Sneha Girap (Editor)

Mark Lawson

Updated on
Edit
Like
Comment
Share on FacebookTweet on TwitterShare on LinkedInShare on Reddit
Nationality
  
British

Name
  
Mark Lawson


Role
  
Journalist

Mark Lawson Mark Lawson quits Radio 4 39Front Row39 amid bullying furore

Born
  
Mark Gerard Lawson 11 April 1962 (age 62) Hendon, London, England (
1962-04-11
)

Occupation
  
Journalist, broadcaster, author

Nominations
  
British Academy Television Award for Best Talk Show

Books
  
The Deaths, The battle for room service, Architectural Design in Steel, Bloody Margaret, Going out live - or - Are they the s

Education
  
University College London

Stephen fry most polite man in britain mark lawson talks bbc


Mark Gerard Lawson (born 11 April 1962) is an English journalist, broadcaster and author. Specialising in culture and the arts, he is best known for presenting the flagship BBC Radio 4 arts programme Front Row between 1998 and 2014. He is also a Guardian columnist, and presents Mark Lawson Talks To... on BBC Four.

Contents

Mark Lawson Mark Lawson to leave BBC show 39for personal reasons

Celebrity interview stephen fry the times crossword and a jail cell mark lawson talks to bbc


Life and career

Mark Lawson httpsiguimcoukimgstaticsysimagesGuardia

Born in Hendon, north London, Lawson was raised in Leeds, where his father was a marketing director for the Civil Service and British Telecom. Both of his parents originated from the northeast of England.

Mark Lawson Mark Lawson Journalist and Broadcaster Childrens Media

He was brought up a Catholic, and was educated at the independent Catholic school St Columba's College in St Albans. He then took a degree in English at University College London, where his lecturers included John Sutherland and A. S. Byatt.

Mark Lawson Pictures amp Photos of Mark Lawson IMDb

Lawson has been a freelance contributor to numerous publications since 1984, beginning on The Universe in that year, and for The Times from 1984 to 1986. He has written a column for The Guardian since 1995, having previously written for The Independent (1986–95), and has twice been TV Critic of the Year as well as winning many other journalism awards. However, his Guardian journalism has not been universally admired and Richard Gott, a former colleague, has commented that the "prevalence of the bland and the obsequious" on The Guardian is typified by Lawson's "embedded presence".

Mark Lawson Mark Lawson Media The Guardian

Lawson presented The Late Show on BBC2 in the 1990s and presented its offshoot The Late Review (later Sunday Review and from 2000 Newsnight Review) until the 2005 "review of the year" edition of Newsnight Review, broadcast on 16 December, which marked the end of his association with the format. In 2004, Lawson made a documentary for BBC Four called The Truth About Sixties TV, criticising what he called "golden ageists" who, he said, have a rose-tinted view of television's past.

Mark Lawson BBC Arts amp Culture Talking to himself Mark Lawson meets

Lawson became the main presenter of BBC Radio 4's daily arts programme, Front Row, in 1998. He has written several radio plays for the network, including St Graham and St Evelyn (2003) on the friendship between the Catholic novelists Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh and The Third Soldier Holds His Thighs (2005) on Mary Whitehouse's unsuccessful litigation against the National Theatre production of Howard Brenton's play The Romans in Britain. He has also written episodes of the television version of the BBC sitcom Absolute Power appearing as himself in the series 1 episode 2, "Pope Idol", and is one of many celebrities impersonated by the Dead Ringers team, referred to as "Britain's brainiest potato" and "the thinking woman's potato" because of his baldness. In 2002, Viz ran a spoof of his Newsnight Review programme, featuring Lawson engaged in a desperate search for hard-core pornography, entitled "The Artful Podger".

In addition to his work in print journalism and the broadcast media, Lawson has written five books, both fiction and non-fiction. His first, Bloody Margaret (1991), is a collection of novellas on late 20th century politics in the UK, including an eponymous satire concerning Margaret Thatcher. This was followed by The Battle for Room Service (1993), a travelogue of people, politics and culture encountered by Lawson as a journalist. His 1995 book, Idlewild, is an alternative history novel in which both John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe survived the 1960s. Going Out Live (2001) focused on contemporary celebrity culture and the media, and Enough is Enough (2005) is a satire set in the government of Harold Wilson during the late 1960s.

Lawson chaired the judges for the 2011 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. His in-depth, one-to-one interviews for BBC Four, entitled Mark Lawson Talks to …, have been running since 2006.

Lawson's connection with Front Row ended in March 2014 for "personal reasons" in a joint agreement with the BBC. An internal report completed in January investigated claims of bullying within the BBC Radio Arts, which produces Front Row, and identified one producer and presenter as responsible. While Lawson has denied bullying, The Daily Telegraph reported on 5 March that Lawson was the presenter involved and he had been accused of "browbeating junior staff" who are often young freelancers. In Lawson's 2016 novel The Allegations, a lecturer at a fictional English university faces disciplinary action and dismissal for "B&H" (bullying and harassment). The charge sheet faced by Dr Tom Pimm includes such heinous crimes as sighing during departmental meetings, "divisive social invitations" and "visual Insubordination (sic) towards senior management". Pimm's Kafkaesque hearing during which he is told by his chief persecutor that "if someone felt you were being insensitive then, to all intents and purposes, you were", might be read as Lawson's satirical comment on his own treatment at the hands of the BBC, though the author is careful to distance himself from any such interpretation in his Afterword.

He currently lives near Towcester.

Lawson supports Northampton Town FC and frequently goes to games, both at Sixfields and away.

References

Mark Lawson Wikipedia


Similar Topics