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Today's guest is an actor, impressionist, pianist, poet and comedian who provided voices for the early series of spitting image on TV.

Welcome, Alistair McGowan. Tell us whom you've picked and why.

Well, Matthew, I've chosen the writer H.E. Bates, who's probably best known for the Darling Buds of May, which people, I'm sure will remember fondly from the television adaptations in the early 90s, with David Jason, also remade as the Larkins recently with Bradley Walsh, best known for that, and also probably the novel Fairstood the Wind for France. But H.E. Bates wrote so much more than that.

What do you love about him most? Oh, goodness me. His love of nature, kindness, the fact that the

stories are about love, they're about friendship, his sensuality, particularly, and also just the

fact that he was so versatile. He was really a short story expert. Yes, I love his short stories. Yeah, this is a form which has always fascinated me. I was lucky enough to be pointed towards them for my A-level. We studied Mopasson. We studied Joyce's Dubliners. And then I went on to read some check-off stories in my early career on the BBC, now available on four extra. And it made me very interested in that form. And I discovered Bates' short stories and continue to discover new ones that I've never come across before. He wrote over 200 of them. And I think that H.E. Bates was the best short story writer in any language ever in the world. That's quite a claim. Well, also, yeah, and the fact that he's sort of not known for that and is only known really for the Darling Budds of May by a few people now, if they know him at all. But I honestly think he's the best short story writer. And his contemporaries, we think of, you know, people like Graham Green, Evelyn War, and Orwell, we know about because they wrote a landmark novel. Bates didn't, but I think his style,

his content is as good as any of those writers. And to me, it's a minor literary tragedy that he is

so little known and so little trumpeted. And I would urge anybody who doesn't know his short stories,

go and read them. And if you want the novellas as well, I read two in preparation for this

in the bath. But in 80 minutes, it was a long bath. You can read the triple echo or you can read Dalsama and you will have your breath taken away. His style, his passion, his sensuality. I think I said that earlier on. Considering most of his novels were written and are certainly set in the 30s, 40s, 50s. I realise with alarm, as I'm sure

all do when you play these maths games, that that era was born in 1964, that world is much

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