Comedian

'Death In Paradise' is my dream job - a fascinating character, great scripts, superb cast, and shooting in the Caribbean with French catering.

Children basically need one thing: to be played with.

I've never really had a plan. You never know what's going to happen.

Ricky Gervais has jokes about people with disabilities, but do I think that's a healthy thing? Yes, I really do, because he's chosen his targets very carefully, and he's thought about what he's doing.

Everyone was doing alternative comedy. I thought I'd distinguish myself by just telling jokes, with differing degrees of success.

For me, one of the things art has to examine is how to live your life, and unless it's doing that, it doesn't work for me.

Everything in politics is so stage-managed.

I've always loved science, but I was never going to make much of a contribution. I'm better off having science as a hobby.

It's my theory that comedy is going to die out in the year 6000.

This is a shameful thing to say, but I've never really got that 'grown-up' mind-set. I have to buy forks? Why?

More than anything, I enjoy making people laugh.

I'm prepared to try to talk to a very beautiful girl. I learned a fantastic secret, which is that the most beautiful woman in the room is not being spoken to because she's too intimidating. They're not looking for somebody beautiful; they're looking for somebody to amuse them.

Life is a mystery: you've just got to go with it.

I'm a huge fan of French comedy. The French play comedy in a slightly different way than we do: they play it with a sort of realism that we don't necessarily often do ourselves.

You need to take a little break sometimes. Then, hopefully, you get some more lead in your pencil, and you're raring to go again!

I go back to L.A. as often as I can, and even if I'm there on business, I always add on a few extra days for pleasure.

Being away from my family for six months a year - even if it was in the beautiful surroundings of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean - was just too hard.

Initially, the best thing about being in L.A. was the girls - they loved me. It was like being a pop star.

My enthusiasm for L.A. stems from my father, who was a lecturer in American literature at the University of Birmingham. Through his work, our family did several house swaps with L.A. families. It was a dreadfully daring thing to do in the early 1980s; there was no Internet, so you had no idea of what you were getting into.

Comedy is my proper job. It's what I should be doing, and when I do other bits like my science series, I miss it.