He saw a Vincent Black Shadow not long ago – “just breath-taking”. Motorbikes are a passion. He’s got a Yamaha in London and the Triumph in LA, which he rides “with a weird chauvinistic pride… I was watching Biker Build-Off and there was this Japanese custom bike designer called Shinya Kimura. You could tell within seconds he was a genius.” Laurie thought about buying one of Kimura’s bikes. “It was $26,000. I thought, ‘I can’t possibly justify that’, and then I thought, ‘Well, why am I doing this job?’” Did he buy it? “No. Something in me says you shouldn’t have toys.”

He has, however, bought a ping pong table. “That’s a real luxury.” Is he better than his children? “Er… I’m not bad actually,” he admits shyly. I say I thought he was supposed to be Mr Self-Deprecation. “Yes, I spoke to my shrink yesterday on the phone in LA – you have to have one before they let you in – and I mentioned I was doing this [interview]. I said, ‘I can’t bear going through the same f****** dance of despair. I’m just going to say what I feel.’ And he encouraged that. So yes, I’m quite good at ping pong.” But is he better than his children? “Er… that’s a parenting issue. If I announce publicly… Er… I’d better skip over that one.” His children, he says, are “an unending delight”.

"So this is 'Welcome Back Television,'" says House's Hugh Laurie. "Is this going to be one of those photos where they have a diagram with an outline of the people and numbers so you can identify everyone?"

Attanasio penned "Courtroom" on spec and is executive producing the project, a darkly comedic courtroom drama in the vein of "House," which is set in a Milwaukee Superior Court and revolves around a judge, a prosecutor and a public defender.