Do you prefer doing comedy or serious roles?
I won't do any more comedy now for a long time, I would imagine. I wouldn't be able to do
it all the time. There's people that are brilliant at it. I'm not brilliant at it, I do it
fine, but I'm not a comedian. I love doing it when it's as well-written as Graham writes
it, but generally it's not, and that's the problem. You can get away sometimes with drama
not being perfect, but comedy not being perfect looks terrible, that's the problem.
Tell me a little bit about your character, Roy.
He's the kind of slobbish guy with a higher opinion of himself than he really should have, a
slightly bullying and yet really fearful, arrogant and ignorant fool. He works as a
character when you see him with Moss. If Moss wasn't there, it wouldn't work, and vice versa.
They totally work as a couple. You can imagine that they met on the first day of University
in, say, Nottingham, when everybody else was in the bar, they were in the computer lab. And
they probably didn't even say anything to each other for the first week, but they probably
didn't befriend anyone else in the whole of college or the years afterwards. They've found
their lot.
How's your own IT knowledge?
Not great. I struggle. I have a computer, which breaks frequently. Mostly because of
spillages. I'm not really technically gifted. But I like ebay.
You knew both Katherine and Richard before this project, didn't you?
Yeah. I met Richard through Festival, and we played some chess together. And Katherine I
knew from drama school. Richard actually put me up for this. He had it years ago. Graham
started talking about it four years ago, but it started life in a tourist office, I think.
Anyway, Richard was involved with it ages ago. And then recently they were struggling to
find a Roy, and he suggested me, and I got it after some debate, and we were then struggling
to find a Jen, and I put Katherine up for it.
Richard studied law at Cambridge. Is he actually a highly intelligent super-geek in
real life, like his character Moss?
No, no, he's thick as shit. And you find that out the moment you start talking to him. He
goes home, watches I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, and eats Dime bars. That's Richard's
life. That's all he does.
