MARK Thomas, one of Britain’s most acclaimed comics and influential activists, turns his attention to matters closer to home with an award-winning, critically acclaimed show about his father.

“Bravo Figaro came about by accident,” he explains. “I went on Radio 4’s Saturday Live to do an item called ‘inheritance tracks’.”

Mark was in fact the show’s first guest to contribute the tracks he’d picked up from his parents, and the ones he’d be passing on.

“I talked about Figaro’s aria, in the Barber of Seville. My dad used to play it when he worked on the building site, it was terribly embarrassing.

“But as he succumbs to an illness called progressive supranuclear palsy and disappears from view I start to cherish that image of him, as a self-educated, workingclass man who discovered a love of opera against the odds.

“Someone from the Royal Opera House heard the broadcast and asked me to come and talk to Mike Figgis, the film director, who was curating a festival at the ROH,” he recalls.

“I met him and he commissioned me to write a show for the festival. It was a one off but I loved doing it and went away and rewrote the whole thing.”

Last year, Bravo Figaro was one of the sell-out hits of the Edinburgh Fringe, attracting both awards and rave reviews.

Bravo Figaro is the true story of Mark’s father, a self-employed builder with a passion for opera, who would take his cassette player up on the scaffolding, to the embarrassment of the teenage Mark, working alongside him, and about his illness and Mark’s attempt to put on an opera in a bungalow in Bournemouth.

The bungalow opera was facilitated with the help of the Royal Opera House.

“The deal was I would do a show for the ROH but they would lend me opera singers. My dad doesn’t get out much and rarely listens to opera anymore. So we took the singers down to the bungalow in Bournemouth and performed in my dad’s living room. It was amazing.”

Highlights of Mark Thomas’s extensive career include six series on Channel 4, numerous awards, several television documentaries, three books, a Guinness World Record, sell-out tours, a published manifesto, a series on Radio 4, writing for various publications, producing charity benefits, a Medal of Honour, battling multinational corporations, exposing abuses of civil liberties and corporate skulduggery, and succeeding in changing some laws.

Mark Thomas presents Bravo Figaro at Ludlow Assembly Rooms on Tuesday, February 5, at 7.30pm. Book online at ludlowassemblyrooms.

co.uk or call the box office on 01584 878141.