To criticize a person for their race is manifestly irrational and ridiculous, but to criticize their religion, that is a right. That is a freedom.

Get that right, then- if you get the quality right, then the marketability or whatever; your ability to sell videos or your ability to earn money or whatever, will follow naturally. But try to be creatively lead rather than market lead. And that’s important to me.

I’m more critical of the films I make than anyone else.

Marketing is what gets you noticed, and that side of it something – this side of it, if you like, doing interviews – is the side of it that I least enjoy, and yet is 50% of the project.

But, actually, so many of the clerics that I’ve met, particularly the Church of England clerics, are people of such extraordinary smugness and arrogance and conceitedness who are extraordinarily presumptuous about the significance of their position in society.

I think you’re bound to get a sense of any character that you play. It’s not something you often do in comedy.

If you’re a serious actor, it’s when you know you’re going to die tomorrow that you really start to feel it.

I think I have an inner confidence that my tastes are pretty simple, that what I find funny finds a wide audience. I’m not particularly intellectual or clever or minority-focused in my creative instincts. And I’m certainly not aware of suppressing more sophisticated ambitions.

Apart from the fact that your physical ability starts to decline, I also think someone in their fifties being childlike becomes a little sad. You’ve got to be careful.

It’s a bit disconcerting being treated like Madonna.