The monarchy is foremost a business and it's important to them that the British public continue to finance the excessive luxurious lifestyles of the now quite enormous wasteful and useless 'royal' family. I find it very sad.

You hear entertainers all the time saying 'If I couldn't get paid for this I'd do it for free.' When's the last time you ever heard a business person say 'If I couldn't get paid for being chairman of British Petroleum I'd do it for free'?

Liberalism is a really old British tradition and it has a completely different attitude towards the individual and the relationship between the individual and the state than the collectivist response of Labour and particularly Old Labour does.

I think it has something to do with being British. We don't take ourselves as seriously as some other countries do. I think a lot of people take themselves far too seriously I find that a very tedious attitude.

Britishness is just a way of putting things together and a certain don't care attitude about clothes. You don't care you just do it and it looks great.

I often find myself privately stewing about much British art thinking that except for their tremendous gardens that the English are not primarily visual artists and are in nearly unsurpassable ways literary.

The British political system and the whole clapped out Westminster architecture and the language that we use about politics it's completely unsustainable. You either decide to be part of that transition to do something different. Or you cling to old certainties.

On banks I make no apology for attacking spivs and gamblers who did more harm to the British economy than Bob Crow could achieve in his wildest Trotskyite fantasies while paying themselves outrageous bonuses underwritten by the taxpayer. There is much public anger about banks and it is well deserved.

What's amazing is that I'm recognized all over the world through 'Red Dwarf.' British fans are exceptional but the American fans are something else. Some of them fly 500 miles to stand in line for three hours just to meet me then when they do they collapse. It makes you feel like a rock star!

With most British actors it's amazing. I think they start with the character on the outside and work in.