Mark Gatiss

Mark Gatiss: off with his head!

He writes for Doctor Who and Sherlock - now Mark Gatiss is starring as Charles I on stage. He talks to Mark Lawson about overreaching royals, bad auditions and why he's the man to play Jeremy Hunt.

Mark Gatiss among cast of Living with Mother series two

Doctor Who writer joins an all-star cast including Brigit Forsyth, Tom Goodman-Hill and Alison Steadman in the returning Radio 4 comedy.

The best comedy of the week was to be found over on CBBC, where series four of Horrible Histories made its debut (confusingly, BBC1 is currently showing series two).

Based on the cheerfully bloodthirsty books by Terry Deary and Martin Brown, it plays a bit like Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time, if you replaced the visiting professor of history from Queen's College, Oxford, with a talking rat making jokes about wee.

There have been plenty of bloody revolutions featured in Horrible Histories, but the team's most recent coup was to reunite The League of Gentlemen for the first time in a bronze age. Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith turned up as craven Hollywood execs keen to panel-beat the messy lives of historical figures into award-bait biopics, and while Gatiss's American accent was pretty duff, the bickering spark between the three gentlemen remained.

Recruiting the league should not distract from the tireless efforts of the core cast, particularly Jim Howick, who has matured from being an off-model David Mitchell into a gifted comic actor in his own right. But ultimately, the highlight of this first salvo of new shows was a prancing Charles Darwin explaining the ch-ch-changes of evolutionary theory via an exquisite David Bowie pastiche. Horribly good.

Interesting fact: in the late 1630s, as part of the war effort against the Scots, womens' urine was collected from church congregations for use in the production of gunpowder. This is grist to the mill for Horrible Histories, back on CBBC for a fourth series. And isn't that Steve Pemberton, Mark Gatiss and Reece Shearsmith, AKA The League Of Gentlemen, joining in the fun? Which just goes to show how much credibility HH enjoys these days.

Mark Gatiss: Being Human is my favourite TV role

The Sherlock star was happiest as a vampire - but he'd like to be a judge on America's Next Top Model.

Why did The League of Gentlemen choose to reform on HH?

Find out why Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and Mark Gatiss are working together on the popular kids show.

Mark Gatiss: I'm proud of binned Sherlock pilot

Co-creator says he and Steven Moffat were "very happy" with 60-minute original, in a BBC Four interview tonight.

Mark Gatiss on playing Mr Snow in Being Human

The Sherlock co-creator joins BBC3's horror fest as the vampiric leader of the Old Ones - and says he has been amazed by all the eleborate theories about Sherlock's death.

Mark Gatiss scores stage success

The Sherlock star enjoys rave reviews for The Recruiting Officer at London's Donmar Warehouse.

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.