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Writer, actor and comedian Robert Webb is the co-star of Channel 4's BAFTA award-winning Peep Show, along with his on-screen other half, David Mitchell. Together they also created That Mitchell and Webb Sound on Radio 4, which transferred to TV as That Mitchell and Webb Look, another BAFTA winner. He has also written a hit memoir How Not to Be a Boy. Here are nine things we learned from his Desert Island Discs…

1. He loved making his school mates laugh

"I suppose I was a classic sort of class clown,” says Robert. “I was doing impressions of teachers quite early on. And then by the time I was 13, there was this fateful day when a friend of mine, Paul, he'd written this 10-minute comedy thing called Class Reunion.”

“It was set in the improbable future of the year 2000 - this was 1985 - and he got appendicitis. He survived, everything's fine... but I took the main part that he'd written for himself. And I started to get laughs, and I started to time the lines... and I started to do all the things that I've been watching Rowan Atkinson, Rik Mayall and Hugh Laurie doing.”

“And I had this strange effect on people and people sort of looked at me in a different way and I thought: ‘Oh, I quite like this,’ because I had been painfully shy when I was little, so this was quite a big deal.”

2. As a child Robert could conjure up rich imaginary worlds

Robert grew up in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, and his grandparents and great aunt worked in the kitchen of the local golf club: “I basically spent a lot of time over the weekends and summer holidays there,” recalls Robert, “because I had the run of the place - not on the actual golf course, heaven forbid! - but in the grounds and the gardens and the fields.”

“I'd be on my bike and my bike was a horse because I was Zorro or I was Dick Turpin. Or it was a motorbike because I was Jon and Ponch off CHiPs and I’d just go around there fighting crime or in the case of Dick Turpin, causing crime. I was in this world of the Land of Make Believe - as Bucks Fizz would have it.”

“I was very happy in that world. I was in charge in that world. I can see a movement from there to being a writer, where you're in charge of your imaginary world and you're king or God of that universe. And nothing's really changed!”

3. As a teenager he experienced a life-changing loss

When Robert was 17 his mother Pat was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she died shortly afterwards.

"It was really tough because she was my favourite person really,” says Robert. “And she just kind of disappeared. And when you lose someone that you live with, their absence is almost this presence. It's really weird. They're kind of everywhere. It's like living with a black hole. I just couldn't believe that she’d gone. And then eventually you accept that this is what's happened.”

4. His mum’s favourite music was important to him after her death

“I made a mixtape of her favourite songs,” Robert remembers. “She had an excellent record collection from the 60s and 70s of singles that she would play at night. While she was cooking or whatever in the kitchen, she would put on various favourites and those songs were her, in a way. And I would play this tape, almost daring myself to get upset. And of course, I did get upset.”

“And I say that I was listening to this music, but in other ways I just didn't want to engage with it at all. I just wanted to forget about it… I mean, it was, it was horrifying. It was terrible.”

Robert’s third choice is one of the songs from the mixtape of his mum’s favourites: “This one would always get me and not particularly because it was extra sad, but because it was very hopeful,” says Robert. “I think I loved this song because it felt like Mum was still looking after me.”

The song is Elkie Brooks’s version of Fool If You Think It’s Over.

5. He knew he had to work with David Mitchell from the first time he saw him perform

Robert met his long-time comedy partner David when they were both students at Cambridge. Robert’s first impression of David was that he was “so quiet and so shy and so polite. And then he put on this show with some friends. And I went to see that. And that was the turning point.”

“It was a thing called Go to Work on an Egg and it was just their little sketch show. And I remember I didn't take my eyes off him for an hour. He just had this combination of ease and focus. This will sound conceited because it is: he reminded me of me, and I just thought this guy looks like he lives there on the stage.”

“And I asked him, basically, if he wanted to do a show with me. I've only had to be smart in my career once, and that was the decision not to compete with David Mitchell, but instead to capture him and take some of his goodness for myself.”

“He had absolutely no choice but to say yes because I was Footlights' vice president.” (Footlights is the renowned comedy society at Cambridge University.)

“And we started writing together and we really, really got on really well writing because we just laughed at the same things. And there was a sort of chemistry between us.”

6. Robert loves playing Jeremy in Peep Show – because he’s quite obnoxious

Channel 4’s Peep Show brought Mitchell and Webb to a much larger audience, with David and Robert playing flatmates Mark and Jeremy – but how similar are they to the characters they portray? “They were sufficiently like us that it would be weird if we played them the other way around,” says Robert.

"Although I like to think I was doing more acting than David was, because Jeremy on paper is not a very nice man. You know, he's petulant and very stupid and a really bad liar and selfish and talentless.”

“It was such a pleasure to play him because he's so awful. And it was just a lot of fun.”

7. Robert readily admits that chance has played a big part in his success

Robert recalls that, early in their careers, he and David juggled numerous projects, hoping that one might come good: “So much of it is luck. We were like one of those old variety acts spinning plates on The Generation Game. We had like six plates spinning and Peep Show was just one of those things, and not necessarily one of the more promising ones. We loved the scripts - Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong had written these fantastic scripts.”

“Channel 4 commissioned one-half of a pilot and then we made that. And then they commissioned the second-half of the pilot. So we made the second 12-and-a-half minutes six months later.”

“It was all very gradual and by the time Peep Show gets commissioned for a full series we've been on camera a fair bit by then, so everything was very gradual, which was really good for us in the long run.”

8. Robert’s sixth disc is dedicated to his wife

“When I had been going out with Abigail Burdess for a couple of weeks, I started humming this song... And then after I left, she looked it up and she says at that moment she thought, ‘OK, this chap is quite into me it turns out.’”

“I think this is an absolutely beautiful song... I think it's just achingly romantic, but in a really grown up way because... it's a song about being afraid of being lonely but it's also an acknowledgement of, and almost a longing for, the messy give-and-takeness of being in love with someone or sharing your life with someone, and that sort of pooling of sovereignty, that sort of blurring around the edges where you don't know, don't care anymore, where you stop, and the other person starts.”

“I find all of that about marriage profoundly beautiful and my marriage with Abby is the foundation of whatever happiness and sanity I can lay claim to in this world. And I'm really glad I bumped into her and I'm not going to get over it.”

The song is Being Alive from Stephen Sondheim’s musical Company, performed by Adrian Lester and the cast of the Donmar Warehouse production in London in 1996.

9. He also takes a track for the times on the island when he’s feeling down

“Well, you don't always want to be cheered up,” says Robert. “Sometimes I think on my island I might be feeling a bit glum and I might want to just sit with my glumness. I almost enjoy feeling glum, and that's why God invented [this band], and I adore them...”

“And I think there'll be times on the island when [hearing]: ‘I'm not here, this isn't happening’ that I could really get behind that sentiment. I mean the joke about [this band] is that they're miserable. That's not my experience though. I think misery is certainly one of their subjects, but their music has never made me feel miserable.”

“It's a bit like when you go and see a Shakespearean tragedy and at the end the stage is littered with dead bodies but you don't walk out of there depressed. The experience is always one of uplift because you know you've been in the presence of a fully achieved work of art and that's what I think this is.”

The track is Radiohead’s How to Disappear Completely, from their album Kid A, released in 2000.