The problem with comedy audiences - it's like the Coliseum - when they see someone struggling, they don't feel altruistic towards them. They feel slightly repulsed by it.
I must be an anorexic because an anorexic looks in the mirror and sees a fat person.
Everyone in comedy thinks if you go to the U.S. you become a global star but, unfortunately, I've always been a bit anti-American - so I never did.
I have seen good nurses and bad nurses. They existed along a continuum: from hard-working, kind and competent people, to office-hugging, bone-idle types, to apathetic, disengaged automatons.
Does anyone really go into nursing intending to be apathetic, cold and removed from suffering? I find that very difficult to believe.
I have friends who vote Tory, and I'm appalled, but that's not to say they're not great people in so many other ways.
Some men are deeply likable but have attitudes I don't like. Does that mean I should completely dismiss them? It's like saying: if someone votes Tory can you like them? And, yes, I can. I have friends who vote Tory, and I'm appalled, but that's not to say they're not great people in so many other ways. We have a tendency to oversimplify things.
My dad's a very sensitive man, but as the archetypal rebellious teenager, I didn't realise that.
There are two types of people in this world: one who opens a packet of biscuits, has one and puts the rest back in the cupboard, and one who eats the whole packet in one go.
I'm not really a churchy person, although I do think Jesus was a good bloke.
I like reading, I like boring things, and yet I think people for ages had this image of me that I was on the tube with a chainsaw looking for any likely candidate.
The thing I thought about doing it was it's Comic Relief and you've got to be funny. So although I did try to sing properly it obviously has hilarious results when you can't sing.
I used to get nervous about three weeks before a gig... now I've managed to condense it down to a manageable ten minutes.
It wasn't a conscious effort to have kids later. It was just the way life goes.
I think actors go along a continuum from Simon Callow down to kind of Ross Kemp, and I like to think of myself as the Ross Kemp of comedy. He's very good in 'East Enders' because he plays a version of himself. I think I can play a version of myself - that's about all I can do.
I went on the pill when I was 16, put on four stone... so that proved to be a very effective contraceptive.
I find it difficult to judge myself, but people say that I have become a bit more socially acceptable over the years in terms of my material; which apparently at the beginning - though I never really intended it to be - was man hating and now is just a bit more cuddly.
I don't know really, it doesn't feel like it has changed to me but I think to have to move with the times. Try out different areas and not get stuck in 1978.
I have two brothers and we basically spent our lives playing in the woods, falling in ponds, getting chased by wasps and riding donkeys that we shouldn't have been riding.
I'm not a flag waver for obesity. It's not healthy, and you have a crap life because there is such a downer on it.
