I don't really have plans like that [move towards more dramatic acting].

To criticise a person for their race is a manifestly irrational and ridiculous. But to criticise their religion - that is a right. That is a freedom.

Johnny English is someone who really means well it's just that he's not as good as he thinks he is, and I think that maybe that's the British male in a nutshell.

We still have a tradition certainly in English television; it's faded a bit in the last five years, but we still have a tradition where the important thing is the quality and the challenging nature of the programming.

Look, if I'd wanted a lecture on the rights of man, I'd have gone to bed with Martin Luther.

[Maigret] is terribly self-contained, not that I would ever wish him to be any more comic, particularly, but in the second film we've made you see he's a little more ironic from time to time. But as I say, that's just work in progress.

But, actually, so many of the clerics that I've met, particularly the Church of England clerics, are people of such extraordinary smugness and arrogance and conceitedness who are extraordinarily presumptuous about the significance of their position in society.