Most of my friends are women - I quite fancied being a woman in a way.

I wanted to write about how people's beliefs shift.

The optimum frequency with which comedians should do a series is every year. I do one every three years. My audience is literally dying off.

I have a lot of nice Italian winter clothes that make me look like a sophisticated Lebanese professor, so my friend Robert and I go around pretending to be experts in Arabic politics. It doesn't work in the summer though. I don't have the right clothes.

I exist as an annexe of the BBC. I'm down the road a bit from the main building, in a little hut.

People used to think I was just a shouty comic but I was doing stuff about Sartre.

For me, the showbiz memoir is uninteresting - you want to tell people something they don't know about.