My wife, Tania, is very big on dogs, so I'm always paying out to animal charities.

I like the idea of being out there regularly with an audience and with a funny gang of people. That's what I grew up with - doing television, doing shows every week.

Having little money to spend was a valuable learning experience. My schooling also shaped my work ethic because while other children were listening to the Goons, I was studying, which enabled me to go to Cambridge University.

I live in a Spanish-style hillside home in Los Angeles, California. I paid $900,000 in 1995. It's perhaps worth about $3m now. Thankfully, I paid off my mortgage before the crash because I could see it coming. I worried that I would be caught having to pay off a very high mortgage for a house I couldn't sell.

There's animals like us existing and thinking and giving interviews on Australian television.

They're a typical Hollywood audience. All the kids are on drugs and all the adults are on roller skates.

You initially become funny as a kid because you're looking for attention and love. Psychologists think that's all to do with mother abandonment. I think John Cleese has his depressions, and Terry Gilliam's the same. All of us together make one completely insane person.