Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My cast away this week is Jack D, comedian actor and writer, his persona is that of the

laconic miserablest. His hit sitcom was called Lead Balloon and his autobiography's entitled Thanks for Nothing.

You get the picture, well at least part of it. Even though Showbiz was in the family,

his great-grandparents were were in music hall his early

working life was all over the place from grafting in the kitchens of the Ritz to

working in an artificial leg factory at one point he even seriously considered the priesthood. He says that his

caustic ironic sarcastic comedy comes from a sort of realism. You can't escape the

dark stuff in life and my way of dealing with that is to absorb it into my life

So that it's no longer worrying for me

You've been married Jack D for a quarter of a century. You've been on our television screens for the last 23

years you've got four healthy children none of that sounds like there's much to

be miserable about there isn't and I'm very blessed but I still think that comedy is a lens through which I see everything and I

think almost to some extent the better things go in your life the more fearful you can become

that they will cease to be that way.

You still bother to do stand-up to sell out crowds and you've been performing stand-up now

for a run about 25 years.

When I watch you do stand-up, there's none of that manic energy that we often see with comedians

and stand-ups, which I guess comes from a degree of nervousness.

Now you must also have the nervousness.

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