Showing off seemed to me to be a highly valuable and necessary activity when I was 20.

I don’t really think of myself as an actor.

If I hadn’t done this I might have ended up digging the roads.

I thought The Office was good, though I didn’t think of it as a sitcom, just as a very good programme.

I think that women just have a primeval instinct to make soup, which they will try to foist on anybody who looks like a likely candidate.

I have no qualifications to do anything else and there weren’t any formal application forms you had to fill in for stand-up, so I thought I’d give that a twist.

I never thought I want to do anything, really, except not go to work properly and turn up at the same place every day and eat sandwiches in the same canteen, if I can possibly help it, as I don’t think I’d be very good at it.

I don’t want to do the same thing over and over again.

Black Books adheres to a more old fashioned, traditional sitcom format, which I think works, because in its own way, it’s quite theatrical.

One thing that’s coming up a lot is: are you as grumpy as you appear from this Black Books thing.

In the same way, there is some creature gnawing away inside of me, urging me to do things in different ways.

The trend now is to get away from stage bound sitcoms.

The truth is that I’m constitutionally incapable of doing an ordinary job.

I have a very low level of recognition, which is fine by me.

We are both drawn to surreal situations so the writing was a joy.

Yeah, I think Michael has had to deal with that label of being Michael Caine for a long time.

You achieve the surreal jokes through the realism by making it elastic.

Showing off seemed to me to be a highly valuable and necessary activity when I was 20.

I’m actually about as famous as a fourth division footballer from the 70s.

I think a lot of the time you just parody yourself.

It’s true that I have spoken about doing a book before, but then everyone you speak to is planning to write a book.

The characters can’t be wittier than people are in real life. They have to be character witty.

You try various things when you’re growing up. I was an attache in the Foreign Service for a while and then I drove a bulldozer, but neither of those panned out for me so it had to be stand-up.