Michael Buerk

Michael Palin interview

The Monty Python alumnus discusses playing the author of his favourite novel - and why Vanity Fair's protagonist is a heroine for modern times.

David Walliams on Billionaire Boy

Is lavatory humour the key to happiness? Michael Buerk investigates...

Jack Whitehall criticises Michael Buerk for I'm a Celeb

Jack Whitehall has criticised Michael Buerk for taking part in I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!.

The first episode of Charlie Brooker's series How TV Ruined Your Life advanced the proposition that television's preoccupation with disaster and death ("shouting boo in your mind," as he put it) had left us full of delusional fears about the world at large. It was something of a shotgun assault on the medium, ranging from doomy news priorities to public information films, and cutting from real archive clips to pastiches that were good enough to make you do a double-take. But it was very often funny too, particularly when reminding you of 999's appetite for the wilder fringes of human mishap. "Have you ever thought what it would be like to be stuck in the path of a runaway digger?" asked Michael Buerk gravely, with the implicit suggestion that if you hadn't you'd been living in a state of foolish denial about the looming threat of rogue excavators. There was also an excellent parody of a Horizon-style doomwatch programme - "If Pens Got Hot" - which used a global outbreak of ballpoint combustion to mock the Chicken Little aesthetics of such formats.