Mark Speight

Mark Warwick Fordham Speight (6 August 1965 – 7 April 2008) was an English television presenter and host of children's art programme SMart.

Speight was born in Seisdon, Staffordshire, and left school at 16 to become a cartoonist.

He took a degree in commercial and graphic art and, while working in television set construction, heard of auditions for a new children's art programme.

Speight was successful in his audition and became one of the first presenters of SMart, working on it for 14 years.

Speight was also a presenter on See It Saw It, where he met his future fiancée, actress and model Natasha Collins.

He took part in live events, such as Rolf on Art and his own Speight of the Art workshops for children.

He was involved in charity work; he became the president of the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign's Young Pavement Artists Competition, and was a spokesperson for ChildLine.

He auditioned for SMart and, following a successful interview where he met future co-presenter Jay Burridge, he went on to present SMart from its first edition in 1994.

Speight became close friends with Burridge, whose art studio in West London was used to create all of the art content for SMart; Burridge noted: "We would bounce ideas and jokes off each other all day until we had developed an almost telepathically linked knowledge of what made each other laugh."

Speight and Burridge were joined by third presenter Zoe Ball, who was replaced first by Josie d'Arby, and then Kirsten O'Brien and Lizi Botham.

With Burridge, O'Brien and Botham, Speight presented the spin-off shows SMart on the Road, SMarteenies, and various live events.

He starred in the BAFTA-nominated ITV Saturday morning show Scratchy & Co. from 1995 until 1998.

Speight's other work ranged from children's television to adult factual programmes.

His children's television credits include playing the Abominable No Man in Timmy Mallett's Timmy Towers and presenting Beat the Cyborgs, Name That Toon, On Your Marks, Insides Out, Eat Your Words, and History Busters, the last of which won a Royal Television Society Award.

Speight also worked on This Morning, The Heaven and Earth Show, The Big Breakfast and was a contestant on ITV's Gladiators and Celebrity Wrestling.

Speight also played the king on children's programme See It Saw It, where he met Natasha Collins.

Collins was seriously injured after being hit by a car in 2001, and had to leave the programme.

Speight began dating her in 2003, and they became engaged in Barbados in 2005.

They planned to get married in fancy dress and Speight joked that the wedding might feature monkeys, his favourite animal.

In 2004, Speight participated in Rolf Harris's Rolf on Art, for which a giant reproduction of John Constable's The Hay Wain was created in Trafalgar Square.

In 2005, he was involved in a similar project where Hans Holbein's portrait of Henry VIII and Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa were both reconstructed, the latter in the grounds of Edinburgh Castle.

Speight regularly toured with Speight of the Art, a series of art workshops he ran for children, and during the Christmas period, he performed in pantomime as "Buttons" in Cinderella at the Watersmeet, Rickmansworth, in December 2007.

Speight was involved in charity work.

He was President of the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign's Young Pavement Artists Competition, originally a one-off, year-long project that ended up lasting eight years, and he was a spokesperson for ChildLine.

In 2007, he was the presenter of the Müller Big Art Project for Comic Relief in Trafalgar Square.

In January 2008, Speight found Collins's body in the bath of their shared London flat.

He was arrested on suspicion of her murder, but not charged with any offence.

An inquest later determined that Collins had died of a drug overdose and severe burns from hot water, and it was death by misadventure.

In April that year, Speight was reported missing and was later discovered to have hanged himself near Paddington station.

Two suicide notes were discovered, describing how he could no longer live without Collins.

Speight was born in Seisdon, Staffordshire.

He grew up in the village of Tettenhall, Wolverhampton and had two siblings, Tina-Louise Richmond (née Speight), and Jason Speight.

His father, Oliver Warwick Speight, is a property developer, and his mother, Jacqueline Fordham Speight (née Parker), was an art teacher.

Jacqueline died on 5 September 2008, aged 62.

Speight attended the private school Tettenhall College for a year, before moving to state comprehensive Regis School, now known as King's C.E. School, also in Tettenhall, at the age of 12.

Speight stated in an interview he was a slow learner at school, with a short attention span, and art was a way for him to communicate.

He said he did "very badly" because he was a victim of bullying, and the "daily ordeal for two years" forced him to become the "class joker".

Speight left aged 16 and went on to attend Bilston Art School, where he took a degree in commercial and graphic art.

Speight intended to become a cartoonist, but he eventually became a TV presenter following a job painting the set of a television production.

Speight had planned a project involving a trip to Borneo in March 2008 to train abused orangutans not to fight each other, but this never took place.