13 Facts About Mark Lawson

Mark Gerard Lawson is an English journalist, broadcaster and author.

Mark Lawson is a Guardian columnist, and presented Mark Lawson Talks To.

Mark Lawson was brought up a Catholic, and was educated at the independent Catholic school St Columba's College in St Albans.

Mark Lawson has written a column for The Guardian since 1995, having previously written for The Independent, and has twice been TV Critic of the Year, as well as winning many other journalism awards.

In 2004, Mark Lawson made a documentary for BBC Four called The Truth About Sixties TV, criticising what he called "golden ageists" who, he said, had a rose-tinted view of television's past.

Mark Lawson became the main presenter of BBC Radio 4's daily arts programme, Front Row, in 1998.

Mark Lawson has written several radio plays for the network, including St Graham and St Evelyn on the friendship between the Catholic novelists Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh and The Third Soldier Holds His Thighs on Mary Whitehouse's unsuccessful litigation against the National Theatre production of Howard Brenton's play The Romans in Britain.

Mark Lawson has written episodes of the television version of the BBC sitcom Absolute Power appearing as himself in the series 1 episode 2, "Pope Idol".

Mark Lawson 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.

Mark Lawson's first, Bloody Margaret, is a collection of novellas on late 20th-century politics in the UK, including an eponymous satire concerning Margaret Thatcher.

Mark Lawson's 1995 book Idlewild is an alternative history novel in which both John F Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe survived the 1960s.

Mark Lawson chaired the judges for the 2011 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine.

In 2022, Mark Lawson wrote about this encounter and his personal experience of Savile in British society.