I was very into New Order, Joy Division, all of that when I was younger. I had a lot of bootlegs that I saved up my pocket money to buy. I had all the obscure early EPs.

New Order never celebrated anything to do with Joy Division.

One thing that's coming up a lot is: are you as grumpy as you appear from this Black Books thing.

You try various things when you're growing up. I was an attache in the Foreign Service for a while and then I drove a bulldozer, but neither of those panned out for me so it had to be stand-up.

To me, New Order split up when Bernard and I stopped writing together. We started Joy Division together; we started New Order together.

A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.