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.

We destroy icons - that's what we do.

My first professional job was appearing in a disastrous theatre production of Oh, What a Lovely War in Leicester Rep, shortly after leaving Cambridge.

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.

Life has a very simple plot: first you're here and then you're not.

Executives do not on the whole do well with comedy. They can't understand it, they can't read it, they can't spot it.

I don't necessarily know much about comedy, I don't spend a lot of time watching it. Mainly because all my life for about 50 years I've had comedy.