You know, people tend to get stereotyped for about forty percent of their behavior, so if you're completely crazy forty percent of the time you'll get stereotyped as crazy, even if you're totally boring thirty percent of the time and just studious the other thirty percent of the time.

When you start off with your first book, people assume that you're like all the characters in the book - and it does complicate things, when you're being constantly bombarded with it, but you have to embrace it.

The dead man is on the trolley and the woman collapses across his chest. That's what the ghouls want a shufti at, like at that Princess Diana's funeral, they want to scrutinise those who really knew her, to drink the misery out of their faces.

If I stop working and publishing, and TV, and film and all that, I would be dead within a couple of weeks. I don't really have that kind of off-switch.

What worries me is the professionalism of everything.

I think the media in America have been absolutely fantastic about the rise of Trump, they've kept a firm eye on the ball: this constitutes democracy, this constitutes transparency, this constitutes fairness, this constitutes the way to behave in a civic society, this constitutes fascism, this constitutes authoritarianism. They're drawing that line, and they're calling him out every time. That's really what needs to happen, and you just have to do that.

Their [BBC] idea of bipartisanship is to try not to offend the Conservative party, try not to offend the Labour party.There is no analysis of anything beyond that, and these two parties are exactly identical, following the same Neoliberal policies for thirty years. And it's no criticism outside of that, it's just that there's basically sectarian pandering to these two individual parties, these two individual organisations. They still make a lot of great programmes and do a lot of great things, but there's not much political analysis happening broader to that.