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 actor and writer Mark Gatus. His creative

preoccupations seem rooted in the past, yet his reimagining of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who

for contemporary TV audiences have been huge hits.

And he gives good comedy too.

His very first day at drama college

would prove a turning point.

He met the people with whom he created the award-winning show The League of Gentlemen.

A diverse output, yes, and a clue to his creative germination might lie in his childhood. He grew up living opposite a psychiatric hospital.

From the word go my mother used to say I had an old soul and that I was morbid, he says, adding a healthy scare is as valid as a healthy

laugh do you really think that's true? Oh God yes absolutely I think we've

become slightly to wrapped in cotton wool about especially the notion of frightening children

I think it's it's a it's a happy release and to go right back to sort of first

principles the idea of being in a group of people in the cinema

and jumping out of your seat and then what people always do straight afterwards

is sort of laugh because it is a release and your mother said an old soul.

Tell me more about that.

What did she mean?

I mean, I can remember going, it must have been around about five.

She used to go and look after some pensioners.

...