British television's pre-eminent playwright - latterly a novelist and film-maker - talks with passionate erudition, disarming candour and acerbic wit about the early influences that shaped him and led to his pioneering use of non-naturalism, to his self-reflexive subversion of film and TV cliches, his controversial approach to sex, politics, religion and the double-edged puritanism of the English condition. The book presents a remarkable portrait of a man for whom writing is, first and foremost, a vocation.