Rhod Gilbert
The only thing that stops me doing the teaching is that there's so much stress involved. And there shouldn't be. It's the most wonderful, inspirational job on the planet from what I saw. I loved it. Teachers, we should be molly-coddling them. Looking after them. Nurturing them.Collection: Inspirational
My wife and I sometimes get nostalgic, both yearning for a time when Friday nights were exciting and Sundays were lazy; I miss the comfort of that predictability.
My last job was in qualitative research, and I loved it.
What I found was, the higher profile you get, the more people are just coming to see you. On the last tour, I found that the support act didn't quite get the sort of reaction you'd hope they get. People wander in and out, standing in the bar... not really being that interested.
And I loved teaching to the point where I may well retrain.
I'd love to spend the day drinking a real ale in front of a fire at a lovely pub, doing the crossword with the dog at my feet.
I suffered from social anxiety as a kid - the dread of homework and being back at school was awful.
I've got a routine: eat, shower, soundcheck, iron shirt. Then there's a two-hour rollercoaster onstage, followed by a crash when I collapse afterwards.
If you look at the sales for anyone's DVDs - comedy certainly - they will be massive at Christmas and pretty much on Boxing Day be in a bargain bin! The sales trickle in the rest of the year, but it's a real trickle.
I've made a conscious decision and one that took some time not to do arenas.
Broadly, I start it off as a two-and-a-half-hour show, and I try to get it down to an hour 45. I will drop some bits in and some bits out. I will drop a whole 15 minute section for a few weeks or a few months, and then put some of it back in, or all of it back in and drop something else out.
I certainly think that live comedy on radio is my favourite thing.
I'm not one of those people that subscribes to that thing that you need any life experience to be funny or to do stand-up.
I think stand-up now will burn out. I think probably sketch or something will come back into fashion. I think other forms of comedy will replace stand-up. There's so many more people out touring and so many more DVDs, I just don't think this is sustainable at all.
I can see the appeal of panel shows to commissioners. It's fairly cheap to make and it's fairly reliably watched in fairly significant numbers. If you get the right combination of people and the right format, then I think a panel show is wonderful.
In the old days, there were things like 'Call My Bluff', they were sort of gameshows, panel shows. When they're right, they're brilliant.
I'd even refuse to go to school when I was at primary age, and if you look at any class photo with me in it I'm always the kid with his hand in front of his face, or turning away from the camera.
And now, if I catch anyone staring at me, I figure they either recognise me or are trying to work out if I'm that bloke off the telly, whereas previously it just made me feel self-conscious.
I want to stick two fingers up to shyness, make people aware that it's a widespread problem and not just something they and they alone are going through.
I swear, even if I'd had to drive all the way to Leeds after a full day's work to do a show, nothing would have made me happier than to find out upon arriving that the booking was off.
I never had any massive burning ambition to be on the box in everyone's front rooms at peak time on Saturday night never remotely in my life.
I am a bit of a control freak I think but I do enjoy as editing is really fun. It is where you build the story because you have got all this footage and you just go 'right how can we tell a story out of this?'
So it's fun to build this jigsaw in the edit by moving scenes around, you can do anything that you want and tell a story in a hundred different ways but you have got to find the right way to find that story.
When you are use to having complete control it is really hard to give up control of things to other people so it can be very stressful for a stand-up working in television, you are getting paid just to go on a road trip with your mate.
I go to my fair share of festivals and gigs and I know that there are great musical talents out there.
I did one gig in a French youth club. I was in front of the mic - it was quite weird. There were only about nine people in the audience - nine French youths staring at me and this other guy who was with me. I don't think they quite knew what we were trying to do.
I can kind of play the piano and I've got a drum kit which I've been meaning to learn. And I am going to teach myself when I get time.
But my dad was a jazz pianist and plays by ear, and all my family are musical. And that bizarrely, is quite off-putting when you're a kid because I used to plinkety plonk and try and work out a tune and then my dad would sit down and play this amazing jazz version of what I was trying to.
Walking out in front of 5,000 people is a big old thing. I have to be ready, and I have to give it absolutely everything.
The worst thing you can do is compare arenas and compare rooms. Every room is different, in its size, its shape, the acoustics.
When I started, I used to be like a tiger. My comedy developed in the comedy clubs in London and up and down the country, and I used to bounce onto the stage like an animal let out of its cage. In some of those comedy clubs, in the early days, I had to come out fighting.
I never know what I'm going to say when I first walk out. It might be 'hello' or 'how are we?' or something like that. It's not planned to that extent, but within about a minute or so I will get into the rhythm of the show, so that I know where I am.
All the success has come as a huge shock, because most famous people you see just seem born into that world.
It's what I've always done since day one though, immediately turn down new offers of work by being dramatic and protesting that I've got too much on already.
But I don't think I'll ever completely shake the low self-esteem that robs me of the ability to go up to someone new and chat without feeling I'm being rude and intruding.
I truly believe we don't appreciate the value teachers have in our society, instead they're put-upon, down-trodden and hammered from every angle.
A spa hotel? It's like a normal hotel, only in reception there's a picture of a pebble.Collection: Pebbles
As funny as watching a man in a wig trying to hold down a job on a helipadCollection: Jobs