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 the director, producer and writer John Lloyd.

If you've laughed at all over the past 30 years, there's a pretty good chance. He's the man you should thank.

Spitting Image, not the 9 o'clock news, Blackadder, QI, they are just a handful of the programs

that he's helped to create. And if the comedy work ever dries up he could open a shop

flogging secondhand baffters. He's won a huge stack of them and a Grammy and an

Emmy. Which isn't to say it's been an easy ride. Fallouts, multiple sackings and missed opportunities

have also peppered his stellar career in comedy.

He says, I like starting things.

There are starters and finishers in life.

That's the great divide. I like the fight and the passion and the difficulty.

Well, I don't like it, but it's what I do. You make it sound John Lloyd as if it's almost like you're the midwife at a difficult birth would that cover it?

That's very good line. Yeah I think a lot of stuff that I do in retrospect it all looks

you know great and lovely and easy and I passionately believe

that nothing great has achieved without difficulty not exclusively true but the

Navajo have a proverb which is everything easy is evil everything difficult is good I sort of live by that really.

In film and TV I often think it's pretty easy to make people cry it's very difficult to make them properly laugh. Why do you think that is?

I don't know. I think laughter is one of the great mysteries of the universe,

along with music and consciousness and life itself. I've been asked occasionally to do

serious drama and I think how would I know when I'd got it right. Whereas comedy

...