Nick Fisher's debut novel, Pot Luck, inspired by Weymouth fishing community, will prove great catch

Not that writer Nick Fisher from Hooke needs validation for his talent given that he's made his living from writing for more than three decades with such credits as Casualty, Holby City, the Bafta winning The Giblet Boys and the BBC comedy drama series Manchild.

He’s a much-published expert in fishing and fish cookery - his book with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall won awards, as well as being author of several teenage advice books. Nick has devised and presented a handful of factual fishing shows and the late night agony show Dear Nick.

But for reasons he questioned often during its gestation, Nick decided to write a novel set in the fishing community of Weymouth.

According to the jacket it's a dark and desperate tale of greed, crime, drugs, family fear and commercial crab fishing.

It says: 'Set in the fishing community of Weymouth, Pot Luck is a thriller with sinister twists and a raggedy mob of opportunists and bottom-feeders, drowning in an ocean of bad blood.'

Nick said said: "I thought I must be mad, no one is paying me to do this.

FRIENDS: Nick Fisher with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. His verdict: "Funny, dark, surprising and altogether highly entertaining."

"I have spent a lot of years writing medical dramas for television which is a nice secure way to make a regular living but it is quite formulaic and in the process of television everything is so planned out beforehand.

"I have to outline my story, then do a scene-by-scene breakdown. Then you go to script, you have a director and a producer, script editors, story producers - you have all sorts of people involved whereas with a novel it is just me and a pen and a piece of paper."

So he revelled in doing absolutely no planning beyond the central conceit and then went away to the Canary Islands for a week.

He said: "I sat on a balcony of a fairly naff hotel and I took out my pen and pad. I had no idea where I was going day by day I didn't plan anything. It really was just a very pure enjoyable form of writing unlike what I do most days.

"It was a bit like a holiday. I wasn't taking any money up front, I wasn't commissioned, I wasn't on deadline, I didn't have anybody to please except myself.

INSPIRATION: Weymouth harbour fishing boats

"That's quite a luxury and for me completely alien.

"It really was a liberation. I was in the hotel for six days and I wrote something like 60,000 words.

"I have been writing for more than 30 years as a job, quite a lot of time seven days a week and this was something I wanted to do.

"I'd never written a novel before, I'd written plays and non fiction books, short stories for magazines, lots and lots of TV, adult, children comedy drama, action, all sorts."

Not only was the form of the novel new to him he was relieved to be writing on a subject both dear to his heart - and entirely familiar. He is a qualified commercial fisherman and charter skipper, as well as a self-confessed harbour groupie and angling fanatic.

"I spend most of my time writing about operations in operating theatres that I have never been in and I don't have a clue what the medicine looks like, I have to learn it.

"I didn't have to sit down and read a whole load of researchers' notes, or talk to a heart surgeon to find out how I could make someone really ill without killing them."

But despite his long career as a writer Nick stopped writing three quarters of the way through.

He said: "I thought, what am I doing, why am I spending time writing something I am not being paid for so I stopped dead.

"I persuaded myself I was being an idiot."

And that was despite his own son Rory offering to pay him to finish it.

"This spoke to him because it was a gritty adventure in a world that was very contemporary. He just really wanted to know where it was all going and of course I had no idea so I couldn't tell him."

The manuscript spent 18 months in a drawer and it wasn't until he was asked to write foreword for an old friend's book Addicted to Angling that he got the impetus to get going again.

The publishers loved the foreword and knowing his other work asked if there was anything he'd like to do with them.

He said he wanted to write a novel about commercial fishing in Weymouth.

He sent them the unfinished work on a Friday and had an offer by the Tuesday.

He went to Cuba and a bed and breakfast in Sidmouth to finish it and readers - and Rory - will be able to read it when it comes out in June.

As as for Mr Chibnall - he had this to say: "Compelling... full of secrets and betrayals that will keep you reading all through the night."

And fellow fish lover Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall said: "Funny, dark, surprising and altogether highly entertaining."

Pot Luck is published by Peridot priced £7.99.