Steve Coogan has talked revealingly about his career in comedy in a new interview.

Talking to Kirsty Young for her Young Again show he chatted openly about his early days and his future.

He said he no longer feels as trapped by Alan Partridge as he once was: “Because I’ve had a degree of success with other areas, I now feel a little bit more relaxed. It freed me from Alan Partridge so that when I do Partridge now it's through choice, not cause I'm locked into this Alan Partridge-shaped cage.” 

He added: "Laughing is really important and it took me a while to realise that it is really important to be able to laugh in the most dire of circumstances.”

Coogan also said how important winning the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1992 was: "It was like I pulled off a heist. And I've had lots of Baftas over the years and I've had Oscar nominations, but nothing was as exciting as winning the Fringe award at the Edinburgh Festival. It's like a condensed life. The first show I had six people in the audience… Six. And then a week later, just through word of mouth, you've got 100, then you've got 200, which is the capacity of the venue. And you go from zero to hero really fast and everything changes. I wasn't doing any impersonations in it, and it's like, ‘I've won the show with the thing that people think I don't do’. So that mattered to me.”

And he confessed that he took a while to grow up and that when he was initially successul in his twenties he made the most of it: "I bought a sports car before I bought a washing machine...It was that sort of idiocy.”

Listen to the full interview here.

Steve Coogan is currently starring in a stage version of Dr Strangelove. Details here.