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 don't think people were that interested in what I was doing for the most of the 1990s.

It seems easier to make a career out of comedy now than it was in the 1980s.

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

As a comic, you try something and if it works you go with it and grind it to death.

It always seemed to be a constant that my parents were political.

Even a blind dog can find a bone every so often.