Growing up, I was always enthralled by Ronnie Barker. He made my dad howl with laughter, which always intrigued me, and he had the rare gift of being as good a performer as he was a writer.

In my career, all my most important breaks have come from Edinburgh. Winning awards, being reviewed, bagging my BBCR4 series and the chance to tour has all come from Edinburgh, which begs the question, why the hell have I left it so long to come back?

As a parent, I often wonder what I should be encouraging my kids to do for a career.

My job is to make people laugh. If I've upset them instead, then I haven't done my job properly.

The debt and the deficit is just getting out of control, and the administration is still pumping through billions upon trillions of new spending. That does not grow the economy.

I've never been in this business to make money. I've always been in it to make good music.

I had to dance topless for two years to make cash to pay my bills and save some money. But it was very enlightening, by the way. I'm talking about light from the gutter.

A painting lets us know how somebody literally saw things. A piece of music is another language that transmits a whole wealth of emotion and wordless experience. But writing is special in the way at allows us to temporarily enter another person's world, to step outside the boundaries of our own time and space.