Lucy Scholes

Exactly.

Oh!

Yeah.

No, I thought fiction would be too difficult.

Biography is easier in a way because you've got all that research to do.

And while you're doing that, you're occupied and feel you're very busy and important.

In the end, you're left, of course, with piles of notes and then you've got to start actually doing the book.

But it is in a way an easier matter, I think, than fiction where you're on your own.

Oh, yes, because you're safe there, copying bits out.

No, it's when you're left on your own.

I mean, William Morris said, anybody can compose a novel, you can do it on top of the bus.

And they were open-top buses in those days, but he was a great man.

I think it's quite a frightening moment when you're left alone to get started.

I thought when I came to write the book, which is of course long after the war, that all the people I worked with at the BBC would be dead, but they weren't.

They're indestructible and they wrote from really all over the world where they got jobs.

So I was quite glad to have written that book because it's almost impossible, anyway I did try, to give the idea of a world without TV where in fact you're only,

hope of hearing the news was the BBC 9 o'clock.

There were no other networks, no TV.

There was a sort of golden light over RPDs, he was called.

That meant Recorded Programmes Director.