There's a reason we have a lot of pomp and ceremony around coronations and the transfer of power in democracies. It's a scary moment. The rules aren't clear.
It's touching that people only think there's one of these around. Dynastic families are all around us.
I guess Trump is gone, but the shape that he gave to the American political and social environment - that still resonates. There's a certain amount of post-traumatic stress in America about the possibilities of what could have happened, and what people still feel did happen.
I'm in the game of realism so happy endings probably feel a little bit too neat for life.
The camera reacts with the speed of a human being rather than somebody who knows what's going to happen next. And that lets the comedy and drama play in a way which I think subliminally makes you feel like you're in the room.
Almost anyone can give me the willies. Man or woman, Asian, black or white, young or old.
If you're on your way to meet your maker, you are not, are you, going to stop en route for a foot-long tuna sub?
The human propensity to having opinions must, I guess, have started as a pretty useful evolutionary tool.
Most of us now have opinions on such things as road tolling, the U.S. position on climate change, and the correct colour of a newsreader's tie on the occasion of a state tragedy, which are way beyond the arena of things we have any control over.
Why do I bother having all my stupid opinions? I mean, really, my ever evolving Balkan policy of the mid-1990s - what did I think was going to happen? That I was going to be supersubbed out of Oddbins and into the Foreign Office?
As a private individual, it's probably not worth having a foreign policy of your own at all. Not unless you own at least a small boat with which to try to effect it. Probably two boats is the minimum, actually. And a gun.
As a comedy writer, I work largely from home.
This is the tragedy of the entrepreneur. They literally cannot slack off. That's why Alan Sugar looks so jowly, tired and angry, and Richard Branson so phonily, aggressively cheery.
My writing partner and I usually write separately, because if we write together we are liable to go a little nuts. The person not at the keyboard can start to feel disenfranchised to the point that they sometimes make a lunge for that accoutrement of computer power, the mouse.
Wimbledon fortnight is always a testing time for the home worker. I spend most of it on the phone to my writing partner pretending to chat about character motivation when actually I'm checking if he's working - listening out for any telltale bleeps from the line-call machine off the TV in the background.
Between 1995 and 1997 I was a researcher for a Labour MP. And looking back I realise I wasn't a very good one.
I can't say I connected with many of my co-workers at Westminster. My MP's office was sandwiched between those of Peter Mandelson and Harriet Harman, but I never mixed with the important-looking young men and women who bustled in and out of their doors.
I never got to see inside No 10, but I did once go to Ann Widdecombe's ministerial office under the Commons where she sat framed by two posters on her wall, one featuring a Technicolor foetus in an anti-abortion message, the other Garfield the Cat wryly musing, 'The Diet Starts... Tomorrow.'
With my writing partner, Sam Bain, I have gone on to write for lots of shows, including our co-creation 'Peep Show,' two series of which have been shown on Channel 4. But politics has always attracted me.
You've only got so much plot, character and psychological capital. One day it will be gone and you don't know when that day is. The fear is that it'll sneak up on you when you're not looking.
The writers' room is an open forum where anything mad or weird that aggressively shakes up the show can be suggested and considered.
So often in TV you're looking at the monitor thinking, 'Oh, yeah, that sort of looks a bit like that other TV show that we're pretending to make.'
There's that saying: 'No man is a hero to his valet.' It's the same between flatmates.
War isn't funny, obviously.
Wars are hard to look at head-on.
Catch-22' is the big daddy of funny war novels. It's capacious and occasionally rambling. It's a bible of literate comedy: you can find anything you want inside - it's all in there.
Red Alert' is a gripping cold war bomber-command procedural. But read now, you can see 'Dr Strangelove' - the film which took the book as source material - peeping through the gaps.
I like people to make their own decisions.
I love the breadth and space you get to explore character in so-called serialized TV, the novelistic element of maybe being able to find out who people are. But I also very much like the sitcom discipline of having a self-contained episode that you could conceivably, I hope, be able to enjoy in and of itself.
Without sounding defensive, I would say that sometimes TV critics assume that after a few episodes the writers 'finally understand the characters,' and as a writer I often feel that what really has happened is that the viewer has gotten to know the characters. It's a natural process.
We have characteristics we're born with, that are molded by the lives we live. And so to have a psychologically engaged show, our view of human nature is that it doesn't come from nowhere, it comes from somewhere.
Because Oswestry is very much an Anglo-Welsh mix it can lead you to feeling a bit bipolar sometimes. I mean, you're in England but there's plenty of Welsh accents to be heard, lots of Welsh-speaking chapels dotted around the place and, on market day, the place would be overrun with farmers from over the border.
Political parties can be pretty internecine, and pretty savage.
You can put all your philistine-dom on TV.
It's sad ending 'Peep Show,' but it'll be fun starting some new shows.
It doesn't worry me, the idea of coming up with new stuff.
As a writer you often watch things with a certain distance.. More often, you're worried that something that you have invented is going to become reality, and you'll look like you copied it.
I can just about enjoy it. There is an initial hurdle, where I feel like, oh goodness me, I'm going to watch a sitcom or a drama and it's my competition. But luckily quality tends to override that, so when I have been watching 'Him and Her' or 'Girls' or any of the shows I admire, you simply enjoy them.
It's a lucky kink for comedy writers that particular English obsession and interest with class and social difference. It maybe is not good for society but it's good for the comic writer.
I wouldn't like to say I'm a class warrior.
I was of that generation of NME-reading, indie fans. Part of the reason I went to Manchester was because of New Order and The Smiths. Growing up in the north west, it was where we aspired to go out.
Writers tend to feel like outsiders.
I guess I'm interested in politics - I'm interested in ideas and ideology.
If you're making a satirical show and you're aiming to change something, I'd say you're on a fool's errand.
I suppose terrible things happen in the world all the time and some of them we feel a particular connection to and some of them we don't.
I've always found it easy to write comedy in the area where people have strong emotions.
Hanging around a lot of really intelligent people for months on end, talking about whatever's in the news, is fun to me.
In my own experience with films, books, plays, TV, I don't want somebody telling me what it means, because I think I know, and I want my interpretation to be valid, because it is valid.
I'm relatively sensitive to the atmosphere of what places are like, what relationships are like, and the feeling of power in rooms.