Most people I was at school with, if they saw me on telly, wouldn't know I'd been at school with them.
I'm not one of those stand ups that's going to write a show about a big subject or try and tell you about the death of a parent or something.
I moved to London when I was 21 and I needed a job. I'd just done a year working in Waterstones in Manchester and I was looking for any old job. This advertisement came up for an editorial assistant on Dora the Explorer Magazine. Because I'd been working in the Children's Department in a bookshop for a year I just nailed the interview.
The great thing about stand up is you get to do other things. You get to do your stand up tours but you also get to do 'Have I Got News For You.' You get to do a sitcom, but you also get to do the 'Great British Bake Off: An Extra Slice.' I'm easily bored, so I like the variety.
No, I never really set out to be a stand up. I wanted to be a writer of some sort. I thought I'd do a bit of stand up and hopefully that will lead to stuff and little did I know it kind of snowballed. Before I knew it I was doing stand up 300 nights a year.
What sitcom's brilliant at is identifying a social movement or type and skewering it.
I think the moment you're convinced something's going to be good is the moment that it's not going to be.
I've learnt that from stand-up - you should always worry that it's going to go badly, otherwise you're too laissez faire.
I think to keep yourself fresh, you need to try different things.
The great thing about a pilot is you can make your mistakes and no-one sees them... Or they see them on iPlayer and it gets taken off a year later, to be disposed of or whatever's happened to it.
I would never ever want to be an actor playing anyone other than myself. I can't do voices or anything. No, it's not for me. There are lots of people who are trained actors and I feel it's offensive for me to do it.
I'd hope that when Channel 4 started, 'The Last Leg' was the kind of show it wanted to be putting out. I think they're really proud of it.
