John O'Farrell

John O'Farrell (born 27 March 1962) is a British author, comedy scriptwriter, and political campaigner.

Previously a lead writer for such shows as Spitting Image and Have I Got News for You, he is now best known as a comic author for such books such as The Man Who Forgot His Wife and An Utterly Impartial History of Britain.

He is one of a small number of British writers to have achieved best-seller status with both fiction and nonfiction.

He has also published three collections of his weekly column for The Guardian and set up Britain's first daily satirical news website NewsBiscuit.

With comedian Angela Barnes, he co-hosts the light-hearted historical podcast We Are History.

O'Farrell grew up in Maidenhead, Berkshire, the youngest of three children, attending Courthouse Primary School and then Desborough Comprehensive where he wrote comedy for the school magazine and stood as the Labour candidate in the school's 1979 mock election.

His father was a book dealer from Galway, Ireland, whilst his mother was active in Oxfam and Amnesty International.

He attended classes at the Redroofs Theatre School and played Christopher Robin in the West End at the age of ten, before appearing in the horror film From Beyond the Grave with Diana Dors and Donald Pleasence.

O'Farrell went on to study English and drama at Exeter University.

O'Farrell moved to London in 1985, winning a talent competition at Jongleurs in Battersea, but gave up stand up-comedy in favour of comedy writing.

After attending the open meetings for Radio 4's Week Ending he formed a writing partnership with Mark Burton and they soon became lead writers on the show.

The duo won the BBC Radio Comedy Writers Bursary, and wrote for a number of radio comedy series, including Little Blighty on the Down, McKay the New and, with Pete Sinclair, A Look Back at the Nineties and Look Back at the Future, in which O'Farrell also performed.

The latter series won a British Comedy Award, a Gold Sony Radio Academy Award and a Premios Ondas.

Burton and O'Farrell were commissioned for Spitting Image in 1988 and the following year became two of the lead writers for the show, where they remained for 10 series.

O'Farrell is credited with the idea of making John Major permanently grey.

They also wrote for Clive Anderson Talks Back, Nick Hancock on Room 101, Murder Most Horrid, and co-wrote some of the "Heads to Heads" for Alas Smith and Jones.

In 1993, they left Spitting Image and became the first writers credited for the scripted parts of Have I Got News for You.

Again for Hat Trick Productions, they wrote the BBC1 sitcom The Peter Principle (The Boss in the US) starring Jim Broadbent.

They also contributed to the screenplay of the Aardman film Chicken Run.

In 1998, O'Farrell published Things Can Only Get Better: Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter.

The book became a number-one best-seller, and was nominated for the George Orwell Award and the Channel 4 Political Awards.

The popularity of the book led O'Farrell to be invited to address the 1999 Labour Party conference.

The memoir was adapted for BBC Radio 4 starring Jack Dee and Doon Mackichan.

In 1999, O'Farrell began a weekly satirical column in The Independent, soon switching to The Guardian where he remained until 2005.

Three collections of his columns have been published; Global Village Idiot, I Blame the Scapegoats and I Have A Bream.

In 2000, O'Farrell published his first novel, The Best a Man Can Get, which was the best-selling debut novel in 2002 and eventually sold half a million copies.

It was dramatised for BBC Radio 4 starring Mark Heap and Tamsin Greig.

The novel later was optioned by Paramount Pictures.

Two further novels followed, This Is Your Life and May Contain Nuts, the latter of which was nominated for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and adapted for ITV by his former co-writer Mark Burton and starred Shirley Henderson and Darren Boyd.

In 2007, he returned to non-fiction with the publication of An Utterly Impartial History of Britain, or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge which was BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week and went on to sell over 250,000 copies.

In September 2010, it was listed by The Economist as Britain's third best-selling political memoir since 1998, after books by Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

O'Farrell co-wrote the musical Something Rotten!, which opened on Broadway in April 2015, and co-wrote a Broadway musical of Mrs. Doubtfire which opened on Broadway in December 2021 and in London's West End in May 2023.

O’Farrell co-wrote the book for the original stage musical Something Rotten!, which opened on Broadway in April 2015, and for which he was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical with Karey Kirkpatrick as well as a Drama Desk Award and an Outer Circle Critics Award.

The show ran for nearly two years on Broadway before going on tour across the United States.

In September 2017, he published Things Can Only Get Worse?, a sequel to the 1998 political memoir that originally made his name.

His books have been translated into around thirty languages and adapted for radio and television.

It was announced in April 2018 that O'Farrell was co-writing a sequel to Chicken Run.

It was announced in August 2018 that the same team had been commissioned to write a stage musical of the film Mrs. Doubtfire for Broadway.

The stage musical, also titled Mrs. Doubtfire premiered at the 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle, Washington and opened on Broadway at the Stephen Sondheim Theater in December 2021.

It opened at Manchester Opera House in September 2022 and transferred to the Shaftesbury Theatre, in London's West End in May 2023.