A movie is a miracle, even if it turns out to be a disappointment.

One of the wonderful things about Portlandia - and I'm not just blowing smoke, although I can blow smoke, but I'm not - is that there is an expansive feeling to each segment. It's not reductive. It doesn't seem like sketch comedy.

In the steel-and-glass society that we live in, the value system would be that the lawyer, with the Mercedes and the fine suit and the Ivy League education, was more valued than the minority without the education. But on the island, the rules are changed. It's the person who can make a fire or who can make friends. A kind human soul is valued.

The Ranger who trained me at the time was [American] Major Buck Kernan, who became Supreme Allied Commander. I hadn't spoken to him in a few years, but he reached out to me and said, "I'm so proud of you."

When we went to war at the Falklands, Buck Kernan had to shake each man's hand as we boarded a boat for war.

I watched American TV shows: Starsky & Hutch, Dallas, Rockford Files, Bonanza. And for many summers growing up, I worked on my aunt and uncle's farm in East Anglia. Down the street was an American cemetery for the Second World War, and every Memorial Day an American bomber would fly over that cemetery and drop rose petals.

I was a section commander in the parachute regiment [in the British army].