Actors From England

"It's what we've always known for many years outside of Australia...You can't have a world leader called Kevin. [On Kevin Rudd]"

"And the thing is, I'm amazed they went with Obama at all, you know, I mean, I thought Hilary would have been a shoo-in, but no. [Shrugs] Apparently America's got an issue with gender, not with race. Huh. So, erm..."

"Thank God for Darwin, eh?"

"Tonight's show is about doubt. Or maybe it isn't - haven't made my mind up yet."

"I would never condone the burning of a Dan Brown novel, much though I loathe and detest his work. Well, I say "work", you know, words, randomly arranged to form millions of dollars... I'm not bitter at all..."

"Not so great in England at the moment; in an online poll we came last, we actually came bottom of European countries for quality of life, because of things like the weather, obviously, late retirement, poor holiday, poor public services, poor health service; it's basically just a kind of grey, godless wilderness, full of cold pies and broken dreams."

"Welcome to the O2. A unique building in Dublin, in that it is actually finished."

"It's always been my long-held belief that eventually insects will take over the world."

"This is the news theme, but it sounds like pure Hollywood entertainment. It sounds like E.T. on a horse being chased by Darth Vader, which is something I'd love to see."

"You knew exactly who the good guys were and who were the bad guys just by the chord: the good guys got a perfect fifth - strong, compassionate - the bad guys got an augmented fourth... Just a semitone, but sometimes in life when you make the wrong choices, it's just a semitone out."

"... have a banana!"

"Was he a Swiss nationalist, or a nutso with a crossbow? I don't know."

"Not a very well-known fact, but on planes they always carry a trombone just in case there's a disaster and they need to keep morale up. All cabin crew - fully proficient in the trombone. And of course there's a double facility: if you ditch at sea, it can be used as a snorkel."

"There we go, that's it. I just hold my hand in this position for the next couple of hours."

"Orchestras have often been used to conjure up the natural world: Swans, sharks, trout, but not, as far as I know, the often maligned jellyfish."

"I tried to like it. For me, it was like being smacked around the head by a piece of IKEA furniture: it hurts, but you've got to admire the workmanship."

"Juxtaposition, you can't handle the juxtaposition!"

"So go into your local branch of UBS, and say "I'd like to open an account please.", and when they say "What with?" take out a loud hailer and say "NAZI GOLD! Just like you did!"

"(On being prepped for a gig supported by the bank, UBS) She told me not to mention Nazi Gold, and of course if you tell a comedian not to do something, they'll immediately go and do it. So I went out on stage on a giant, neon Swastika, and sang "Gold, gold/always believe in your soul/you're indestructible-like the Third Reich!"""

"I feel sorry for James Blunt, he has to wake up every morning and think 'Oh my God, I'm James Blunt, what have I done?'"

"(Quoting his three year old son on a James Blunt song) "Daddy, turn it off, it's spoiling my brain""

"I know that to be a true fact because I read it in Heat magazine"

"It's the augmented fourth, or diminished fifth, depending on your outlook on life...""

"(On bizarre Conspiracy Theories)- Countries are actually closer than you think...Pilots just fly aeroplanes around longer to make you THINK they're far away- There are tiny cameras in ham...They're called 'Hameras'"

"(Commenting on band The Killers' lyrics from the song 'All These Things I've Done') Deep down, it really is just a meaningless lyric, isn't it? [Sings] "I got soul, but I'm not a soldier". I mean, you may as well be saying "I got ham, but I'm not a hamster""

"BB: So, who here has a guinea pig?Various Audience Members cheerBB: What kind of guinea pig? Muffled suggestions from audience members BB: Nah, you're not serious about it! (Imitates guniea pig owners) "I dunno, some brown thing...". So what breed? Audience Member: Crested! BB: (misunderstands) A what? A crusty...a crusty guinea pig? (Imitates owner) I think you should take it to the vet as soon as possible! "Gah, it's crusting over again, it's crusting up Captain!!" (understands) Ah, crested? What you have there is a newt I think, madam! Some bloke in a pub sold you that! (as man in pub) "Yeah, that's a crested guinea pig, they're lovely, them...""

