Mark Lawson

This is the first time TV broke out of the TV set.

And a man called Mark Lawson, writing at the time in The Guardian, wrote quite a pressing article, I thought.

Technological developments in transmission with programs in the future to be delivered through computers and telephones are generally expected to make viewing a fragmented and isolated experience.

In this envisaged...

Well, you could on the news.

Probably kids.

Mark Lawson goes on, in this envisaged world in which viewers become their own schedulers, you'll watch Friends at half three on a Tuesday morning if you want to.

Only a dramatic news event, the sudden death of a princess, for example, will unite the audience.

they sat around yeah yeah yeah

i would love Mark Lawson, that's it.

Kirstie Walker, that's it.

And the critics would be Hardeep Singh Kohli, Tony Parsons, Mark Kermode, Jermaine Greer.

A. Milne's inspiration was very apparent at the Pooh Sticks Bridge celebration.

But it was another author who inspired broadcaster and literary critic Mark Lawson to become a trustee of the Royal Literary Fund.

There's a writer, a great public figure called P.D. James, a crime writer who wrote the Adam Dalgleish books and many others.

And she was a mentor to me.

He went to prison in 2001.

In 2006, he published his first novel post-release, a thriller called False Impression, about the sale of a Van Gogh painting, and he came into the Front Row studio to talk to Mark Lawson about it.

For a number of years, you were surrounded by criminals of various kinds, a good opportunity for research for this kind of book, which has a criminal plot.

Did you take advantage of the know-how around you?

I can't remember a book I haven't done twenty drafts on." So there are these lucky people who can knock them out in one, two, and three, and obviously a lot cleverer than I am.

But no, for me, it is a lot of hard work.

Jeffrey Archer, whose death was announced yesterday, talking to Mark Lawson here on Front Row in two thousand and six.

His last novel, Adam and Eve, is out today.