Although I had good hand-eye coordination, I was so tall and skinny and muscularly weak that I just was not well coordinated. But what I started to do quite early on was watch some of the great old silent comedians, like Laurel and Hardy and Chaplin, and then later on Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton.

The English contribution to world cuisine: the chip.

What is absurd is not the teachings of the founders of religion, it's what followers subsequently make of it.

If life were fair, Dan Quayle would be making a living asking 'Do you want fries with that?'

English television from the Fifties to the Nineties was the least bad in the world, and now it's just as bad as it is anywhere.

Because, as we all know, it’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking. And it’s also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we’re not so sure about.

The writing is the most important bit, and performing it is just closing the circle because I'm less likely to screw it up than anyone else.