Graham Duff

Graham Duff (born 1964) is an English writer, actor and producer. He was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, and lives in Brighton. He graduated from the University of Brighton. His work for TV and radio is typified by intricate plotting, large casts, frequently dark subject matter and a love of wordplay and surrealism. His writing is influenced by the worlds of horror and science fiction, musical sub-cultures and the realms of fine art and art house cinema. He is a noted music enthusiast, having worked as a DJ and selected all the soundtrack music for seven series of his TV show Ideal, as well as compiling an Ideal soundtrack album and helping to release albums by the left-field bands Celebricide and Cyclobe. He also worked as a script editor on seven series of BBC Radio 4's Count Arthur Strong's Radio Show! and the Alan Partridge movie Alpha Papa (2013). Early career Duff began writing and performing in the mid-1980s with the performance art group Theatre of the Bleeding Obelisk and the fringe theatre company Wax Cabinet. During this period, he also worked occasionally as an assistant editor at Ikon, the video department of Manchester's Factory Records. By the early 1990s he was a member of the comedy improvisation group "Fish-heads". With Wax Cabinet colleague Malcolm Boyle, he wrote for BBC Radio 1's Mark Goodier Show and contributed sketches to BBC Radio 3's The Music Makers. Duff also DJ’d and hosted comedy phone-in shows in the guise of self-help guru Doctor Devlin on a number of independent and pirate radio stations, as well as presenting "The Duff Almanac", a regular feature on BBC Radio 4's Loose Ends. Stage His first one-man stage show was ‘Burroughs’ (1992) – based on the life and times of infamous beat author William S. Burroughs. The show won a Brighton Festival award and was followed by "Diary of a Madman" (1993), adapted from the novel of the same name by Russian absurdist author Nikolai Gogol. With comedian and writer James Poulter, Duff toured internationally with the stand up shows "The A-Z of Drugs" (1995) and "The A-Z of Taboo" (1996). These were followed by another solo comedy show "Vinyl Anorak" (1997) about the world of music obsessives.