Marc Wootton

Marc James Wootton (born 8 February 1975) is an English actor, comedian and writer, best known for his role as Mr Poppy in the Nativity! film series. He also starred in the TV series High Spirits with Shirley Ghostman, La La Land, Nighty Night and voiced Max in Counterfeit Cat. Career Wootton made early television appearances on the Channel 4 comedy show The Eleven O'Clock Show and BBC Three's Cyderdelic, E4 comedy The Pilot Show and the BBC Two sitcom Thin Ice. His breakthrough role came with the Channel 4 comedy gameshow My New Best Friend, in which contestants had to convince their closest friends and relatives that a series of awful characters (played by Wootton) were their new best friend, for a prize of £10,000. He then wrote and starred in the BBC Three sketch show Marc Wootton Exposed, the first series of which started on 13 January and finished on 25 February 2008. His regular character Shirley Ghostman, a parody of TV psychics such as Derek Acorah and Colin Fry, was spun off into his own series, High Spirits with Shirley Ghostman, for BBC Three. However, the series was shelved after an in-character appearance by Wootton on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, during which he made a number of jokes referencing "Jews, cancer patients and Hitler". The BBC apologised after receiving over 350 complaints. Ghostman returned, along with other characters, in Wootton's six-part show La La Land. The series premiered on the Showtime USA network on 25 January 2010 and premiered on BBC Three on 27 April 2010. In 2018 Wootton wrote and starred in the six part comedy series High & Dry for Channel 4 in the UK, which debuted on the station on 4 May 2018.