To this day, I feel a fierce warmth for women that have the same disregard for the social conventions of sexual protocol as I do. I love it when I meet a woman and her sexuality is dancing across her face, so it's apparent that all we need to do is nod and find a cupboard.

I've always been a 'your parents have got to come up to the school' type of person. Even now, when I do something wrong - if I say something inappropriate on a live tv show, for example - I half expect to have to deliver a note to Barbara Brand: 'Please come up to Channel 4 head office, Russell's done something despicable.

No-one really feels self-confident deep down because it's an artificial idea. Really, people aren't that worried about what you're doing or what you're saying, so you can drift around the world relatively anonymously: you must not feel persecuted and examined. Liberate yourself from that idea that people are watching you.

It seems to me that actual democracy is where all of us get to participate and it's not just a sort of a blunt little dry hump in a ballot box, but an actual penetrative process.

It would have been convenient to be gay. Just because of the grooming, the narcissism, stuff like that. But I have this kind of roaring heterosexuality. Traditional, uncomplicated heterosexuality, an almost cliched Robin Askwith thing.

When you fall in love you recognise you're not the most important person in the world, and your focus becomes another person.

Surfing should be called "foam-choking" or "sea stabbing.