But as in all cults, what's central to the Communist Party is the belief system and the elimination of nuance. From there you're very slowly led down the road to fanaticism and mass murder.

If sitcoms were easy to write, there'd be a lot of good ones, and there aren't.

Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, may have had his charms, but he really couldn't be considered hip.

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

Now, as a comic, if you're vaguely amusing you can go straight into TV, then you play the O2 and then everyone's sick of you.

I did six series for the BBC and that was enough. I've been writing for ten years, which is more challenging artistically.

But as in all cults, what's central to the Communist Party is the belief system and the elimination of nuance. From there you're very slowly led down the road to fanaticism and mass murder.