Denise Mina & Frank Skinner (18:45-20:15)

Act One: Frank Skinner’s stellar career was launched at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1987. Four years later in 1991 he took home comedy’s most prestigious prize, the Perrier Award. Since then, he has become a household name for his sell-out tours, TV shows such as The Frank Skinner Show and Room 101 and as collaborator with David Baddiel - not least for their Three Lions football anthem.

Skinner, who has a Master’s degree in English Literature, has been a bestselling author for two decades. His autobiography Frank Skinner was the bestselling autobiography of 2002 and spent 46 weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list. Recently he has launched the hugely successful Frank Skinner’s Poetry Podcast simultaneously with a companion book, How to Enjoy Poetry. As a devout Catholic, he has also written A Comedian’s Prayer Book, revealing his convictions, his questions, his fears, his doubts and his many joys with his relationship with God. Skinner will be talking with his characteristic humour and honesty about the many sides to his life.

Act Two: In 2020 Skinner, who admits to being ‘a life-long fan’ of Dr Johnson (the subject of his Master’s degree) set off with the brilliant Scottish writer, Denise Mina, personifying James Boswell, in the footsteps of Boswell and Johnson’s 1773 Tour to the Hebrides which was filmed as a Sky Arts Road Trip, culminating in a visit to Auchinleck.

Denise Mina, garlanded with awards for her crime fiction, will join Frank to talk about their literary adventures and the fresh insights these revealed into the personalities of Boswell and Johnson. The journey for our time-travellers sealed a friendship just like Boswell and Johnson’s; and in 2021 they went on to follow in thefootsteps of another legendary literary pairing, Wordsworth and Coleridge for another Sky Arts programme.

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