Marcel Theroux is a British novelist, journalist and documentary film-maker. He was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1968, and grew up in Wandsworth, south London. After graduating from Clare College Cambridge, he studied international relations at Yale University, specialising in Soviet and east European studies. He has presented several award-winning documentaries, including Oligart – The Great Russian Art Boom and Unreported World for Channel 4, but is best known for his novels A Stranger in the Earth, The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes and last year's acclaimed Strange Bodies, now in paperback.

Television: Inside No 9

A terrific series of six stand-alone 30-minute comedy drama films, sort of like a modern take on Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected. They are dark, they are weird, they are funny, they are beautifully made and beautifully acted. The conceit is that each takes place in a house numbered 9, every house being on a different street. One is set entirely in a cupboard during a prolonged game of sardines at a garden party. It's like Festen (the Danish social satire) reimagined by the Monty Python crew.

Books: The Disenchanted by Budd Schulberg

This has just been reprinted. Budd Schulberg is best known for writing On the Waterfront, but The Disenchanted is a novel about his time co-writing a crappy, campus-based, comedy-musical with an ageing and impoverished F Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood in the early 1930s. By that time Fitzgerald was a broken-down alcoholic; his literary career had hit the skids. He and Schulberg were sent to a New Hampshire college to research the book. Fitzgerald was on the wagon but his dad gave them a bottle of champagne and this caused Fitzgerald to go on this epic bender and the whole thing turned into an absolute shambles. He was dead six months to a year later. It's a superb portrait of a great, great artist in tragic decline. Anyone with a true interest in Fitzgerald should read it. It is as close as you will ever get to actually meeting the man.

Leisure: swimming in Tooting Bec lido

I have been swimming there for two years now. It is unheated pool and I swim through the whole year. This winter, as you can imagine, it has been unbelievably cold. Doing it on the freezing days makes you truly appreciate the sunny days. I think Tooting Bec lido is one of the great jewels of London. It is beautiful in itself – this vast expanse of bright blue water in the heart of south London – but its beauty is enhanced by the bizarre collection of people, of which I am proud to say I am one, who swim there every day, no matter what the weather.

Games: Hero Kids

When I was a kid I was a massive Dungeons and Dragons nerd. I recently discovered Hero Kids, which is an online Dungeons and Dragons for small kids, age five and upwards I think. And I play it with my children. I think role-playing games have not been given their due. They really do stretch the creative imagination. A considerable amount of art can probably be attributed to playing Dungeons and Dragons at an early age, not least the art of the contemporary computer game that owes a lot of its conventions and scenarios to Dungeons and Dragons. For my children it is wonderful because you really do see them immersing themselves in the world and the characters.

Place: Crimea

I wanted to mention Crimea as it is beautiful and extraordinary, and is now in the news for pretty awful reasons. Anyway, it had me thinking of the recent horse meat scandal. One of the strange effects was that all of a sudden there was a jump in the demand for horse meat; people read about it and decided they wanted to try it. I am hoping this awful news does something similar for Crimea. I have been there on a number of occasions and have really fallen in love the place. It has huge mountains, great beaches and amazing architecture. Chekhov had a home here. There are also some superb Crimean wines, alongside some real gut rot, but nonetheless I think there is something inherently appealing about Crimean wine. It has incredible Tatar palaces and most famously and mindbogglingly the Vorontsov Palace, which was commissioned by an anglophile and is a classical design heavily modified by an Odessa architect called Francesco Boffo – it's part Scottish baronial, part Mughal. And it sits in these amazing landscaped German gardens and woods. It is a testimony to the extraordinarily diverse cultural influences Ukraine has enjoyed.

Museum: The British Museum

I am a member of the British Museum and it is one of my favourite places in the world – always surprising and spooky. You can wander around it and come across an entire civilisation you had no idea existed, and yet it produced art and had a legal system, and wars and peace. I sometimes wonder if our own civilisation could end up like that, as a sort of museum peace unknown to all but a few academics. It's very humbling, as it emphasises our own insignificance in the grand scheme of things. I am really looking forward to the new Viking exhibition. As a child I read Myths of the Norsemen by Roger Lancelyn Greenand became obsessed with Vikings. As an adult I love Viking sagas. It is said to debunk our view of Vikings as bunch of savage marauders that arrived in their longboats and killed monks. The problem is people always say this about Viking exhibitions, then you go and discover that despite the publicity the Vikings were indeed a bunch of savage marauders who arrived in longboats and killed monks. But I am not going to allow that to put me off. The British Museum is always a joy.