Julian Barratt

“Laughter's good, but it's not love. It's one aspect. One emotion you're eliciting from your audience.”

“When things start running a bit too well on the tracks, I tend to derail them if I can.”

“I don't do stand-up anymore.”

“I ran off stage at my first gig. Halfway through it, I forgot my lines and didn't know what to do, so I just ran out of the building down towards a lake. I was going to throw myself in, but the compere came out and said, 'No, it's going well, come back and finish the gig!'”

“Life without music would be a mistake.”

“We used to have to convince people we were funny, and it didn't always work.”

“I'm not a natural comic, I don't think. That's why I gave up stand-up. It was hard. It involved a lot of death. Dying. Dying on stage. But it's one of those jobs you can only learn by doing it.”

“People can see that we are part of a tradition of absurd comedy, stretching from Spike Milligan and Peter Cook through to Monty Python and Vic Reeves. We're not like Ricky Gervais's hyper-real cringe comedy. We're at the other end of the scale, but there's room for the sillier stuff, too.”

“Adapting a book doesn't mean the book stops just because you've made a film out of it.”

“We should send a load of bad celebrities to colonise Mars. They would have to mate in space, and then their children would be sent back to Earth in 50 years' time.”

“Films do have suspense and tensions and scares and jumps, and I like to write things that have both in them, comedy and horror, but sometimes they are hard to balance.”

“I like the countryside. I like chopping wood. I'd like to be a carpenter.”

“With something that's not based just in comedy, you can be a bit weirder in a slightly realistic way.”

“I have trouble keeping a lid on the self-hatred.”

“If the 'Boosh' was a bit more of a specific thing, or less multi-limbed, we would probably have done it and moved on.”

“I was going to be a jazz-fusion guitarist. I came to London at one point with my mate, and we were going to make it. We spent three days there and went back home to our mummies.”

“I find the pressure to be funny when you're being interviewed live - quite intense.”

“I don't like talking about myself; I'm not good at analysing myself. I don't want to analyse myself.”

“I miss quite major cultural signposts quite often.”

“I remember films I made at university, which are unbelievably pretentious. Poetry that I'd written that I delivered to camera, against a Venetian blind, strong shadows, looking slightly off-camera.”