Guilty Pleasure

It's all beginning. With Mills and Boon turning 100 years old in 2008 there will undoubtedly be an upsurge of media attention. Here's a programme not to miss if you've got access to BBC Radio 4 at 11.30am UK time. (www.bbc.co.uk/radio4)

Guilty Pleasure: a Hundred Years of Mills and Boon.

Here's what Jane Anderson says about the programme in the Radio Times:

"Comedian Lucy Porter admits to feeling a sense of shame in being caught reading a Mills and Boon romance on public transport. But, as she finds out on visiting Romance HQ, aka the Mills and Boon offices in the aptly named Paradise Road in Surrey, these works of fiction shift 200 million copies each year. There's a strong feminist contention that Mills and Boon encourages women to settle for less than they're worth, but Fay Weldon argues back that we should let writers write what they want and readers read what they want."

Chris Campling writes:

"Someone you know has read, possibly even written, a Mills and Boon romantic novel. There is no shame in this. In fact, so little shame is there that people pour out of the woodwork to talk to comedian Lucy Porter for Guilty Pleasure - a Hundred Years of Mills and Boon (Radio 4, Thursday, 11.30am).

Some of them are successful M and B writers, including Roger Sanderson, the imprint's only male novelist. The only one to admit to it, perhaps. Others are not so fortunate. One failed contributor to the oeuvre tells Porter that having her contribution, the intriguingly titled Fires of Zanzibar, knocked back so damaged her confidence that she was put off writing for six years. Luckily when Helen Fielding did get her nerve back she came up with Bridget Jones, so it all worked out in the end.

Porter's programme is full of nuggets like that, as she talks to editors and executives and roots through the company's enormous archives - 100 years of slim volumes full of bursting bodices takes up a lot of space.

In the interests of balance, though, she also talks to those critics who argue that the novels are formulaic, badly written, sexist and for people who are unhappy. One can see the truth of the first three gripes, but the fourth? What's wrong with writing and publishing books that make unhappy people happy?"

Okay, I'm braced. I have no doubt parts of the programme will irritate me greatly - as has some of the above. We'll see ......