Biography

His show, Something Wicked This Way Comes, won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Entertainment Show 2006.

Other than his main work, he is also an artist who paints caricatures of famous people.

A principle demonstrated at one of his stage shows, of how the distraction of counting ping-pong ball transits prevents one from noticing the guys in gorilla suits entering the edge of vision, was used in a Mayor of London 2008 awareness campaign advert that alerted motorists to the need for looking out for unexpected cyclists.

Has one brother, Dominic, who is nine years younger.

Studied Law and German at Bristol University.

(Talking about two of his TV shows) "Seems The Séance has become the most complained-about show. It received 700 complaints. I might add that the prospect of me blowing my head off on live TV last year attracted only twenty. Fair enough, I suppose."

I was inspired by a stage hypnotist, but I didn't really want to do that - I didn't want to make people look stupid. So I started doing magic. But the trouble with magic is that it's either naff or, however good a trick it is, you know it's just a trick. It's inherently quite patronising. If you say, 'When I click my fingers the coin travels through the air,' you know it's rubbish.

I am embarrassingly incompetent at football or any kind of team sport. I'm so bad it would anger you.

(on finding a partner) If it happens, it happens, you know. The more you go out and look for it, the worse you make it for yourself. One day someone will turn up - or they won't. But I'm sure one day they will.

Returning for a moment to the theatre stage doors, it is not uncommon to meet there a small band of truly devoted people who follow me from show to show. Among this group are numbered an even smaller handful, who, having stood in the rain and cold with many other patient and delightful people awaiting my arrival, usher everyone else before them so that they themselves can spend more time with me after the others have left, as if they and I enjoy an exclusive relationship not extended to ordinary 'fans'; and then, out of this same eagerness not to appear obsessive(as if the other people were being anything other than entirely flattering), they finally feign indifference and exaggerated nonchalance to the point of actual rudeness, wordlessly thrusting across photographs to sign and then looking away with a grand display of apathy while I accede to their requests. They are kind enough to have spent their money on several shows, sufficiently sweet to follow me from city to city and queue in unfavourable conditions when they should be getting home, yet in a misjudged effort not to seem like a loony, they act exactly like one. I have spoken about this with many performers, and it seems a very common occurrence - a wonderful, predictable glitch in our natures that makes us behave quite antithetically to how we would like to appear. I have, of course, made the same mistake.