Paul Abbott: finding comedy in the tragic

On Start the Week Andrew Marr explores how childhood experiences affect later life.

The screenwriter Paul Abbott famously put his early life into the television series Shameless. Although his later work, including his latest police drama No Offence, moves far beyond his own experiences, he excels at finding the comedy in the tragic.

In France the writer Édouard Louis has caused a storm with his brutal autobiographical novel about class, violence and sexuality. The book is his attempt to bury his childhood.

The psychiatrist Gwen Adshead spent years working at Broadmoor Hospital studying the nature of human violence and looks at the moral choices people make.

The poet Paul Farley is interested not in the early life of poets but in their dying. From Shelley's drowning to Sylvia Plath's desperate suicide their deaths have become the stuff of myth casting a backward shadow on their work, creating a skewed image of the poet's life as doomed and self-destructive.