 I don't want to do the same thing over and over again. |
| One thing that's coming up a lot is: are you as grumpy as you appear from this Black Books thing. |
| If I hadn't done this I might have ended up digging the roads. |
| 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 trend now is to get away from stage bound sitcoms. |
| Black Books adheres to a more old fashioned, traditional sitcom format, which I think works, because in its own way, it's quite theatrical. |
| Yeah, I think Michael has had to deal with that label of being Michael Caine for a long time. |
| We are both drawn to surreal situations so the writing was a joy. |
| I think a lot of the time you just parody yourself. |
| The characters can't be wittier than people are in real life. They have to be character witty. |
| I have a very low level of recognition, which is fine by me. |
| You achieve the surreal jokes through the realism by making it elastic. |
| I thought The Office was good, though I didn't think of it as a sitcom, just as a very good programme. |
| I don't really think of myself as an actor. |
| 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. |
| The truth is that I'm constitutionally incapable of doing an ordinary job. |
| 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. |
| In the same way, there is some creature gnawing away inside of me, urging me to do things in different ways. |
| Showing off seemed to me to be a highly valuable and necessary activity when I was 20. |
| 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. |
