That time I congratulated a waitress on being pregnant.

I once found myself chatting to a big handsome bloke at a party in Oslo. I said, “And what do you do?” “Well,” he said, “I am the king.” Being a great wordsmith, I zinged back, “Oh. Errm. Cool.”

Years ago, I was trying to get with one of the big agencies and I cobbled together a VHS tape of me in adverts and sobbing in The Bill, and took it United Agents for the attention of Dallas Smith. A week later I went back and said, “Has she looked at the tape?” And they were, like, “Dallas is a he, no he hasn’t and he doesn’t want to,” and handed it back to me.

Throwing up all over the red velvet seats in the House of Lords on a school trip, aged nine.

A lot of awful gigs. You can’t become a successful comedian without dying on your arse more times than you can remember.

I was thrown out of a club by bouncers when I walked into somebody and told them that I was registered blind. They said: “Don’t give a fuck – you don’t belong in here.” As a straight white man, it gives you a taste of what other people have to contend with.

Strictly. I went into it thinking I would last two weeks!

My college years when I was 17 to 19, before the responsibilities of adulthood, just doing the things that I was good at and liked – computers, maths, further maths (I was a geek).

To Kill a Mockingbird – I was meant to read it for an exam and I didn’t and I cheated. I was allowed to use a laptop to type my answers because I couldn’t see my writing, so I hid an electronic copy of the book on the laptop.

Hard-working, resilient, irritating.