I get a little adrenaline rush when I’m in New York. I feel so at home there. I’ve never been one of those people to window-shop and covet things, but when I walk down Madison Avenue I want to own everything. There is no tat there.

A caravan holiday in Bognor with my mum and nan is my earliest travel memory. I’ve only started travelling to interesting places over the past ten years. I was brought up in an environment where people would say, ‘Why would you go abroad… there’s parts of Reading you haven’t seen?’ Southerners went to Bognor and northerners went to Blackpool and that was all that was open to us.

I have the palate of a toddler. I can’t eat anything that looks like it might run around the plate. Italy is one of my favourite places and I’m quite safe there. Pasta, pizza and Pinot Grigio… Perfect.

Britain is the most beautiful country in the world. If you saw a picture of an oak in a rolling field you would immediately say, ‘That’s England.’ The landscape does something to me. I appreciate 13th-century buildings that look as if Chaucer might walk out of them. I’m certainly not quitting on Britain.

I dread being stuck on a desert island with toothache. Painkillers would be my desert-island luxury. Along with music. I would take an iPod. Maybe a dentist wearing an iPod. Would I be allowed that?

Music is the most remarkable thing on the planet. Nothing quite moves me like classical music. A chord can make me feel funny in my throat. I’m slightly obsessed with Vaughan Williams, Elgar and Gustav Holst at the moment. I think it might be to do with me being very proud of my British heritage.

I would love to visit Australia but I’m scared of the poisonous spiders. I’m not good with countries where things can live in your sock and kill you. Or where they keep serum in the fridge. If I had to do that survival programme, as soon as I got off the bus I’d say, ‘I’m a celebrity… get me out of here and back to the Four Seasons via the Ivy.’

Ghost Town is in cinemas now. The Extras Special and Complete Box Set is out 3 November 2008.

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Article by Ricky Gervais