Growing up, I was always enthralled by Ronnie Barker. He made my dad howl with laughter, which always intrigued me, and he had the rare gift of being as good a performer as he was a writer.

It's because finance is so baffling that makes being an economist such a safe option. It nestles down comfortably with psychiatry and astrology as a profession where getting it patently wrong is just not a problem - and also, rather wonderfully, seems to have no adverse affect on their professional standing whatsoever.

In my career, all my most important breaks have come from Edinburgh. Winning awards, being reviewed, bagging my BBCR4 series and the chance to tour has all come from Edinburgh, which begs the question, why the hell have I left it so long to come back?

As a parent, I often wonder what I should be encouraging my kids to do for a career.

Singing as a full-time job was not something I had given a lot of thought to and I had no clear notion of the money to be made in it.

Not every business cycle has a financial crisis. Frequently they do.

It's important to learn to say no. With tours and all of that stuff, there are so many aspects that go into it, it's easy to have so many people around you saying, 'Oh yes, yes, you can afford this, you can afford this,' and then all of the sudden you've spent $20 million on your stage, and you're like, 'Where's my money?'

No one picked on me for my lunch money. Probably because it was the 1980s and no one had lunch money.