My name is Alexei Yuri Gagarin Siege of Stalingrad Glorious Five Year Plan Sputnik Tractor Moscow Dynamo Back Four Balowski. Me Dad was a bit of a Communist, know what I mean?

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.

Israel is the Jimmy Saville of nation states.

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

I think that my ideas of the world are that it's random and cruel but kind of quite comical really, and therefore the humour, in a sense, springs from that.

Most of the Communists I knew were nice people.

There's a part of me that still hates everything, and my natural view default setting is still very cynical and dark