Good drama, challenging drama - and comedy for that matter - has a place in the daytime schedule.

Both my parents were migrant workers who came to the U.K. in the Fifties to better themselves. The culture I grew up in was to work hard, save hard and to look after your family.

I make terrible jokes every time I go into a hospital. I think it's a defence mechanism.

It is better to give blood but receive cash than the other way around.

I might do a fitness video. Actually, more of a fatness video.

I've always felt I had to prove myself, and now it has become second nature. When I first went to university, I took lodgings with a woman who said, 'What are the chances of you staining my pans?' I said, 'I don't think I understand the question...' and she said, 'When you cook your curries.'

Good diet and exercise are key, but abject fear has its own rewards. And arriving on the first day for rehearsals for Spamalot and seeing all these much younger, much fitter people, who I was going to be on stage with, became a catalyst for cutting out the more unhealthy aspects of my life.