What is the worst job you have done?

I worked in a unisex clothes store for three days. Girls would say, 'Do I look fat in this?' I'd say, 'Yes.' I was fired.

Washing dishes when I was a student.

Maybe That’s Your Problem, a musical about premature ejaculation. It closed after only 18 performances.

Fixing a municipal sewer pipe.

Picking tiny bits of glass out of long grass for Haringey council, 45 years ago.

I was a floor model briefly at Bloomingdale’s in New York in 1979. I hated it. When no one was watching, I would lock myself in the toilet and read.

In the school holidays, I worked at a soft drinks factory in Southport.

Working on an assembly line in a plastics factory.

I once had to dig a fire escape from a basement in a health club. It took two weeks.

I was what I call a “nut lifter” in a factory in Enfield. I had to get nuts and bolts from the production line into big tins.

I worked in the largest pork pie factory in Europe. I had a plastic mushroom-shaped thing and had to tamp down the meat into the pie base. It was a conveyor belt of pies from nine to five. The worst thing was the crackly AM radio, which was played loudly through the tinny tannoy system. I still can’t listen to I’m Not In Love by 10cc without thinking of raw minced pork.

I’ve only done two and loved them both – one in the band, and the other as an interpreter in customs.

Father Christmas at a department store. The plaintive sadness of the children’s unrealistic requests was almost unbearable.

On a cosmetics production line. I walked out after half a day.

In my first job in film, a giant bloke dressed like a sumo wrestler asked me to get his G-string out of his arse. He said he couldn’t reach it.

I had a cafeteria job, serving food, and some people were really nasty. There was a stack of nice, cool plates, and a stack of hotter plates that had just come out of the kitchen. So, if a person was an arsehole, I’d hand them a hot plate with a smile and watch them deal with it.

I have been pretty terrible in quite a lot of terrible things.

A really bad film for no money: the director had no idea what he was doing and I was wondering: why am I here?

Helping to slaughter farmyard animals as a kid; watching while my aunties cut them up to get their guts out and seeing eggs floating around in the hens. That made me become a vegetarian.

Trying to sell frozen food over the phone for a company called American Frozen Foods. It lasted about half an hour. I found myself telling people not to buy too much of it because it could go bad, and my supervisor said, “This job is probably not for you.”