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

For telling a good and incisive religious joke, you should be praised. For telling a bad one, you should be ridiculed and reviled. The idea that you could be prosecuted for the telling of either is quite fantastic.

I consider myself more of a visual comedian than a physical one.

The Maigret stories are all very different in terms of the content and the way that the stories are told. They're not what I would call formulaic.

What directors of television drama constantly tell you is 'Don't act it. Don't try. Don't emphasise that word'. Whereas with someone like Blackadder, even though he's a relatively low key character in a way, he did relish the lines that he had and the words that he was given, with a lot of inflection.

[Maigret Sets a Trap] was always going to be the first film, and it seemed to be quite a nice story. But of course it meant that here I was playing this new character for the first time, in a place where he had been a relative failure, as all these people had been murdered and the pressure was on. Rather than starting optimistically with his pipe in front of the fireplace, he was in quite a difficult place.

[Georges] Simenon could be very brave like that. You never quite know what you're going to get or how the story's going to be told.