Comedian

I had piano lessons for six months and got nowhere.

I don't know if you saw, in the first 'Celebrity Big Brother,' Jack Dee was in it, and tried to escape by digging a hole with a spoon. That just made me think: that approach would be perfect on 'Taskmaster' - trying to achieve something impossible with something mundane.

I've been sent somebody's heart in a jar. At that point, you're thinking, I'm not sure if I should be opening this!

We're not ashamed of the old stuff, but when you look back at the posters it does make you think: 'My God, six men and one woman.' Weirdly we didn't say 'that's wrong' and no one else did, either. It's been a really quick shift in the landscape of telly, which is brilliant.

The Fringe is by far my favorite time of year; I like everything about it. But there are people I know who are much more successful than me who don't enjoy it.

I haven't had nightmares for some time, but growing up 'Grotbags' certainly haunted my dreams.

I'm a jazz musician in that I have achieved Grade 3 on the French horn.

Comedy is getting more diverse - you can do anything on a stage now. It doesn't have to be just one man and a mic.

Mine is slightly ginger and patchy so it's not really a hipster beard.

I do quite often thank Frank Skinner because he agreed to do the very first series and that was a real stamp of approval.

I used to work as a logger, which is the lowest of the low, you just had to type up what happens.

Katherine Parkinson has got a classics degree from Cambridge yet is an idiot - in the best possible way.

TV is so expensive to make and these channels aren't necessarily rolling in money, that getting anything off the ground... they can't take that many risks.

There's lots of people I'd be keen to see doing things, someone like Jack Dee.

Mark Watson and Paul Sinha have been exactly the same - very, very clever, and very, very thick.

I live in a small village on the Norfolk coast, far from the Edinburgh festival.

I have pretty unsophisticated tastes; I enjoy the videos on 'You've Been Framed' a lot - I don't think there's much that's funnier than people falling over. I prefer that to Bill Hicks.

We try not to think, 'right, we need someone who is a weirdo, someone who is competitive.' We definitely want five very different brains, but it normally starts with one person. For example, with series five, we asked Bob Mortimer because he is one of my absolute heroes and we sort of built it around him.

People are a lot less weird than they might seem.

I'm quite proud that my bird-feeders are always full.