No, disappointingly, I'm not as weird in real life. I think I'm probably just a deeply pragmatic person. I remember there being an interview with Bjork, who is one of my heroines and I'm not comparing myself to her, but it resonated with me - she said people compare me to a pixie, but I'm a businesswoman, a mother... how would I go around and do successful things if I was actually mad? I kind of get that. My creativity is the weirder side of me, but I can compartmentalise that, and the rest of my life is working out childcare and how many lights I need for a shoot. Boring stuff really. One interview I did, someone wrote underneath: "Alice Lowe wore moon boots to college every day, and we called her Weird Alice." So maybe I'm contradicting myself, but I make perfect sense to myself. But it's true about the moon boots. Once a woman came up to me in the supermarket and said she thought I had a club foot, and that's why I was wearing them.

You're assuming I've seen every one, which I haven't. Ask me again in ten years time when my daughter has insisted on seeing everything. I loved Up, and Toy Story. And their rules for storytelling are good - I go back to them when I'm having a knotty issue with a story. Their ideas about character are really good.

Darkplace was brilliant to film. We were all quite young, and we'd been given this amazing opportunity, and it was all shot on film which is incredibly expensive and an unusual situation to be in. We had to rehearse everything because we had limited takes. I remember us all being quite nervous on set, but we all knew our lines really well - the crew were quite impressed with us. It was just amazing. I think as actors, when you're playing with jokes about bad acting and bad TV because it feels like you're breaking all the rules. We all had such fun, including the crew. It would be amazing to do a second series, I'd love it. But part of me thinks there's a purity to it being one series and it'll never happen again!

I would say that sometimes genre is your friend, and sometimes it's your enemy - hahaha! Because they're both genre defying films in a way, deliberately, and marketing might try to push it in one direction or another. But you might alienate an audience who would otherwise love it, just because of the trailer or whatever. What I love is when I get an unexpected audience member saying they love either film - someone who might not be the perceived horror demographic, so for example a pensioner, or a pregnant woman. With Prevenge, I knew I was making a film that wasn't trying to be like anything else. And I think in a way, that's the way to get the attention of new audiences, but not letting genre define you too much. You just want it to be a good film that anyone can respond to, and I have had people say "I don't usually like horror, but I enjoyed this film". And you hope if the story is good enough, that anyone could enjoy a film. I think it's going to be an interesting debate in the future, especially with streaming services like Netflix, they do tend to categorise things and try to predict what it is you want to watch based on your genre choices. Which can start to eliminate certain things you might otherwise have watched. What I really appreciate about growing up in the television era is that I would stumble across really weird stuff that I would watch, and I think there's something really amazing about that pot luck aspect of viewing, which we don't have so much any more.

We had a really great distribution company for Prevenge, who had a really great dialogue with us about how we thought it should be marketed. But one of the reasons for that, was because they acknowledged they didn't really have anything comparable! Which was exciting - we didn't know how to market it, because there was no precedent for it. It was just about grabbing people's attention with a new idea.

Amazing. I still retain a glow, even when I'm an old lady, I'll still have a peachy glow, that that song was written about me.

I haven't heard badgers used in a comedy context since the 90s. I think the badger would win actually - they've got really horrible claws. The badger might have more stamina. The baboon would have more cunning ways, with its opposable thumbs, but the badger would stick it out for longer.

My next project is going to be completely different. I think I'm like a teenager - I go through fads, and tend to be completely disinterested in the thing I've just done, and want to go somewhere completely new. But there's a common thread that goes through my work that I have no control over, really. I would say that all of my work is a sequel in a sense, it's the next stage of my development and in what I'm interested, and emotionally where I am I suppose. I'm always trying to learn new stuff, so I have to challenge myself, and be interested in what I'm doing next. It has to feel new.

It's brilliant working with Ben Wheatley - he's very funny, and it's some of the best fun you can have as an actor, working with him. He gives you a lot of freedom as a performer, and it's a great experience. It sort of spoils you, really, for working with other people. He doesn't really talk about his actors - it's a bit like being a parent, being a director, and he's like a good parent. If you overly praise your child they might get a big head and become a brat - he doesn't like to go in for gushing praise. At least that's what I think! I think he'd say I was good. Before Sightseers, he was always hugely supportive of the short films I did, and I think he's got a respect for anyone who gets off their arse, gets out there, and makes their own stuff.

I will wait until she's 26 and try to prevent her from watching it til then. She's already getting a percentage of the take - whatever I earn goes on nappies and toys for her, so she should be bloomin' grateful. Otherwise, no. There's no Prevenge trust fund, I wish there were.

He will be. Noel's doing Bake Off, so he's going to be huge - not physically, though he may become physically huge too. Matt has filmed his feature debut called Possum, which looks amazing - slowly but surely he's going to be doing fine in a very different field. Also, he's quite shy, Matt Holness, so some of that is choice rather than accident.

It's funny because I went to Finland and people liked that show. I think it's had more exposure in Finland than over here. Again, a really interesting show, but nobody watched it. I think I must have some kind of curse attached to me as a TV performer. Each episode was based on a different classic film, which is a brilliant idea, and you wonder who would commission that now. One week was The Shining, next week Top Gun, all spoofed, but not huge pastiche, it was really quite subtle and very well done.

I think I am up for it yeah, but I don't see the downside, so they need to come up with a plot development. Maybe she works in a place with a spiral staircase or something. I did have, because I've had a virus recently, a sleepless night the other day when I had the same repetitive thought on a loop - what if I was in a shop, and it filled up with doll parts, those really plastic 80s ones. Would you die by suffocating, or would you be able to fight your way out? That's possibly another part we could add to this film. I think we'd have to be careful with the wheels on the feet not to rip off Some Mothers Do Av Em, and the famous rollerskating scene... maybe we could reprise it.

