Funny things tend not to happen to me. I am not a natural comic. I need to think about things a lot before I can be even remotely amusing.

I think in many ways Johnny English is a more believable character.

I find his films about as funny as getting an arrow through the neck and discovering there's a gas bill tied to it.

I'm as poor as a church mouse, that's just had an enormous tax bill on the very day his wife ran off with another mouse, taking all the cheese.

My personal problem is that I take the business of film-making so seriously that I find it very difficult to relax.

Confronting a stadium audience, you can't see the whites of their eyes. It's just an amorphous mass of noise and, of course, you can't see the alleged billions watching at home either, so the degree to which you are intimidated is quite low.

Having spent a substantial part of my career parodying religious figures from my own Christian background, I am aghast at the notion that it could, in effect, be made illegal to imply ridicule of a religion or to lampoon religious figures.