"Without the beat in the background, Jazz basically sounds like an armadillo was let loose on the keyboard"

"(Imitating a Belarus citizen commenting on their national flag) Stupid National Anthem....Look at this flag; Two bears fighting over a pineapple. What kind of message does that send to the world? "Come to Belarus, where wild animals will steal your fruit""

"Hey, ASDA, I ain't gonna be your bitch!"

"And if it all goes horribly wrong we've still got Argos. Don't you just love Argos? With the Laminated Book of Dreams. You know why it's laminated don't you? To catch the tears of joy! (mimes turning pages, crying) "So many beautiful things! I cannot possess them all! Quick, stock check! Beep beep beep". It's like the ultimate betting shop, isn't it? The tiny little pens, the slips of paper, but everyone is a winner! And then you have the staff there, the pale mythical wardens of the treasure."

"Even if you’re not particularly religious, then you have to admit that religion surrounds us even in the most mundane aspects of our lives. I was trying to rent a car, and the bloke said to me: "You’re not covered for acts of God."I said: "What do you mean by that?", he said: [waving arms] "Woooooh!"I said, "Can you be a bit more specific?", and he went, [vaguely gesticulating] "Eh... ooooh... uh?"I said, "I’m intrigued because you said 'acts of God', and not gods, or spirits, or jinn, or nymphs, but 'God', a capital God, a monotheistic religion, maybe a Judeo-Christian religion, which would imply a belief system, which would perhaps lead to free-will and determinism, so logically anything that man does directly or indirectly is in fact an act of God, so I’m not covered for anything!"He said, "I’ll get the manager."Then I said, "What do you mean by an act of God? What do you mean by that?"He said, "I dunno, a plague of locusts or something.""'A plague of locusts'? They swarm round the vehicle, rip the wing mirrors off, and I’m liable for a fifty pound excess?”And he said, "No, like, rain or something."I said, "Yeah, but how much rain? It’s drizzling a bit now, is that an act of God? At what point does the rain reach a certain level beyond which it takes on the more apocalyptic mantle of the water-based punishment of the Lord!?"And he said, [despairing] "I just work Saturdays."I said "You can’t answer me, can you? Your policy is riddled with theological inconsistency. You disgust me. You twist and turn. You remind me of the Siberian hunting spider, which adopts a highly-convincing limp in three of its eight legs in order to attract its main prey, the so-called Samaritan squirrel, which takes pity on the spider, and then the spider jumps on it and injects the paralysing venom, and the squirrel remains bafflingly philosophical about the whole thing. Not to be confused with the Ukrainian hunting spider, which actually has got a limp and is, as such, completely harmless, and a little bit bitter about the whole thing: [imitating spider] 'Siberian spider have good leg, have nice day, can catch fly, can make web, can catch fly for family, I can do nothing, my leg, it drags behind! It drags! [audience laughs] And you laugh! You make fun! Oh, ha, big joke! I am failure! I am freak! [singing] But in my dreams I can fly, I'm the greatest spider in town. But I wake and it's cold, and I feel so old, and my legs are dragging me down.'"And then the manager came out, and he said: “Stop all that spider singing." Pointed to a sign on the wall: a spider with a line through it. "Oh, fair enough."He said "I can offer you an upgrade, fifty quid, and we can include in it policies set in place by the Marquis de Laplace, the French scientist who declared that all things in the universe are predetermined, so you would be covered even if time-travel was invented during the period of rental.”I said, "Nah, probably leave it.""

"[Singing as U2, in Irish accent] Hello! Some old Celtic bollocks!"

"Talking of tough gigs, I saw a very tough gig in New York, it was Whitney Houston. She was doing this open-air gig in New York. It was in the winter, and it was like minus eight degrees, in Lincoln Plaza. She was meant to be on at three, there were about three-thousand people there. Ten past three, no sign of Whitney. Half past three, crowd getting a bit grumpy, a bit restless. Eventually, four o'clock, Whitney sashays onto the stage in a fur coat. She comes up to the microphone, she says "I just want to say I love every single one of you." And this huge black guy next to me says "Sing, bitch!". Tough crowd."

"Milton Keynes: Satan's lay-by."

