Points: 0

Comedy Career path:
I was a teacher in Widnes, and started writing radio comedy scripts. One got picked up and I took it from there.

I studied Russian at Oxford. Not sure reading Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead in the original Russian is particularly useful for writing contemporary sitcoms but who knows...

Career highs and lows:
I'm not sure I think about my career like that. I enjoyed working on Shameless. Being told "you are the biggest wanker I've ever met" by some little tosser in specs while on an NUT conference in 1993 was probably a career lowpoint.

Comedy favourites:
(in rough chronological order) Laurel and Hardy, Marx Brothers, Phil Silvers, Bob Newhart, Lenny Bruce, Morecambe and Wise, Monty Python, Blackadder, Fry and Laurie, Bill Hicks, Mel and Griff, Jerry Seinfeld, Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, Eddie Izard, Bill Bailey, Paul Merton, Mitchell and Webb.

TV programmes:
Too many to list really. Seem to be watching a lot of Scrubs at the moment, which is great. Think Peep Show is great at the moment. Friends probably my all time fave (see below)

Current projects:
Lots of different sitcom things. I've just finished writing an episode of a show called SmallTime which is set in a Cat C prison. It's on BBC3 in the autumn. Before that produced a pilot of a show called Sound which was about two young guys who weary of their pen-pushing jobs in the town hall and decide to set up a record label.

Comedy influences:
When I was starting to write comedy I found myself watching the show Friends really religiously - kind of studying it - how many scenes there were, the length of the scenes, how many stories ran through each episode, how those stories were constructed, the characterisation, how the jokes were set up and paid off, the length of the speeches, the use of the sets, the use of additional characters... I could probably write a short thesis about that programme!