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helped too. I’d always liked getting drunk in the pub or at parties – now I had a real use for it. At the end of a miserable day you could use it to speed up time – almost like cutting to the next morning’s hangover. So I did that a lot.

A few times, when drunk, I’d get off with someone. The booze allowed me to tell myself that it might make me feel better. Maybe I’ll manage to fall in love with this person instead, I always wondered. It seems that it can happen very quickly. And surely I should be doing something to shake myself out of my obsession with a woman who’s going out with someone else.

One of those pissed late-night snogs was captured by a paparazzo and printed in Heat magazine. That felt pretty humiliating. What a fool I’d been, I thought. I had no personal life to speak of, not even much experience of how to meet women and form relationships, and yet I’d already become famous. If I was ever to work any of this out, relationships, women, life, as I probably should have done as a teenager, I’d have to do it sneaking around because the press might be interested. I was snogging a girl outside a bar, for God’s sake – that is a normal thing to do, something I should have done more often, and now thousands of people will have seen. No one, I thought bitterly, can have had a higher percentage of their life’s snogs appear in the papers than me. I wasn’t ashamed of what I’d done but I was embarrassed for it to be shown to the world – as if someone had taken a picture of me washing my balls or having a shit.

It dawned on me gradually that quite a lot of people who I didn’t know were interested in my private life, or my apparent lack of one. My profile had grown slowly – initially Peep Show had barely been noticed but, as more series aired, more people became aware of it. Then some became aware of the sketch show. Others started to see me crop up on panel shows. Gradually the likelihood of a stranger knowing who I was had grown.

And, as it grew, I was interviewed more often by newspapers, and the nature of the questions I was asked in those interviews changed. They were fishing for details of my private life. I suppose that’s natural – people are always interested in that sort of thing, and my character in Peep Show has his private life very much to the fore. They wanted to know how mine compared. And I’d certainly implied in panel shows, as a way of getting a laugh and developing a persona that people could get a handle on, that I was a lonely, dysfunctional, OCD loser.

For years, I was very happy with this image. People found it funny, and when I wasn’t that well known they didn’t want to dig any deeper. The language of lonely self-loathing gets a lot of laughs when bluntly used in a comic context – it’s like doing a sketch about the Samaritans. But, in an interview, the context becomes more serious. They weren’t letting me paint a stereotypical, broad-brush picture of an isolated wanker – they wanted details. And, because I was broken-hearted, it was a joke that was getting a bit too edgy for me anyway. It made me sad to describe myself as so sad.

‘Is that what you’re really like?’ interviewers wanted to know. ‘Lots of women find you attractive, you know – just look at the internet.’

It was absolutely true that, by googling my name, I could find lots of examples of people saying that they fancied me, usually (they added) to their surprise. But then some people will fancy anyone who’s on telly. That just turns them on. As, sometimes, does being funny. As does being unattainable. As does not being there ‘in real life’, all wrong/normal/unglamorous/unhilarious/hairy/human like people are when you actually know them. I get it a lot on Twitter – people saying they fancy me or asking their friends if it’s ‘wrong’ that they fancy me, which is definitely a backhanded compliment, or possibly a backhanded insult. It’s all a bit of an ego boost, I suppose. But I think that moment of saying they fancied me would always be the high point of the relationship, so there’s no need to take it any