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 castaway this week is Jimmy Mulville. He began his life in comedy as a performer

and writer, but success in front of the camera clearly wasn't enough. His production company

Hatrick has turned out more hits than is frankly decent. Have I got news for

you room 101, drop the dead donkey, Father Ted, and outnumbered are just a handful of its brilliant creations.

He says he sees his job as identifying the maniacs behind the next big show, and his skill in

managing unpredictability has doubtless coming useful away from the studio too.

He has triumphed over alcoholism and drug addiction, fought cancer and even managed to keep running his TV hit factory with his one-time wife after their marriage

collapsed. He says of himself, I'm completely obsessive. When I ask for tea and biscuits,

I don't mean one cup of tea and a biscuit I mean a pot of tea and a packet of

biscuits and the pot of tea is drunk and the packet of biscuits is eaten.

So you are very much an all or nothing kind of a guiding of.

I'm afraid I am.

Yeah, I think the idea of balance wasn't in the Melville DNA.

I think that someone said there was an instruction manual that came with you and

you just didn't bother reading it and if I never read any instruction manuals for

anything I asked my wife right so a bit like Ozzy Osbourne, I'll be confronted by an enanuous object

it's just not doing what I wanted to do and I'll shout,

Karen! And Karen comes along with she fixes it. She's the handyman in the house.

And working with the maniacs, of course we all understand that the best comedy comes out of a degree

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