Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome.

In those days, the early 1980s, TV and film were interchangeable.

The one thing that Via Dolorosa has is no opinions. To me, curiosity is 50 times as valuable as opinion.

Writers always sound insufferably smug when they sit back and assert that their job is only to ask questions and not to answer them. But, in good part, it is true. And once you become committed to one particular answer, your freedom to ask new questions is seriously impaired.

Are we simply waving farewell to the days when some of the most interesting thinking in Europe and America came to us from our fiction film-makers? BBC2, which once introduced and showed great films, now shows none.

You cant get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.

The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-toothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts.