I never had any desire to be famous. I find people who do really sad. I genuinely feel sorry for them because there is nothing of substancein their lives. I am happy when I am writing or performing. Not when I sit there being "famous". I like recognition for my work, but not recognition for being "that bloke off the telly". It is genuinely humbling when a woman comes up to me, as someone did recently, to say she wanted to commit suicide after her husband died, and my show cheered her up and made her feel better. That's great.

That's what gives people hope - that you can still love someone from afar and you can still have those feelings across an ocean.

But with comedy it's a simple premise. If it's funny, people laugh. If it's not, they don't.

Hacking into a victim of crime's phone is a sort of poetically elegant manifestation of a modus operandi the tabloids have.

I like comedy, but I like comedy as a device in drama. It's more interesting for me to use comedy to seduce people into thinking about something serious. If you want to hit a beat in a drama, you can distract people with a little comedy, and you can punch them in the gut with some emotion.

I'm an entertainer. I don't go round saying I'm a paragon of virtue, so that is clearly not in the public interest.

I want my work to be judged, not me.