Greg Davies

My dad is the funniest human being I've ever met in my life - for years, I'd watch him hold court in whatever situation he was in; he was the most amazing raconteur. I often feel I've hijacked what should have been his career.

I have a terrible work ethic. The best way for me to do anything in life is for someone to say, 'You need to do this by this time, or you're in trouble'.

Our family were very quick to laugh at each other.

I am not a father, and the only children that I get close to are my nieces.

Don't say I was an inspirational teacher - my former pupils would laugh their heads off. I was grossly incompetent, but I hope I didn't do the children a disservice.

When I was 17, my dad was teaching in the States. He hired an A-Team-style van, and we drove all over. My resounding memory of it was that we saw all these wonderful places but that my sister and I were being horrible, sulky teenagers.

I often run teaching down in my standup, but I had some great years, and it's a great job. It represented a place where I knew what I wanted to do but didn't have the courage.

If you're funny and working in education, I think the perception is that you're either inspirational or awful. So which was I? I suppose that depends on who you talk to.

The truth is, I should have never done teaching. I did teaching because I didn't have the bottle to have a go at comedy. Whether there's any gain to comedy is not for me to say. But certainly it was no loss to teaching.

I've never disguised the fact that I wasn't happy in teaching. But the reason was that I wanted to do comedy. I would have been a very unhappy security guard or a very unhappy greengrocer.

I frequently meet ex-pupils who seem to think I didn't totally ruin their educations, so that's something.

Man Down' is not a serious study of the human condition: it is a balls-out attempt at making people laugh. So nobody in the show can afford to cling on to any vanity, because we're always going to push the humiliation levels.