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With Great Pleasure

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

Series bringing fresh insight into lives through literature, with guest presenters

Series bringing fresh insight into lives through literature, in which guest presenters pick readings from their favourite pieces of poetry and prose

BBC Radio 4 FM

Heidi Thomas

Nicholas Farrell

Sylvestra Le Touzel

Christine Hall

With Great Pleasure: Heidi Thomas at the Hay Festival

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Heidi Thomas at the Hay Festival

17/07/2014

BBC Radio 4 - With Great Pleasure, Heidi Thomas at the Hay FestivalSearch BBC

Call the Midwife screenwriter Heidi Thomas chooses some favourite pieces of writing.

Heidi Thomas, screenwriter on Call the Midwife and Cranford, presents some favourite pieces of writing to an audience at the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts.

"Do you think because I am poor, obscure, plain and little I am soulless and heartless?" cries Jane Eyre to Mr Rochester in one of Heidi Thomas's favourite books, and Heidi uses this rallying cry for the oppressed and under-estimated as a motif for her choice of readings in With Great Pleasure. She is joined onstage at the Hay Festival by Nicholas Farrell and Sylvestra Le Touzel, who read a wide selection including poetry, Bills of Mortality, novels and social history.

Heidi's interest in the small, the uncelebrated life has informed much of her work, from her television adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford to her current work, the massively successful Call the Midwife.

Producer Christine Hall.

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