And this is not sort of mad patriotism, but especially British comedy, I think. And actually, Canadian too. American comedy is fantastic for wise cracking guys, but they're usually the... If you'll excuse my French, I think of John Belushi in Animal House. Brilliant performance when there's the little folk singer on his guitar. John Belushi just takes the guitar and smashes him with the head with it. Everybody laughs. Now that's great, but to me, a real comedian would want to play the folk singer. Not the bully. That's what John Belushi was. A brilliant bully, don't get me wrong. But I'm the guy with the biggest dick in the room, is essentially an American comics view of life. Whereas a British comics view of life is, I've arrived at a party, or I forgot my dick. Yes. Yes, I do absolutely sympathise with Charlie Jean, because I know what it's like to be an addictive personality. I don't know what it's like to go quite that nuts, and I hope I would never treat people quite as badly as you. Do you have a public breakdown though? I did indeed. 18 years ago? Yeah, I did. I was cast in a play and I was in a very low state about it, and I walked out, not to put too fine points on it. There was a set in the night performance, and on Sunday morning at about dawn, I drove to a channel port in the south of England and drove my car onto a boat, went to Europe and just drove and drove east without telling anybody where I was going. They were looking for you. They certainly were. The police were looking in the attic and digging up the garden. My house was thinking I might have done away with myself. It was a very bad moment, but on the other hand, it was what I believe, alcoholics, school, a moment of clarity. Which I always thought was a moment when you spilled clarity over yourself. I've gone all clarity. What the hell? But there's a moment when you're with your car and you're waiting to get on the ferry and you have to make the decision I'm going to drive on to the ferry or not, because once you're on, you're on it. Absolutely. What was going on in your mind there? What was going on in my mind was that I couldn't stay. I couldn't be in England. I couldn't be in the... I had to try and... I mean, I didn't know what I thought. I imagined in some fantastic way that I would drive up to the eastern north of Germany and cross the border through Schleswig-Holstein into Denmark and go to the north of Denmark and somehow learn Danish. And get a big white polo net pull over in a pipe and sit on rocks and write poems. We're all scared inside. We may all walk big and those guys who walk along look really cocky. They're the ones who are most scared. They're deeply scared. We're all, you know, we all think everybody else has got a big club. Well, we've got a tiny cute tip behind us. That's all I've got. And, you know, we all think we've just missed out on what life, you know, the secrets of life. And everybody else has got it. Everybody else is, yeah. But the wonderful secret is that we're all equally afraid and uncertain and that that isn't a bad thing. It's wonderful. The most amazing one was a man I met. I had been a commander in the Royal Navy. In fact, he'd been in charge of the he'd been in charge of the Royal Yacht Britannia, which was the Queen's Yacht. And he suffered really, really bad in at one point. He was in a hospital with with with light security because he'd been, you know, talking to his people and you know about the fact that he was considering suicide. It was really, really low. He managed to evade his security security people. He walked out into the road in front of a lorry and his legs were smashed to pieces and so badly that he had dozens of operations with pins had them rebroken and rebroken and it took years to get his legs right so he could walk. And I remember saying to him, my God, the pain you must have been in, what did it? All these operations. He said, yes, he said, but you have to remember that pain was nothing like as bad as the pain inside that made me walk into the traffic. And that's a thing that people don't understand about really severe depression. There's a very much, and how to do, go and walk it off. You know, just go have a good walk, listen to some music, you'll be fine. It's the stiff upper left. Yeah. And it's unfortunately not just isn't like that. It's like saying walk off the weather. You know, the weather is real and it's the weather inside you, but you can perhaps at least say, look what it will do to other people. Did you ever get that low? Yeah, I tried to end my life on a number of occasions, pre-20s, a couple of times with huge mixture of pills. Fortunately for me, it was such a mixture and they went together so badly that my brother, who had a bedroom some way away from mine in my parents' house, was awakened by the sound of my projector, vomit. And he came in and I was sort of unconscious, but it's viewing. And so I was taken to a hospital and had my stomach pumped, so that was very fortunate. On another occasion, then again, it's sort of faintly comic, really, is I put myself in a garage and put a duvet, sort of quilt under the door and put my finger on the keys of the car. Really was thinking of turning the key, but how did you get out of that, though? I was my parents, it was the thought of doing that to my parents. Just I couldn't bear the idea of how they would respond. I knew that it was an awful thing to do to them. But what it actually ended up with was me feeling much better about myself in the end, because I realised that I had an issue with mood swings by polar disorder. And I made a couple of films that we'll see some years later called The Secret Life of the Manit Depression, which was a really interesting thing to do, because I met people who had the problem even far more than I had. And it made me extremely grateful for not having you know, manit depression or bipolar disorder as bad as they did, but also grateful for knowing that that one could make a program about it and try and help alleviate some of the stigma that serons mental health is. I don't know many people actually worth knowing who don't have a mind that sometimes leads them astray. You know, I don't know that sanity, real sober sensible sanity, is such a glorious thing. I think most of the world's advances in creativity and invention and in almost anything have been done by little spurts of madness. There's a poem by Dorothy Parker that the denser every line ends, you might as well live. And sometimes life does seem unsupportable. Not for any logical reason, that's the point. You can't talk someone out of finding life unpleasant by saying, look what you've got, because it's not about that.