In 2005, the Iraq war was entering its third year and no one believed that we were going to find WMDs any more. The prewar claims of their certain existence were becoming an embarrassing joke, a big present we’d been offered that was getting ever later in showing up.
I suppose terrible things happen in the world all the time and some of them we feel a particular connection to and some of them we don’t.
You’ve got to trust the audience, and hopefully if you do interesting work you’ll get an audience that are interested and engaged. But if they go out thinking, ‘Ra-ra-ra, I wanna be like Malcolm Tucker,’ then at a certain point you can’t take responsibility for that person. That person’s just a moron.
There’s an underlying sense that your family should accord you a greater level of safety in your interactions with them. When that’s violated, it’s particularly brutalizing.
I never got to see inside No 10, but I did once go to Ann Widdecombe’s ministerial office under the Commons where she sat framed by two posters on her wall, one featuring a Technicolor foetus in an anti-abortion message, the other Garfield the Cat wryly musing, ‘The Diet Starts… Tomorrow.’
Standups always like the room cold, and if you’re shooting a sitcom live you want it a little bit chilly for the audience. I don’t know why – you’d have to ask a combination of an evolutionary psychologist and a building-maintenance man.
Hit shows are very difficult to achieve. You need to have everything just right – that’s what’s so terrifying.
There are lots of great characters in fiction who viewers and readers have engaged with that behave badly. Great characters can be unfaithful. They can lie and cheat.
When you talk to police communications staff and think about their job from an insider’s point of view, you can see they have to inch out along a razor’s edge every day. They have a duty to be honest. But there’s also a responsibility not to inflame.
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