If I wanted your opinion, I'd slap it outta ya.

Channel 4 are a great bunch of people to work with and the crew are lovely. Working at ITV was like being in the court of Caligula.

Comedy, your funny bone, is formed in childhood.

Every week I have a disaster in my kitchen. The fire alarm goes off repeatedly. But it doesn't stop me being adventurous.

I am quite happy to take a cut. You've got to, if you want to work and continue working.

I dress up as a middle-aged prostitute and do a game show.

I enjoyed school - although I ran away on the first day. I'd reminded the teacher that it was nearly time for 'Watch With Mother' on TV.

I go in the butchers and there's not a lot of meat I can eat these days, with having all the animals.

I love looking after animals. I find it very enjoyable.

It's become normal for me to walk on set as Popeye, Frankenstein or an Elf or even a chicken.

Taking a pay cut won't demotivate me, not at all. It's not about money in the first place. It's about the job.

The worst drivers are women in people carriers, men in white vans and anyone in a baseball cap. That's just about everyone.

Times are hard and friends are few.

I don't live with people, that's why my relationships last. I'm not romantic. Even when I was a teenager if somebody asked if they could hold my hand I'd say, - no, it's not heavy, I can hold it myself, thank you'.

I don't want to sound like Catherine Cookson but I've worked since I was eight, with a paper round and in a fruit and veg shop. Taking a pay cut won't demotivate me, not at all. It's not about money in the first place. It's about the job.

I was a really picky eater as a child. Because I was obsessed by Popeye, my mum and aunts would put my food in a can to represent spinach and we'd hum the Popeye tune and then I'd happily eat it.

My primary school teacher once poured a bottle of curdled school milk forcefully down my throat. Then I threw it up all over her suede shoes. I'd rather have drunk from the spittoon in Barney's barber shop.

Long before I was a writer, when I was just a haphazard reader and a dreamer of stories, I learnt about an influential book by Harold Bloom. 'The Anxiety of Influence', published in 1973 when I was five years old, is taken up with the terrifying influence of poets on each other.

Long before the arrival of reality TV - before speed cameras, before recording angels on buses and lampposts - I felt I was living in a country that already knew how to watch itself. It was journalism that held the responsibility for seeing who we were and noticing what we did.

Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will live in several places at once. That is both our curse and our charm.