I liked 35 and in both my novels that is the age of the lead characters. I tried making them my age but they just seemed to keep moaning about stuff.

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

I suppose the common idea of me is that I'm going to be someone who's hyper and cracking jokes all the time, but people who meet me are soon disabused of that notion.

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.

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

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

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.