I did a short film with director Jacqueline Wright, shot on Super 8. Silly film basically, without editing, just shot in camera and then sent off to be processed. This film competition watch it, and show it at a tent in Cannes if they like it - we won two years running. One film is called Stiffy, and the other is called Stick and Balls. You can watch it on YouTube. I made a lot of short films with Jacqui for no budget, and it was invaluable experience that's gone towards making a feature. I don't think I'll ever make another song about sport though, unless under duress. We shot it on a real golf course, for free, on the grounds they would let people play golf pass us. Lots of people asked us if we were shooting a porno. We risked life and limb - we could have been knocked out by a golf ball at any point.

Unfortunately, with a 16 month old child, I still haven't seen the film and I feel very guilty. I've heard it's great, and it felt very funny filming on set. I'm in it for one scene, but I do say the name of the film, which I think makes me hugely important. Like Timothy Spall in Secrets and Lies where he actually says: "Secrets and lies!"

The director is also the star, and there is a really relaxed feeling on set - he wanted us to improvise and contribute, and I think that will make for a really relaxed and genuinely funny audience experience. Kind of an early Woody Allen vibe, potentially. It's about an actor, who's trying to make his name, and he's told he's "chubby funny", rather than leading man material. It's on at the LOCO comedy film festival.

So, not many people know, but fans of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace may or may not know that it started off as an Edinburgh show that won a Perrier award. And in that show I played a camel - not all the way through, just the one scene - and people that saw that show still ask me about the camel. This is the difference between TV and theatre - the stage show was more fanciful, with more theatre jokes. My character was an actress who wanted to be able to play anything, and wanted to play a camel - one scene Garth is alone in the desert and his only friend is a camel. And he eats her. We worked with Paul King, who went on to do Paddington, and there was lots of physical comedy in the show - lots of strange visual things in it. So ok, yes, I'm doing the ruminating camel right now.

Yeah, I love folk horror. And I think a lot of my inspiration comes from, culturally, a lot of those ideas from fairytales and pagan influences. And a lot of Britishness actually, whatever that means. I kind of feel like, for me, there's a sense of a lot of Britishness being built on status and hierarchy and class, and a lot of comedy is built on that too - but a lot of horror can be too. Something like The Wicker Man, or Straw Dogs, is actually about class, and social status, and anxiety. And I think that Prevenge has that element of social satire. I have this theory that people put on a mask to the world of who they want to be, and what's under that mask is either frightening or funny. I build a lot of characters on that premise - that people are stranger under the surface than they want you to think.

I'd say... many are my favourites, but Whistle And I'll Come To You is one. It's a BBC television broadcast horror thing, that's not feature length, and you can buy them from the BFI who released them. It's based on an MR James short story, and it's Michael Hordern playing this bumbling professor type, and he finds something strange on the beach in Norfolk, that leads to his haunting, and ensuing insanity. It's got brilliant use of sound and editing.

No, I had no idea. I think what was interesting about that show was that there was quite a lot of freedom in terms of performance, and that's something that feels like it's becoming rarer in comedy shows. There was a sense of fun about it, because it's a kids show, and a lot of shows I've worked on are the opposite of fun at times - because people are scared of the success of the show, or the judgement that's going to come from it. Whereas with Horrible Histories, there's this sense of joy, but also the idea that you're teaching kids something gives a bit of higher purpose than just your own comedic ego. It's a lesson for us all - ha ha ha!

Yes. Hot Brew is me and Anthony Elvin, and it's a kind of Pentangle-y folk duo that we have a lot of fun performing. But it's hard for us to get together because both of us have very small babies. We've got a song called Field of Rape, which we got in trouble for. We sing about root vegetables. And we've got a song called Hey Globe - we've got a child we're bringing up genderless, and the child, Globe, has the wisdom of an ancient being. We called it that because we didn't want it to have any angles.

I agree, I love The Witch. It's a sort of period horror set in America in the 1600s or something like that. Some people don't like that scene, but I loved it. And actually, probably influenced some of the elements of the voiceover we had in Prevenge. I think it's the classic thing with the devil - when you see too much it becomes unconvincing. For example in Rosemary's Baby, you don't see the devil at all, and that makes it more creepy. And the idea of the devil as a shapeshifter - I've always loved that idea. There's this horror called Toby Dammit by Fellini, it's one of my favourite films, and the devil is portrayed as a little girl - I always thought that was brilliant.

You can be a lot smaller on films because of close ups, whereas on stage, you have to be bigger for people who are further away in the audience. I remember Steve Coogan, who I worked with on stage, saying things had to be bigger than you think. He did a tour about ten years ago, and I was one of his supporting cast members - it was quite a learning experience, doing a nationwide tour, playing lots of different characters.

I think mainly we were worried whether that scene was going to work at all, so from what I can remember, we were just very serious throughout the whole thing, and it was only when we looked at the rushes, we realised the scene was pretty good. There was a lot of us sitting in silence in a cab, because we didn't know we could film in a cab at all - we just grabbed one. So a lot of it was us worrying whether it was even going to work or not.

Thank you! We had loads of fun on set. Weirdly, some of the most fun we had was when we were filming the murders and things went wrong slightly with the special effects, to much amusement. There was one time I was supposed to be sort of castrating Tom Davis, from Murder in Successville, and I had a fake knife made of cardboard, and we were trying to make this look effective and he was in his underpants... and I could feel this shaking on my shoulder, and it was the cameraman laughing silently to himself, doing this closeup on his crotch. Tom said: at this point, you're just stroking my thigh with a bit of cardboard. We pissed ourselves laughing. Sometimes it's exhaustion – you're not sure whether you're just laughing because you're tired... I hope there will be outtakes on the DVD, yes.