Campbell's brilliant madness

Ken Campbell gave me my first job, so you can blame him! While at RADA, I decided the two people I most wanted to work with were Mike Leigh and Ken. I've still not cracked it with Mike Leigh but Ken came to see my one-man show at RADA and, after I'd left and was working as a security guard with Securicor, he invited me round to his house. "You talk about Mike Leigh and improvisational stuff - we'll do a thing about it," he said. So I did an improv, standing in his lounge among his little girl Daisy's toys, about Mike Leigh being a Chinese takeaway owner who did theatre work in the evenings.

Ken invited me to Liverpool where we did a sequel to The Warp, the longest play ever written. I remember at one point a goat had to leap through a window. That was probably the most ordinary thing in the whole evening. Ken was my mentor. He made me do improvisational sessions at lunchtime and after the play too, and told me, "If you do any stuff I've heard the night before I won't pay you."

I do love him. There is such method and brilliance in his purported madness. He's not just a mad twat, which I believe some of the more po-faced, herring bone-wearing crowd think. With his new show, Ken has taken the ordinary little things he's discovered and turned them into something extraordinary. He's a complete original and totally his own man. The nearest he's ever come to cashing in is a Kit-Kat commercial he did as the devil, and working with Warren Mitchell on Till Death Us Do Part.