Career
Steel has given varying accounts of his early life: he became bored with constantly being asked how he had started in comedy and took to telling the questioner the first thing that came into his head. He is often described as having worked as a television repair man but confesses that he has no technical ability whatsoever. 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-hour 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.
Steel wrote a column for The Guardian between 1996 and 1999. He was sacked by that newspaper, according to the comedian because The Guardian wanted to "realign towards Tony Blair" - though The Guardian denied this. In 2000 he started writing a weekly column for The Independent, which appears in the Wednesday Opinion Column.
He has written and performed several radio and television series for the BBC, and authored several books, as detailed below.
In 2005 he toured the UK and Ireland, where he discussed the French revolution in a light-hearted style.
Read more about this topic: Mark Steel
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