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With Great Pleasure

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

Series bringing fresh insight into lives through literature, with guest presenters

Series bringing fresh insight into lives through literature, in which guest presenters pick readings from their favourite pieces of poetry and prose

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With Great Pleasure: Mark Thomas

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Mark Thomas

23/01/2012

BBC Radio 4 - With Great Pleasure, Mark ThomasSearch BBC

Comedian Mark Thomas presents his favourite readings, including Orwell and AA Milne.

Comedian and satirist Mark Thomas presents his favourite readings, including George Orwell and AA Milne, to an audience at the Red Shed, Wakefield's Labour Club.

The comedian, campaigner and satirist Mark Thomas presents his best loved literary extracts - with Orwell and AA Milne among them - to an audience at the Red Shed, Wakefield's Labour Club. This long, narrow wooden hut was where he performed his first satirical sketches during the Miners' Strike of the 1980s, when studying drama at nearby Bretton Hall. He's warmly greeted by the home crowd. 

Mark shares a deep love of poetry and the written word - owing, he tellingly reflects - to being descended from a long line of Methodist lay preachers for whom the Word was key. He's joined in Wakefield by one of his favourite poets, John Hegley, who also reads Spike Milligan's brilliant account of the declaration of war in 1939. 

Mark Thomas also revisits his very first performance piece - a poem about a mischievous mouse by AA Milne - which he proclaimed aged 4, from the pulpit of a church in Clapham, South London. The other extracts reveal Mark Thomas' passionately engaged journey through life and literature, building towards Brian Clough's tragi-comic epiphany in David Peace's 'The Damned United'. 

The readers are Jane Godber and Jonathan Keeble

Producer: Mark Smalley.

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