Quotes

When I was nine, we'd take a bus to the seaside. Coming back, we'd take turns entertaining, singing songs and the like. I tried some stand-up comedy. I had a captive audience in that bus. Then I realized I wanted to do more than that.

It's a little like casting out hundreds of fishing lines into the audience. You start getting little bites, then more, then you hook a few, then more. Then you can start reeling them in and that's a loveliest feeling - the whole audience laughing with you.

I'm still a kid inside, and adventure is adventure wherever you find it.

I'd rather get a good clean laugh with good material, than an easy laugh by swearing or shocking. That's not clever or comedic, anybody can get a laugh that way, it's too easy.

Good acting is consistency of performance.

I only travel to good material, a good director and a good company. I won't work in another country for a year any longer, because I have a lovely wife and I adore her and I can't bear to be away from her.

I'd get more applause than some because I was just seventeen. If they didn't clap at the end of my act I would limp off stage and boy would they feel guilty. They would all burst into tremendous applause as they saw this poor cripple kid walking off.

You've got to love the villain if you have to play him. You've got to find something that you can live with in yourself if you're going to play the villain in a play on stage.

You cannot learn anything from success, you only learn from failure.

I remember certain people in the audience laughing and I wanted to ask: 'What are you laughing at? This isn't funny.' Now I realize that laughter can come from insecurity. They don't know how they should be feeling.

There is no spray can called 'Instant Stardom', only talent can keep you at the top.

I feel if some kid has sat down and felt I'm important enough to write two pages of words to and take up a lot of his valuable time, then he deserves a few words back, or even a phone call as I have done on a few occasions.

We talk about theatre museums filled with old costumes and things. What we also need is a theatre museum of the old routines on videotape. We are only the custodians of those techniques, and they should be preserved.

The joy about the recording is that you are your own boss. You don't have a director telling you how to do it.

On 'Carry On' cast: I knew I was entering a clique. When we sat around talking that's when you relaxed with them. We would rehearse in each other's dressing room quite a bit, so that's where we got intimate. But I wasn't deep friends with any of them because I had to go home to see the kids rather than go out on the booze. I had no idea about the relationship that Sid (Sidney James) had with Barbara Windsor. Kenneth Williams was probably one of my better friends although he was a real sod at times.

A career in the theatre demands so much commitment.