Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Me and my sister made up a game called 'Milky Cow'. We were on holiday in France when I was 12, and there was a kid who had bovine features, and every time we went past her, we'd say, 'There's Milky Cow'.
One day I woke up, had an early mid-life crisis, and decided it all had to change. I went and did Logan Murray's comedy course for 11 weeks and then started sneakily doing open-spot gigs, and that was it.
Some of my friends in this business have received awful online abuse, but I've so far pretty much avoided it - and I've largely avoided meeting hideous people in the street. Most people tend to be charming.
If you're doing a job, and you secretly want to do a different job, you start to blame the job. I was blaming the teaching for that fact I wasn't performing. I really felt I needed to follow a comedy career.
I have no system of writing. It's chaos. I could be upside down on my bedroom floor; I'll be scribbling on a pad that I'll then lose. I'll be on the toilet with my laptop on, sitting in the pub with my iPad.
The truth is, I should have never done teaching. I did teaching because I didn't have the bottle to have a go at comedy. Whether there's any gain to comedy is not for me to say. But certainly it was no loss to teaching.
I was a drama teacher, so I had the opportunity to show off in front of a captive audience. I essentially did 13 years of stand-up. Whether my pupils would agree that I was remotely interesting or not is another question.
Humour is learned behaviour, and I know exactly why I learned to be funny. I did it from a very early age. My dad was a hilarious man, and the way we interacted was being silly together. It was a way to hold his attention.
One of my friend calls me 'lost to showbiz', but that's only because I don't go for a drink as often as he'd like, because I'm always working. I've met very few famous people who are lost to showbiz - I have met some, mind.
I rather like finding out instantly whether you've been successful or not. It's a cliche, really, but the fact is that every gig is different: it's a live event, and you're with a different group of individuals every night.
Carla Lane's 'Butterflies' seemed to be on in our house at all times when I was a kid, as did 'The Good Life.' But it was 'Fawlty Towers that made me really sit up for the first time. Basil's incandescent rage made me howl.
I was a very young 21-year-old. I was very scared. I spent three years at university in west London, and I went into central London three times. I came from Shropshire, and just having travelled that far was enough ambition.
'Man Down' is not a serious study of the human condition: it is a balls-out attempt at making people laugh. So nobody in the show can afford to cling on to any vanity, because we're always going to push the humiliation levels.
My dad is the funniest human being I've ever met in my life - for years, I'd watch him hold court in whatever situation he was in; he was the most amazing raconteur. I often feel I've hijacked what should have been his career.
I grew up in Shropshire, but I was born in Wales. There was a hospital seven miles away, but my dad drove 45 miles over the Welsh border so I could play rugby for Wales. But as a skinny asthmatic, I was only ever good at swimming.
It's a strange thing when someone passes away. It's always when you're not expecting it that you're affected by it. When we first started filming, we were filming with existing characters in a location that we'd never been before.
When I was 17, my dad was teaching in the States. He hired an A-Team-style van, and we drove all over. My resounding memory of it was that we saw all these wonderful places but that my sister and I were being horrible, sulky teenagers.
I tend to develop my rambling anecdotes by actually getting up and performing them. That's the joy/horror of stand up - if you have the germ of an idea that you think might be funny, there is a way of finding out if it's funny very quickly.
People often tell me that they have no idea how I can do standup. The idea of trying to make a large group of strangers laugh is, for many, absolutely petrifying - and it is - but there are ways of gradually developing the material that can ease the fear.
I would spend a lot of time setting up an accident scene where it appeared that I had seriously hurt myself - hedge-cutter, ketchup, that sort of thing. When my sister happened upon the scene of horror, I would lift my head and pathetically plead for her to 'get Mum'.
My dad always told me that, as far as he's concerned, I can do whatever I choose in life as long as I'm happy and can handle the consequences of bad decisions. He only ever said that when he thought I was doing the wrong thing. I would employ similar passive aggression.
It often occurs to me that this is a strange way to make a living. But it's wonderful, too. There are many ways to read maturity, and I'm not fighting the instinct to simply enjoy that kind of nonsense. I love that someone would pay me to draw on somebody else's bottom.
I once bought some enormous fireworks that were literally the size of sticks of dynamite. We would go into the field behind our house, slide them into the biggest cow pats we could find, and blow them sky high. It was exhilarating and, for the cows, incredibly confusing.
'Man Down''s my absolute priority. If they give me another series, I'll throw everything into it because I really like the characters. But after that, I'll certainly be getting back on stage because I haven't done a proper gig for two years. Which is ridiculous for someone who loves it so much.
Myself and some kids on our estate became obsessed with the creation of the ultimate go-kart. This ambition culminated in the creation of a six-man super-cart, which was essentially a plank of wood with four wheels, and a failed attempt to jump a tributary of the River Severn powered only by Rex, our dog.
It's an irony that with the physical decline of age comes more mental wellbeing. It's life's cruel trick. You've settled down as a person, you feel happier with who you are, and then you get a massive swollen prostate and have to go for a test every two weeks. It's life's way of saying the struggle isn't over.
When you're trying to enter something as intimidating as comedy, starting out with a support network of likeminded people is a powerful thing. It was natural we'd end up working together because we went through those first petrifying moments together. We created gigs for each other, slapped each other on the back, and protected each other.
Every time I travel, I'm in a rage until I reach my destination. I find myself shouting at suitcases, as if it's their fault that I'm an inefficient packer. I've also learnt that whenever you despair of humanity and start thinking that you hate people - as I frequently do - you only have to travel to realise that people are basically all right.