Audio: Mark Gatiss' macabre school days

The writer and actor Mark Gatiss has admitted that he turned every school writing assignment into a horror story and that his school report compared his work to a Hammer horror movie script.

Gatiss was a member of the comedy team, The League of Gentlemen and has written episodes of Doctor Who and the TV series, Sherlock which he created with Steven Moffatt.

Mark Gatiss' interview with Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs will be broadcast on Sunday 23 October at 1115 BST on BBC Radio 4, and repeated at 0900 BST on Friday 28 October. Listen online or browse the extensive Desert Island Discs archive.

The scourging of the Murdock empire is a goldmine of new material for comedians. The biggest audience guffaw in this returning series comes when interviewer Rhys Thomas asks his guest - fellow comedian Simon Day - if there really isn't anything that he wouldn't do for money. Day, fast as a whip, comes back with "Well, I wouldn't hack into people's phones." It's no secret that I love this series: it's akin to the empathetic questioning techniques of Kirsty Young or Victoria Derbyshire being channelled through Alexei Sayle or Steve Coogan - lots of insight, but even more laughs. Rhys does not push Day too closely on his addictive personality - something that the comic has been very open about in his recent autobiography - but we do get to hear about his spell in a borstal, which he refers to as being like "a violent boarding school".

It's easier to define Alan Carr by what he isn't. He isn't quite Graham Norton, which means he's not hysterically shrill and often in Canary Wharf Waitrose. He isn't Justin Lee Collins, which means that he's not disliked on sight by 80 percent of the population. He isn't a great writer, but he has a warm persona which means that his stand-up is unthreatening and extremely popular. More importantly, he isn't egotistical so he's not a bad chat show host.

Chatty Man is over reliant on Norton-esque games (has anyone ever liked them? Ever?). It is at its best when Alan relaxes and natters with his guests, using the Kirsty Young method to unthreateningly coax some fairly good stuff out of them. All that is by the by, however as tonight's special guest is Ricky Gervais, who seems to be on a mission to become the most correctly despised person in Britain.