It always seemed to be a constant that my parents were political.

For me, the showbiz memoir is uninteresting - you want to tell people something they don't know about.

I exist as an annexe of the BBC. I'm down the road a bit from the main building, in a little hut.

But as in all cults, what's central to the Communist Party is the belief system and the elimination of nuance. From there you're very slowly led down the road to fanaticism and mass murder.

I don't think people were that interested in what I was doing for the most of the 1990s.

I did six series for the BBC and that was enough. I've been writing for ten years, which is more challenging artistically.

Most of the Communists I knew were nice people.