I actually very rarely see comedy myself, and although I admire the work of some comics, it does come from all over, so I’ll get a charge out of some fiction writers and poets.

When did you ever hear of a child not in need? 'Oh that's enough jam tart for me, I'll just go now and clean the toilets.'

I know there's similar dissatisfaction in America. There's a lot of white people who come from blue collar backgrounds and who feel ill-equipped and badly served by modern economics and the modern job market.

I think of myself as a theatre comic instead of club comic because I tend to talk for a bit before I start being funny. I don't really do the one-liners and five second bits or whatever. But it's good to work stuff out sometimes.

One thing that's coming up a lot is: are you as grumpy as you appear from this Black Books thing.

People will kill you over time, and how they'll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like 'be realistic.'

What is universal can be surprising. Over time you find the kind of stuff which has people thinking 'That is just something that occurred to me there's something wrong with me', is in fact stuff that is universal.