Private Passions - Harry Enfield

In this rare interview, Harry Enfield talks to Michael Berkeley about his life through the music he loves and how his journey from punk to opera - his great musical passion - developed when he was living in a council flat in his 20s and borrowing a record a week from the library.

We hear parts of two Verdi operas that inspired the theme tunes for his first two television series.

In the early 1990s Harry Enfield went from being a part-time milkman to one of our biggest comedy stars, and many of the characters he created have become embedded in our national psyche - Loadsamoney, Kevin the Teenager, Tim Nice-But-Dim, Wayne and Waynetta Slob, Stavros and Smashie and Nicey, to name just a few.

He started out on Spitting Image and Saturday Night Live, and his television shows in the 1990s reinvigorated British sketch comedy, gaining him more than 13 million viewers a week. Films, documentaries, and more comedy series have followed, as well as a hugely successful theatre show with his comedy partner of nearly 30 years, Paul Whitehouse.