Hello, I'm Krestey 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 2003, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a writer and comedian. Having dropped out of university, he worked as a plasterer in East London,

where in the local pub he and his friends would make each other laugh with impressions of people they'd met.

This became his stock in trade, first in characters he wrote and developed for Harry Enfield, Stavroz and loads of money,

and then in his own right as one of the creators and

performers of the Fast Show on BBC 2. From Cockney to Toff from football pundit to

nosy neighbours the people he's created are a comic mosaic of everyday life in modern

Britain.

He's currently starring in another of his television creations, Happiness, a comedy drama about a man facing

a midlife crisis.

He's modest about what he's achieved and often feels

happier off the screen than on it. Writing is what I really enjoy, he says. I wonder

if it'll be appropriate in a few years time to ponce around in silly wigs and whiskers if I

last that long he is poor White House do you mean we won't be laughing at such

things in a few years time Paul or that you'll be just tired of doing them.

I don't think I might be an embarrassing spectacle more than anything.

Well because you really do prefer the writing.

No that's obviously a showbiz lies isn't it to mask my giant ego and I

could just come out and go no I love it I love the adulation so it sounds much

more intellectual that I prefer the writing process you don't like the adulation. You don't like the adulation too. You don't like celebrity.

I must enjoy some aspect of performing and therefore the response to that. Or I would just write. But as I get older I do think that's what I should do.

...