Unmissable show?
Better Call Saul. The beauty of it is that Breaking Bad is the perfect intro to it. It’s slightly less intense: I found that after a while with Walter White, you just felt like you were watching the birth of a monster. When Saul Goodman first came in, you thought he was a snake but somehow Bob Odenkirk squeezed a moral code out of the character that wasn’t particularly explicitly written. And I loved that he got to explore it on his own show because, in his own way, he was one of the most moral characters. Some of the best acting I’ve ever seen. I get nostalgic for bad acting in TV dramas. You don’t see it so much any more.
Earliest TV memory?
Moonlighting with Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd. I couldn’t get enough of it, I even bought Bruce Willis’s fucking album! My first friends in the world were these two weird kids who I used to talk to about Moonlighting. I must have been under 10 and now I don’t remember much about the actual show. But Bruce Willis was the definition of what I thought everything should be about.
Guilty pleasure?
It’s not a guilty pleasure as such but probably American Pickers. They find crap for no money and sell it for a lot of money and my life is the complete opposite of that. I buy crap for lots of money and end up selling it at a huge loss. I’m sure it’s all staged and not real but it’s so deeply satisfying on some level. I’m just fucking riveted.
Pitch us a show
This isn’t my idea. French Stewart, who was on 3rd Rock From The Sun, had this idea for a show called Blackout Drunk. The episode starts with our hero waking from an alcoholic coma in situations and he doesn’t remember how he got there. So maybe he’ll come to and he’ll be in the middle of an organ transplant or something like that. And he has to piece together how he got into it. And after each adventure, he’ll just relax with a drink. And that will lead on to the next adventure! It writes itself.
Ripper Street series 3 is out on DVD, Blu-ray and download on 28 September
