Mark Steel: When I was a television repair man I had a few jokes I'd learned off my brother when I was about seventeen and just used to try them out on people; and sometimes, obviously, they're very annoyed when you can't fix their TV and say,"I'm going to have to take it away and fix it", so I tried the jokes out to calm them down, really.

So, it really was humour as a defence mechanism, but in an unconventional way?

Yes, exactly - they thought, "We've had a little bit of entertainment even though we've got no telly for the next week." That was my first venture into professional comedy. There was an award as well in the Television Repairman's magazine for the best joke that anyone had told when they came round to see a television they couldn't fix. I won three months in a row. Can't even remember what the jokes were now.

How did you get from comedy to political comedy?

I think you just say whatever you think's funny. When you see politicians who said at the time we went to war, that Saddam Hussein could get his weapons ready in 45 minutes and now they're saying "Oh, no, we didn't mean weapons of mass destruction, we just meant he could get his guns ready in forty-five minutes," regardless of the morals of war, that's just an insult to lying. My kid could do better lying than that. And that's funny. I cannot see how you couldn't see that as funny. If they just meant his guns, why forty five minutes? Is his locker busted? When Saddam launched a war did he like to watch the first half of a football match before he started? It's just mad. How could anyone not find that funny, in a sick sort of way? If you ignore that he helped take the world to a period of unprecedented carnage, potentially.

So I find that sort of thing funny, but equally I might find something that someone said funny, too. Like, I've got a mate from this little village in East Anglia, and the other day his Mum said to him on the phone, "Did you see our village was in the paper?", really proud. "What was it about?" he asks. "Didn't you see it? They've done a survey of all the different places in Britain and our village is the most in-bred village in the whole of Britain." And either of those things - forty-five minutes or my mate's Mum, I find funny.

Where did the idea for the lectures come from?

I'd done talks at various events, about the American Civil War or something; having done them I thought, "there's always jokes to be found in these subjects, there's always a jokey way of doing it" and so I wondered if that was something that could be extended that could fit into a comedy slot. And it seemed to work. I think. It's just doing a lecture as if it was a lecture, but packing it with jokes. For television, it's a different format, but the same thing applies; we had to work out one or two stylistic things, but it's the same principle, really. Again, it's like the 45 minutes thing - there's a way of telling these stories where you point out all the nonsense of it.

Was there anything you found you couldn't do on TV at all?

All sorts of things - there's all sorts of ways around it; if there's a joke that's going to cost two hundred and fifty million quid to stage it because we're talking about rockets flying to the moon or something, you can just say the joke. And that happens sometimes, but most times we find a visual way of showing it. For example, in the Byron one, you want to show that he's really like various modern people, so we've got him as Bob Dylan doing the Subterranean Homesick Blues video, and we've got a modern rapper doing Byron lines to hiphop - that's something that you couldn't do on radio. And we've got him in the Paul Simonon pose from the front of the London Calling album. There's more things you can do on telly than on radio. The only downside is it's a huge palaver, and you need a team of about fifteen people running around for four months to make it work whereas I can write, rewrite, rehearse, direct in effect, record and edit the whole series in four months myself for the radio. But I hope it brings something extra, or else a lot of people have been wasting their time.

What do you hope people will take away from the shows at the end of the programme?

It's obviously very flattering if someone thinks "Blimey, Aristotle really is fascinating, I'm going to go and start studying philosophy," but really, the truth is, if you want to know a lot about these people you're going to have to do more than to watch my programmes. Having said that, because it puts these people in their context, and because it looks at their times and sees what the mass of people were doing, that's an angle that most tv programmes don't take. For example, one of the most fascinating things about Byron was his support for the Luddites; I wouldn't concentrate on that to the exclusion of how his poetry works, but most of the books about Byron more or less ignore the fact. It's incredible - he was incredibly impassioned about it. There was an academic who lectures on Byron who I was talking to, and he said, "I think that if Byron was alive today he'd be a Conservative MP, wouldn't he?" - that's an extraordinary thing to say - Conservative Lords broke the tradition of ringing a bell on the death of a Lord when Byron died; they refused to do it because they hated him, and this bloke lectures on Byron and says he'd have been a Conservative MP. An astonishingly ignorant thing to say; I think it's because they get wrapped up in the detail of these things and they miss the big picture. The big picture is: the events outside these people shape people - they're not geniuses, but they're shaped by massive events. Byron was shaped by the aftermath of the French Revolution; he was severely depressed by the death of Napoleon which signified the death of all his hopes for a better world and so his poetry was informed by that - of course it was. That's not to say all the affairs aren't all fascinating, but you have to put them into context. So in that sense, what I hope people mainly get out of it is that you have to see the bigger picture. But then, at the end of the day, I'm a comic, so if they don't laugh, it's bloody useless to me. It's no good them coming up and saying "I was so inspired it changed my life," - no good to me, is it? I'm just a comic.

Is there anyone you're itching to do on the lectures?

The one in this series that I was always wanting to do on the radio but couldn't was Freud. There's no way you'd get away, in the slot we were in on Radio 4, with talking about the things you need to talk about to do the Freud story, and it was really good fun to do that on the telly.

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