes Jack Lemon,

Tony Hancock, Frankie Howard, Jack Nicholson and most recently Benedict Cumberbatch.

Having started out typing Gung show scripts in the mid-50s, she has risen to the very top of her industry and says,

it is terribly important not to know too many rules.

If you know rules and obstacles, you spend a lot of time dealing with them.

If you don't know there's a rule, you just do it.

So, Berle Virtue, the first two rules that you broke where you were a woman in a man's world and you were

something called, well, it'd never really been heard of, an independent producer.

What gave you the nerve way back in the beginning?

I think because I came into this industry so much by accident, I didn't know what to fear I suppose and quite a few people

said you know very difficult being a woman and I hadn't thought about it really

and I did have a cameraman once and he said I've never worked for a woman before and he'd just come off something with Sam Spiegel and I said to him well look let's give it a go and see how it is

so after two or three days I said to him well what do you think so he said well I

think it's the same. And I said, no, it isn't. I bet Sam Spiegel never

kissed you when you came in in the morning. Thank goodness. You are of course part of the establishment now. You know you are a grandee within the industry and it must surely no longer work to pretend not to know the rules.

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