I once saw a picture in the paper of John Hegley with 'poet' written on his knuckles, and I thought that was pretty cool, so I was quite up front about it.

Now that I've had a book published, it is quite validating, but a bit embarrassing.

It would have been very easy to drift into writing a non-fiction book so by taking it away from Nottingham I forced myself to imagine much more of it.

It takes a lot of energy and creativity to make such screwed up lives carry on. And the kind of will people have to survive, year after year, dealing with that stuff, is weirdly impressive.

Money is tighter now, with the advertising dollar spread a lot more thinly across a whole range of media because of the Internet. It means the television networks have less power to produce shows, and TV is where most Australian actors make their money.

I know there are a lot of comics that put their kids all over social media, but I think it's weird. There are over 100,000 people following you. To me, it feels like you should probably tone that down.

I'm over here with the French counterterrorism experts talking about the 'Charlie Hebdo' case, how we can stop foreign fighters from coming out of Iraq and Syria to Europe, but then we have this phenomenon in the United States where they can be activated by the Internet, and, really, terrorism has gone viral.

If it was Europe, I just picked a country that I hadn't been to, but I didn't try to check up on what was going on in the country or anything like that. I just went and had a good time and met a lot of very nice people who are still my friends.