I know it feels like two steps forward and one step back, but we are making progress. In my lifetime, I have lived through one World War, I have lived through the end of Apartheid in South Africa, the pulling down of the Berlin Wall. I have experienced what I never thought I would have experienced, which is a pretty workable peace in Northern Ireland, and I experienced a unified Europe - until the Conservative government got its hands on the idea that in order to appease a few back-benchers they would hold a referendum, what a disastrous idea.

I wasn't campaigning for a role in a Hollywood television series, it was a fluke. So you've got to have a measure of good luck, you really have, being in the right place at the right time.

I've met actors where you think, if only you could just clean up your act and get it together, people would want to work with you. Some people are so difficult, it's just not worth working with them.

I heard police or ambulancemen, standing in our house, say, 'She must have provoked him,' or, 'Mrs Stewart, it takes two to make a fight.' They had no idea. The truth is my mother did nothing to deserve the violence she endured. She did not provoke my father, and even if she had, violence is an unacceptable way of dealing with conflict. Violence is a choice a man makes and he alone is responsible for it.

I've been an activist all my life. And always a liberal activist, for the simple reason that it is on the liberal left that you find the true recognition for the need for fairness in society. I'm not saying equality, because that you can never achieve, because equality is based on such complex criteria. But fairness is another issue.

Creating a believable world on the ship was very important, and technically they got better and better and better at showing the ship too.

As time went on, I did campaign to lighten the character a little bit, to introduce some romance into the episodes, outside activities, horse riding and fencing and mountaineering.