Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1997, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My cast away this week is a comedy script writer for the past 20 years he's been a tireless backroom boy in the factory of fun

turning out jokes and scripts for radio and television.

Weekending news headlines on radio and not the 9 o'clock news,

Shelly and who dares wins on television

are just a few of the shows that have benefited from his deft sense of humour.

But his big success has been

Drop the Dead Donkey, which written with co-author Guy Jenkins

has won two international Emmys and a BAFTA award for best comedy.

Set in a television newsroom, its appeal lies in its immediacy and many of its funniest lines are included at the last minute.

My castaway loves his work.

Sometimes we come across as hatchet-faced joke slaves, he says, but really it is great fun. He is Andy Hamilton.

Is it great fun, Andy? I thought that making comedy was actually rather a serious and arduous business.

It's hard work sometimes, but I'm sure it's not as hard work as working down a mine or in a paint factory.

But you've got to keep up to speed, haven't you? I mean mean whether you're writing hard lines or not the

nine o'clock news or indeed donkey you know you've got to know what's going on you've

got to be in with the latest news yeah I've never found that too much of a problem. I've always from a fairly early age. I've always enjoyed reading the papers and I've always been prepared to bore people with my opinions on current affairs. If you've been working on a topical show for a long time,

there's always a period when the show stops, when I happily would rather pull my

toe-nails out than look at a newspaper. But basically I am a sort of news bore so it comes

fairly easily. But there are a lot of people at it there's a lot of competition more and

more so whether it's cartoonists in newspapers and columnists or it's Harry

...