It certainly helps, I think, with some actors to understand the process of acting. You see what extraordinary pressure they're under, there's a huge circus dedicated to a particular moment and they're got to deliver and it can help that you, even if empathetically alone, understand what they're doing.

It's not easy to take a sit-com and turn it into a feature.

The decision to do it [play Maigret] was related to the fact that the character is a very ordinary man, and generally speaking I haven't played very many ordinary men.

The first couple of weeks of filming were quite tricky for me to find my feet with the character [Maigret], which wasn't helped by the story that we were telling.

It's the demand in many ways of modern television drama - it's very low key and naturalistic, and, generally speaking, the characters that I've played have not been low key and naturalistic.

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.

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