Hello, I'm Kirstie 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 2001, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a comic actor and writer. His path to success has been one trodden by many of our most popular entertainers,

Cambridge Footlights, Edinburgh Fringe, and writing and producing at the BBC. He was one of the four stars of

not the nine o'clock news, a show which revolutionized television comedy and then

with his partner Mel Smith has been for the last 20 years half of one of the nation's comic

double acts.

He's also a prolific stage actor describing his Mr. Toad at the National Theatre as his

Hamlet. Having made a career out of playing silly

asses or toads and bewildered innocence, he said of himself and his

contemporaries in the business, others went off and took proper jobs, but we've all just continued to muck around like the Lost Boys.

He is Griff, Reese Jones.

Lost may be, Griff, but hardly destitute.

Do I detect there an element of guilt that you should have made a decent living out of doing something, you know, not that was a pastime?

Yes, very probably. My father was a doctor, so I always felt slightly that what I ended up doing was not quite

valuable enough to the community. You tell him it's not hard work or would you defend yourself?

Oh no I don't I think all those people...

Comedy is a serious business. Well comedy is a serious people. We get very fraught about it, but I'm not sure that they can genuinely. I don't feel ever that I've settled down and taken a job, but I think that's the great advantage because I did have a job once working as a handbag checker after I left university. I did that job for

about six months and it does seem to occupy my mind a space of about five years.

I thought you were a body.

I moved on to being a handbag trigger from being a bodyguard and even the bodyguard

there was an awful lot of sitting around and I remember the people I work with some people

...