God was treated like this powerful, erratic, rather punitive father who has to be pacified and praised. You know, flattered.

It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand.

When the target audience is American teenage kids, you can have problems. My generation prized really fine acting and writing. Sometimes you have to go back to the basic principles which underpin great visual comedy.

I'm always meeting new people, and my list of friends seems to change quite a bit.

Some actors, I think, want to feel that they are as creative as the writer. And the answer is, frankly, they're not.

When I was a child and I was upset about something, my mother was not capable of containing that emotion, of letting me be upset but reassuring me, of just being with me in a calming way. She always got in a flap, so I not only had my own baby panics, fears and terrors to deal with, but I had to cope with hers, too. Eventually I taught myself to remain calm when I was panicked, in order not to upset her. In a way, she had managed to put me in charge of her. At 18 months old, I was doing the parenting.

English television from the Fifties to the Nineties was the least bad in the world, and now it's just as bad as it is anywhere.