I'm completely addicted to Radio 4, even 100-year-old things like 'Just a Minute.' I even arrange my weekends around the Sunday edition of 'The Archers.'
Some of the vintage comedy on Radio 4 Extra wasn't very funny to begin with, whereas some things just get funnier regardless of the changes in public attitudes over the years.
I've been doing Nixon pretty much my whole professional life. I was in this comedy group called the Credibility Gap in Los Angeles when he was president. I was doing Nixon on the radio, and when we did live shows I physicalized him - if that's a word - for the first time. And then I did a Nixon sketch on a very short-lived NBC show called Sunday Best.
Bob Monkhouse, Galton and Simpson, Spike Milligan and I all started around the same time with an enormous advantage: working to an audience all of whom had shared an awful, common experience - the war.
I grew up in New York wanting to be like those funny men in the movies and on the radio.
I love radio and have done a little bit for years - since 'Workers' Playtime' in the 1950s. It's also a good springboard for comedians.
I used to sing Bill Monroe songs. And I'd sing Dennis Day songs like songs that he sang on the Jack Benny show.
I'm playing an Amazon warrior princess in a new radio comedy series called 'Elvenquest,' and I'm playing a Russian genius in the comeback of 'Red Dwarf.'
My dad was the original announcer on The Goon Show.'
When I say, 'I can't stay long, I'm in-between meals,' that plays differently on the radio than it does in person. So I have to pick material that works because the words are funny, not just because of the images.
I'd always loved radio. I loved Bob And Ray. I loved Stan Freberg.
Old radio comedy makes me laugh, as well as 'I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue' and comedians like Paul Merton.
My roots were in acting. That's all I wanted to be. Even though my father was a radio comedian, it wasn't cool to say, at a young age, 'I want to be a comedian.'
Writing for radio really focuses the mind, because you can't rely on thinking "Oh, just pull a funny face at the end of this sketch." You've got to try to work on the words.
When I was young, I saw some of my heroes doing it on the telly. We're talking about Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Arthur Lowe, Ian McKellan, Kenneth Williams. These were all guys telling stories to me.
So much of a stand-up's life is doing live radio and having to be funny and quick on the spot with these strangers, and sort of surgical in terms of how funny I can be in three minutes.
My dad played a character on the radio called 'Parkyakarkus.' A Greek-dialect comedian. He did Friars' roasts and wrote material and made people laugh that way. But he wrote his own shows with other writers.
Any comic can get on the radio show and be funny. You can get that on any morning radio show or afternoon radio show. There are plenty of people who do that. It's not a difficult format, to sit around with two or three comics and be funny.
