Mark Steel

Mark Steel found an outlet for his passion in stand-up comedy. He worked the comedy circuit for several years, and then in 1992 presented a satirical radio show The Mark Steel Solution on BBC Radio 5, consisting of half hourly monologues which offered solutions to social problems. It ran to four series. It’s Not a Runner Bean, a comic autobiography, was published in 1996, and this led to a column in The Guardian, where his writing career really took off.

Steel wrote a column for The Guardian between 1996 and 1999. He was sacked by that newspaper, according to him because The Guardian wanted to “realign towards Tony Blair” - though The Guardian denies this. In 2000 he started writing a weekly column for The Independent, which appears in the Wednesday Opinion Column. He is currently found lurking around 6:30 on Radio 4’s comedy half hour.