"You get somebody to explain the Trinity to you, they'll say "Well God, he's God, and Jesus is God as well, and the Holy Spirit is...[mumbles indistinctly]". "What?" "He's the fecund spirit of the Lord who impregnates Mary, then gets a bit up himself and is reduced to light clerical duties?" Let's examine that in joke form: three male divine natures go into a cosmic essence, giving and receiving love, but not in a gay bishop way, to which the whole of Islam goes "Wha?"; Hinduism: "Nah!"; or Buddhism: "Ssh!"."

"Three blind mice walk into a pub. But they are unaware of their surroundings, so to derive humour from it would be exploitative."

""God save our gracious Queen": Why would we invoke a non-specific deity to bail out these unelected spongers? [Audience wildly applauds]"

"The reason we'd stopped was that the buffet car was on fire, that was the reason we stopped. One of the giant biscuits spontaneously combusted out of boredom. Whoever was charged with making the announcement momentarily lost all sense of procedure and we got this tantalizing glimpse into the chaos on the trains, and all we could hear was (bangs on microphone) "Gary, it's burning, what we gonna do?!" And everyone on the carriage just cheered, "Hooray! We're rubbish!""

"I'm English, and as such I crave disappointment. I actively seek it out."

"[as George W. Bush] I will tame evil, I will get the evil ones, We must find the evil ones. We must get evil, we must laminate evil, we must wear it round our necks, at the backstage party in paradise!"

"Anyway, beards and drugs leads me neatly to the Taliban; were they really that backward, or were they the finest minds of the fourteenth century? Nobody seems to know or care. That ideology was never going to work, was it? It was just cobbled together from different beliefs: The anti-intellectualism of the Khmer Rouge, the religious persecution of the Nazis, the enforced beard-wearing from the world of folk music, and the segregation and humiliation of women from the world of golf."

"(After asking the audience about their negative experiences with Marijuana)BB: So, what form did these experiences take?Audience Member: Swimming with dolphins! (mentioned earlier on the show)BB: (misunderstands) Dolby? What, you hear everything with a slightly reduced hiss? (As Audience Member) I like to hear the world in Dolby, it's fantastic! Mind you, it means that no snake will I ever hear. And I said that in a very strange way. [As Yoda] No snake will I ever hear, mmm! [Normally] Never put Dolby on snake detectors, that's what we must remember."

"There's more evil in the charts than in an Al-Qaeda suggestion box."

"There’s this one celebrity, Rosie O’Donnell, a talk show host, and she said this: “I don’t know anything about Afghanistan, but I know it’s full of terrorists, speaking as a mother.” So what is this "speaking as a mother" then? Is that a euphemism for "talking out of my arse"? "Suspending rational thought for a moment"? As a rational human being, Al-Qaeda are a loose association of psychopathic zealots who could be rounded up with a sustained police investigation. But speaking as a parent, they’re all eight foot tall, they’ve got lasers under their moustaches, a huge eye in their foreheads and the only way to kill them is to NUKE every country that hasn’t sent us a Christmas card in the the last 20 years!! "Speaking as a mother"."

"I can't ever remember ever seeing any charity porn, though. "Farmyard Frolics 3: A portion of this goes to a women's literacy programme in Eritrea"."

"Talking of white supremacist violent types, I was in America, recently... [Wild laughter and applause from audience]"

"You're absolutely right, Hitler was a vegetarian. It's very unseemly to think so, but there he was. Just goes to show, vegetarianism, not always a good thing. Can in some extreme cases lead to genocide."

"I'm a vegetarian. I'm not strict; I eat fish, and duck. Well, they're nearly fish, aren't they? They're semi-submerged a lot of the time, they spend a lot of time in the water, they're virtually fish, really. And pigs, cows, sheep, anything that lives near water, I'm not strict. I'm sort of like a post-modern vegetarian; I eat meat ironically."

"[responding to scattered audience applause] Ah, lovely: the ripple, the ripple there. That's nearly the Zen clap of acceptance there, wasn't it?"

"But we won't have any genetically modified food, oooh no, we won't have any GM. Which is a shame, I think we've missed a trick there. We could develop wheat with the properties of Velcro... to catch whatever it is that's forming those crop circles! But then the spaceship would have to have the corresponding Velcro, so it's a bit of a long shot."