I don't know really, it doesn't feel like it has changed to me but I think to have to move with the times. Try out different areas and not get stuck in 1978.

I have seen good nurses and bad nurses. They existed along a continuum: from hard-working, kind and competent people, to office-hugging, bone-idle types, to apathetic, disengaged automatons.

Managers of hospitals, over the years have been increasingly recruited from outside the health service and although their experience of running a supermarket chain might allow them to balance the books, it does not mean they have any insight into how a ward should be managed and patients best served.

The problem with comedy audiences - it's like the Coliseum - when they see someone struggling, they don't feel altruistic towards them. They feel slightly repulsed by it.

I thought I was funny as a kid.

I think actors go along a continuum from Simon Callow down to kind of Ross Kemp, and I like to think of myself as the Ross Kemp of comedy. He's very good in 'East Enders' because he plays a version of himself. I think I can play a version of myself - that's about all I can do.

My father was an engineer and my mother was a social worker, and they met as young socialists. That probably tells you everything you need to know about my attitude to money - I've never really been bothered about it.