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 1996, and the presenter was Sue Lolley.

My castaway this week is a playwright. Brought up in a poor family, he couldn't talk until he was 8 or 9.

He left school at 16, became a teacher in his late 20s, and then started writing for a living.

For seven years, he wrote scripts for Brookside. Three years ago, he was asked to write for a new

television series about a criminal psychologist. It was called Cracker, and it's turned out to be

the television drama of the 1990s. So much so that its author has been able to wheel out all his

rejected work on the back of it, proving with films like Priest and Hearts and Minds that he was

always a great talent waiting for the moment of discovery. He is Jimmy McGovern.

Let's start with Cracker, Jimmy, a television detective for the 1990s, as I say.

How much was fits your creation, and how much that of the producer?

It was an awful lot of me, and at my worst, I was fit at his worst. At his best, he was the kind

of person I aspired to be. So at his worst, he was what a gambler and a boozer?

Yeah, and a smoker. And at his best, what do you aspire to be?

At his best, he's a man in pursuit of a pure motive. He's a fine man at his best, a caring,

compassionate man. But I'm very rarely there. He's also a witty man, is that you?

No, it takes me an awful long time to think of them. I envy people like Fert. I envy Robby

Coltrane. There was one night when it was at a cracker app party, and he had his own stitches.

He was absolutely brilliant. And then at the end of the night, he played the piano brilliantly too,

and I hated him. You know, and I can never be like that. All of those witticisms take me

hours and hours and hours to dream up. So none of it is Robby Coltrane. He doesn't bring the

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