Lynne Truss

She followed it with an exploration of declining manners in Talk To The Hand, and recently released Get Her Off The Pitch! How Sport Took Over My Life, a memoir about her work as a sports reporter at The Times. She was chosen by the sports editor there on the basis of her self-professed ignorance of the subject, and spent the next four years in the alpha male-dominated world of “the pack”. The book is published by The Fourth Estate. priced £12.99, and is available now.

Is there a writer who made you think “I want to do that?”

I think it would be Betty MacDonald, the American writer from Seattle [died 1958] who wrote – most famously – The Egg And I. I loved her style. There’s a book about the jobs she did in the Depression, called Anybody Can Do Anything, and it was a secret favourite book when I was a teenager (secret because I never heard anyone else talk about her). Last year I made a radio feature about her, which was great to do.

Do you remember the first record you bought? What was it, and where did you buy it?

The family bought all the early Beatles records, and I remember Love Me Do was mine. I also bought an awful comedy single by Mike Sarne called Come Outside (1962) – which I now think I should have been dissuaded from, since I was only seven, and it was about sex. However, I now see it was produced by the legendary Joe Meek, so perhaps I had great taste after all.

Tell us about any guilty pleasures lurking in your CD collection. Something you know is a bit naff but you can’t help yourself.

I re-bought some old Monkees albums a couple of years ago, and there’s a song sung by Mickey Dolenz called I’m Gonna Buy Me a Dog, which is brilliant, but I wouldn’t dare play it to anyone else.

Which TV programme couldn’t you live without?

University Challenge. Luckily I live alone, so I can shout out answers.

I don’t get very involved in the progress of the competition; I can never remember who’s still in it. I just like to see young people demonstrating they know lots of things I didn’t know at their age. I suppose it cheers me up.

Is there a song or individual piece of music you always come back to?

Things Have Changed by Bob Dylan.

He wrote it for the film Wonder Boys (a favourite of mine) and I think he won an Oscar for it [he did, in 2001]. It’s another masterly and upbeat bit of rock and roll, I suppose. I had no idea I was such a rocker till this moment.

What are you reading at the moment?

I’m reading Andre Agassi’s autobiography, for review, and admiring it a lot. I wrote a whole chapter on Agassi in my sports book, and I’m really pleased to see so many of my theories about him confirmed – such as that he always hated tennis, and was permanently poised between flight and fight. I had no idea about his crystal meth interlude, but then nor did anyone else.

Do you have a favourite book?

I always say Great Expectations. It’s the most personal of Dickens’s books, and also the most controlled piece of storytelling, focusing on just one story. It’s about coming to terms with who you are and where you come from. It’s also about the price of good fortune, and its tenuousness.

Is there a live music or theatre experience that stays in your memory?

Oh yes, many. From ages ago, seeing Ian McKellen’s Hamlet (in about 1970); also Mark Rylance’s Hamlet in the late 1980s. Martin Shaw as Stanley Kowalski in the 1970s – which is a bit awful; I can’t stand him now. Michael Gambon in A View From The Bridge. A Trevor Nunn production of Three Sisters, which is permanently imprinted on my memory.

Much of Get Her Off The Pitch! is about the way sport went from being something barely on your radar to something you had a genuine passion for. How long did it take you to ween yourself off the match reports and analysis after you’d left that world?

It was difficult, but I had to do it. I really wanted my brain back! I’d got to the point where all I cared about was sport. I suppose in a few months I was more or less back to normal. The most difficult thing was getting re-accustomed to the theatre. I couldn’t bear how inert the audience were at plays: stiff, silent, worried about coughing. I wanted them to seethe about and react and shout.

Is there a sporting figure you particularly came to admire during your time as part of the “pack”?

I didn’t acquire any heroes, but I certainly felt I knew best about whether individual sports figures – especially footballers – were underrated or overrated. Alan Shearer, for example, I decided was highly overrated, and would rant about it regularly. And when David Beckham was going through his terrible year after France ’98 (people forget he was booed wherever he went), I stood up for him all the time.