Frank Skinner and crime novelist Denise Mina have embarked upon their latest journey in the footsteps of great writers for Sky Arts, exploring the lives and works of satirists Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, British Comedy Guide can exclusively reveal.

In Skinner & Mina's Literary Road Trip: Pope & Swift, the comic and author will investigate the relationship between the great friends and respective writers of The Dunciad and Gulliver's Travels and their continued influence upon humourists today.

Shot in the second half of last year and set to begin on Tuesday 14th March, the documentary follows Skinner and Garnethill author Mina's similar programmes for the channel on James Boswell and Samuel Johnson in 2020 and William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge the following year.

Pope and Swift were lifelong friends with shared literary sensibilities. But there were significant differences between them, the former an English Roman Catholic reluctant to engage in partisanship and inclined to distinguish poetry from politics, the other an Irish Anglican deeply committed to politically engaged poetry.

The sixth series of Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast has also just begun, with today's episode featuring former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy reflecting on the prayer-like quality of the shipping forecast.