"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!"

Or as King Lear might have said to you at the time if you'd been standing next to him at the bus stop "Awful weather for the time of year wouldn't you say?" Why are we Brits so obsessed with the weather? Partly because of where we sit on the planet combined with our islands status, it makes us the receptacle of an awful loot of unpredicatable weather.

And it was even more the case in Shakespeare's time. The elements played a much bigger part in our lives than they do at the moment, current heatwaves excepted. In a couple of the plays the tone is set by the opening lines - 'Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York,' Richard the Third says at the start of that play. While Macbeth begins famously with the three witches, the first asking "When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning or in rain?"

Shakespeare often uses the weather to evoke a sense of personality - think of the stormy nature of Lear, the man and the play, or the dark and broodiness that hangs over the whole of Macbeth.

As I often say, Shakespeare isn't so much a man with the answers as someone who knows how to ask the right questions, and he makes us think about how whatever kind of person we are, however much we think we can control events, nature has much greater control than any single individual. Even in a play like The Tempest, where Prospero invents a storm - he literally makes the weather - he can't change people.

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"With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come. And let my liver rather heat with wine, than my heart cool with mortifying groans."

In the second part of this conversation with my former Sitcom Geeks co-host James Cary (pictured) we talk about how it's possible to use humour to explore the most difficult subjects. James is one of the most successful audience sitcom writers in the UK, having worked on a host of TV and radio audience shows including Miranda, My Hero, Think The Unthinkable and My Family. Together we nerded out for 222 episodes about all matters sitcom.

James's own sitcom Bluestone 42 ran on the BBC for three seasons, and was set among a bomb disposal unit in Afghanistan. Really you can't get much darker than that can you? Well you can, and another hit show that James worked on Miranda, did just that.

Miranda was a massive hit show and had a deceptive lightness of touch that allowed Miranda Hart and the writers to explore the darkest aspects of what it means to be a single woman in her 30s and all the pressures she is under to get married, have children and have a good job. We talk about the many examplesin Shakespeare where the subjects of life and death are as likely to be explored in the tragedies as they are in the comedies.

Since becoming obsessed with Shakespeare I have come to understand how so much of the audience TV show, my favourite form of comedy, owes its debt directly to the plays of Shakespeare. I thought I might struggle to persuade James of this latest theory but it turns out that he has his own favourite Shakespeare obsessions as well.

In the first part of the interview, we talked about what an audience sitcom is and how it sits as a direct descendant of the old English music hall and the plays of Shakespeare. In this week's episode we talk about comedy and religion, funny characters and the parallels between Shakespeare characters abndsitcom greats.

To find out more about what James is currently up to checkout his website jamescary.com

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"That tragedy from which she rescues him gratuitously for the sake of their mutual welfare."

Once upon a time there was a bad man who ruled the kingdom, and the people were unhappy. Just when everything seemed lost a knight in shining armour arrived, the kingdom was saved and we all lived… well most of us did. Who is this mysterious new character in our lives? What are the chances that in the wake of his arrival, we all live happily ever after? Are we possibly getting a bit old to believe fairy stories?

In this week's episode I look at one of the oldest fairy tales in English folklore, that first found its way into the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, recorded almost a thousand years ago. In a previous episode I talked about the ways in which we become disappointed very quickly with our new leaders, today we're taking a step further back as we investigate what happens in the build up to getting rid of the bad guy and replacing them with the knight in shining armour.

The reason these stories remain so popular is because they still resonate for us in the 21st century, It’s not difficult to see ourselves in each of the main characters in this story. You and I and almost everyone is the poor beautiful young princess, yes even me, a 67-year-old white bloke with hairy legs and an occasional weight problem.

The bad ruler, or ugly sister, or wicked stepmother represents a person we know who seems to have too much control over our lives. The knight in shining armour, in the fantasy that is this story, is the handsome young Amazon driver, here to deliver that control back to us.

Yes it’s a story, as believable as the fairies at the bottom of the garden who tell it. In reality more often than not it’s the lesser evil who still controls our lives but in a slightly less controlling way.

There are many ways in which Shakespeare approaches the story - there's the person who thinks they're the knight when they're clearly knot (sorry), sometimes there's more than one knight battling for the honour of the title, sometimes we just like the idea of a knight, other times there really is a knight but they don't win, and then there's the world where there's no such thing.

Is it all a bunch of fairy stories, a waste of time? Well, occasionally we really do all live happily ever after.

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