Career
He intended to become a cartoonist, but Speight eventually became a presenter following a job painting the set of a television production. He auditioned for SMart, and following a successful interview where he met future co-presenter Jay Burridge, he went on to present SMart from its first edition in 1994. Speight became close friends with Burridge, whose art studio in West London was used to create all of the art content for SMart; Burridge noted: "We would bounce ideas and jokes off each other all day until we had developed an almost telepathically linked knowledge of what made each other laugh." Speight and Burridge were joined by third presenter Zoë Ball, who was replaced first by Josie D'Arby, and then Kirsten O'Brien. With Burridge and O'Brien, Speight presented the spin-off shows SMarteenies and SMart on the Road, and participated in various live events. He achieved further fame while starring in the BAFTA-nominated ITV Saturday morning show Scratchy & Co. from 1995 until 1998.
Speight worked on numerous other shows, ranging from children's television to adult factual programmes. His children's television credits include playing the Abominable No Man in Timmy Mallett's Timmy Towers and presenting Beat the Cyborgs, Name That Toon, On Your Marks, Insides Out, and History Busters, the last of which won a Royal Television Society Award. Speight also worked on This Morning, The Heaven and Earth Show, The Big Breakfast and was a contestant in ITV's Celebrity Wrestling. Speight also played the king on children's programme See It Saw It, where he met Natasha Collins. Collins was seriously injured after being hit by a car in 2001, and had to leave See It Saw It. Speight began dating her in 2003, and they became engaged in Barbados in 2005. They planned to get married in fancy dress and Speight joked that the wedding might feature monkeys, his favourite animal.
In 2004 Speight participated in Rolf Harris's Rolf on Art, for which a giant reproduction of John Constable's The Hay Wain was created in Trafalgar Square. In 2005 he was involved in a similar project where Hans Holbein's portrait of Henry VIII and Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa were both reconstructed, the latter in the grounds of Edinburgh Castle. Speight had planned a project involving a trip to Borneo in March 2008 to train abused orangutans not to fight each other, but this never took place. Speight regularly toured with Speight of the Art, a series of art workshops he ran for children, and during the Christmas period, he became involved in pantomime, performing as "Buttons" in Cinderella at the Watersmeet, Rickmansworth in December 2007.
Speight was involved in charity work. He was President of the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign's Young Pavement Artists Competition, originally a one-off year-long project that ended up lasting eight years, and he was a spokesperson for ChildLine. In 2007 he was the presenter of the Müller Big Art Project for Comic Relief in Trafalgar Square.
Read more about this topic: Mark Speight
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“In time your relatives will come to accept the idea that a career is as important to you as your family. Of course, in time the polar ice cap will melt.”
—Barbara Dale (b. 1940)
“From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating “Low Average Ability,” reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English Language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)