BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast.
Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
And for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast.
I hope you enjoy listening.
My castaway this week is Mark Steele.
He's a prize winning stand up comedian, broadcaster and writer who has spent his working life getting under the skin of the absurdities, contradictions and curiosities of British life.
His targets range from the upper echelons of politics to our more parochial obsessions.
In his long running Radio 4 series, Mark Steele's In Town, his upbringing was every bit as suburban as some of its episodes.
He was adopted as a baby and spent his early years in Swanley in Kent.
He found it stifling.
After being expelled from school, he made his escape to the bright lights of South London via the emerging punk scene, political activism and what would become known as altern comedy.
Over the years he skewered pomposity in high places, but he's also subjected his own story to similar treatment.
He took delight in revealing that his biological father turned out to be a multi millionaire professional gambler.
He says, I've got loads of burning issues to talk about on stage, but the first thing you start with is what other things I think are funny.
There's great comedy in things not turning out as you expect.
Mark Steele, welcome to Desert Island Discs.
Thank you, Oren.
So mark, there've been 12 series now of Mark Steele's In Town and you travel across the country to a particular place and then create a stand up show for that town.
You're looking for the unexpected, then where is a good place to find it?
Where do you start?