Mark Billingham  Mark Philip David Billingham (born 2 July 1961) is an English novelist, actor, television screenwriter and comedian whose series of "Tom Thorne" crime novels are best-sellers in that genre. Mark Billingham was born in Solihull, West Midlands and grew up in Moseley, Birmingham. He attended the King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Boys grammar school in nearby King's Heath, and lived in that general area "right the way through university". After graduating with a degree in drama, he stayed in Birmingham and helped form a socialist theatre company (Bread & Circuses). Bread & Circuses toured with a number of shows in schools, colleges, arts centres and the street. In the mid-1980s he moved from Birmingham to London as a "jobbing actor", taking minor roles in episodes of TV shows "Dempsey and Makepeace", "Juliet Bravo", "Boon", and "The Bill". After finding himself playing a variety of "bad guy roles such as a soccer hooligan, drug addict, a nasty copper, a racist copper or a bent copper", he became somewhat disenchanted with acting, perceiving that the emphasis was not on talent, but on looks. Around 1987 he decided to pursue a career in comedy, in part because: At the time, breaking into stand-up was not as difficult as it would later become, nor was there the modern infrastructure and chain businesses. Billingham cites his own route as a simple progression from 5-minute, unpaid "try-out" spots to (if one was deemed worthy) 10-, 20- and 30-minute paid slots. As he stated, "within a year, you could be playing the Comedy Store". Indeed, Billingham has headlined at the Comedy Store on many occasions, where he also appears regularly as a Master of Ceremonies. Despite feeling rather ambivalent towards "serious" roles, Billingham still found considerable success by merging his careers as actor and comic to work in comedy shows. He was the human face on the puppet-representation-of-celebrities series "Spitting Image", and "the taller half" of top double act the "Tracy Brothers" with Mike Mole from Bread & Circuses days (now guitarist with British comedy punk band Punks Not Dad), appearing regularly on the radio version of "The Mary Whitehouse Experience". In 1988, he was seen in the children's comedy series "News at Twelve", in which the central character "broadcasts his own (imaginary) TV news bulletin every evening".