COMEDIAN and writer Stewart Lee has backed the campaign to save Gloucestershire libaries from cutbacks.

Mr Lee, who has created four series for BBC TV as one half of ‘Lee and Herring’, as well as his own show ‘Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle’, sent a message of support to the Friends of Gloucestershire Libraries.

In it the co-writer of “Jerry Springer:The Opera” said: “William Tyndale, a Gloucestershire man, made the bible available in English for ordinary people for the first time ever, and the skyline of the county is crowned with a monument to him. How sad that Gloucestershire itself should now be making such backward steps in the provision of the written word for everyone”.

Other supporters of the campaign to stop the county libraries’ budget being cut by 43 per cent include Cotswold author Joanna Trollope, Children's Laureate Anthony Browne, and locally-based authors John Dougherty, Alison Weir and Alice Jolly.

Friends of Gloucestershire Libraries chairman Johanna Anderson said: “We are delighted to have received this support from Stewart, and from others who have voiced their concerns about the cuts in library services that we are facing.”

In an article in the Guardian last week, Ms Trollope, attacked the proposed axing of the county’s mobile library service.

“The cutting of mobile libraries leaves me speechless. There isn’t a rural county as big as Gloucestershire in England without a library van,” she wrote.

FoGL handed the county council a 10,600-signature petition calling for an urgent, independent review of its plans.