6. What do your parents/children (delete as applicable) think of your job?
A reasonable and healthy ambivalence probably.
7. What’s the worst thing about being a comedian?
I find the sharp transition from having a lovely gig with lovely people to running for the last train that is full of angry drunks displeasing.
8. I think you are very good at what you do (that’s why I’m asking these questions). What do you think of you?
A lot of the time I see myself as a failure. I see the famous and feted people regularly on TV and in big theatres and think what a schmuck I am, but sometimes I think I am okay and I remind myself that some people who have come to the gigs I have done have found useful and helpful things in them.
9. How much do you earn and how much would you like to earn?
Obviously it was very different in 2020 and this year, but I earn enough that I could get through the pandemic so far without having to panic which makes me very fortunate. In normal years, I earn enough to take at least two seaside holidays where there is crazy golf (Hastings obviously choice number one) and buy the books I want. I would like it if there wasn't quite such a disparity between pay for TV and radio - I worked out that I need to write and present about 60 episodes of The Infinite Monkey Cage to earn what a headliner on Live at the Apollo used to get for 10 minutes on TV.
10. How important is luck in terms of career success – have you had lucky breaks?
I think you increase your luck by saying yes to as many things as you can - I have had good fortune and created lots of weird and niche things and the more I have created and the more risks I have taken the more directions I have been able to go in.
11. Alan Davies has said that comedians fall into two categories - golfers and self-harmers. The former just get on with life, the latter are tortured artists. Which are you – or do you think you fit into a third category?
Category 2 sadly, though as golf is the alternative option it is probably for the best. I have a relentless ability to find the anxiety however well-hidden it is. I might be able to change to a golfer if it was a round with Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne from Dead of Night or Christopher Lee.
12. Who is your favourite person ever and why – not including family or friends or other comedians?
My pal Carl - when Brian Cox was off at the Albert Hall doing a black tie event to celebrate its 150 years and other people I knew were at the prestigious South Bank Awards, I was with Carl at the Aldi in Burnage making hard decisions about which bottle of Rosé to buy. I knew where I belonged most and was happy to be there.
13. Do you keep your drawers tidy and if not why not? (please think long and hard about this question, it's to settle an argument with my girlfriend. The future of our relationship could depend on your response).
It is chaos - drawers are not for order, they are for things that you have no space to put anywhere else. They are opened once a year in the hope that I will decide that some of the unopened boxes of floppy disks or cables for long extinct technology should be discarded, but they never are, just in case.
Buy tickets for Brian Cox and Robin Ince's Christmas Compendium of Reason at the Royal Albert Hall on December 14 here.
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