Vic Reeves

“I love clothes and going to supermarkets. I spend hours walking around the aisles looking at ingredients.”

“I think everyone has to have some kind of hiatus at some point, if only for people to get nostalgic and remember. Then it comes back with a bigger bang. In the meantime, you have to keep busy doing other things.”

“I pretended to be dead in front of a pig once, because I heard that they snuffle you, they try and wake you up, to check if you really are dead. And if you are dead, they eat you, but they like having a little prod first.”

“I've been accident-prone since I was a kid climbing trees and falling out. I've come off a few motorcycles.”

“If we tried to analyse our comedy, we might stop being any good at it.”

“People think I'm a keen birdwatcher, but I don't go out of my way to look at birds. I'm not Bill Oddie. But I do know which are which. I keep my eyes open.”

“When I was young I was shy around girls and never found it easy to talk to them.”

“Ant & Dec have always nicked stuff off us. We met their writers, they said they just trawl our stuff and adapt it. The problem is they're a lot bigger than us, so people think we're copying them.”

“What's that one that people seem to like so much? 'Fleabag.' I watched that and it was that sort of Oxbridge 'Oh, I'm so clever and witty, aren't I?' I don't like that stuff. But then I don't like 'Mrs Brown's Boys' either. I like things that are clever but hide it.”

“If anything had happened to Bob, I wouldn't have carried on. Me and Bob are a comedy unit.”

“If you do a double act for 30 years you kind of get a psychic thing going so you know what the other person's move is and what they're going to say and kind of predict... and you can send psychic messages.”

“Timidity has followed me throughout the years.”

“There's not really a gap between my comedy and my art; it's all the same thing.”

“When I was at art school we used to make films, and we had a really very realistic manikin that we threw off a bridge, and a car nearly crashed. We all had to clear off really quickly.”

“I have a look for everything I do. No matter what I do, I try to dress the part. In the garden, I'd wear vintage Levi's, because they do a thick corduroy trouser and mine have got patches on them. So I'd wear them. And a tweed jacket. The full look.”

“You have to make sure you marry your best friend.”

“People who aren't known for being artists do come in for criticism when they exhibit pictures. Paul McCartney, Tony Curtis, Mo Mowlam's husband are all at it - and what's to stop them? In my case, I don't see the comedy and the art as separate at all - you're just bending your creativity in a different direction.”

“My first crush was at the age of 10, on Emma Peel in 'The Avengers.' She was a powerful woman, which I found very appealing. It had something to do with the leathers she wore: they made her look strong and almost masculine, which is what you like when you're that age.”

“I mean, when we did 'Families At War,' on Saturday night prime time, people said we were mainstream then. But it wasn't in the least mainstream. The fact that we got that on BBC1 at that time with those ridiculous things, that's as mainstream as we get. We do what we do and people can think that it's mainstream or avant-garde.”

“If we started thinking, 'Why's this funny?' we might start incorporating rules into it. I'd be suspicious that it would change the nature of what we do.”