Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I felt that needed to be addressed: the idea that anything a man tries to do properly or thoroughly is dismissed as either metrosexual or OCD. But why can't you be practical and artistic at the same time, which was considered perfectly normal in the Renaissance?
I hate the idea of people nicking my stuff, but in all honesty, I'm pretty well off. If a genuinely desperate man on his last gasp nicks my coat from the pub on a freezing night, well, he's welcome to it. It'll change his life. Mine's only inconvenienced by having to buy another one.
There's a lot of politics in television and a lot of in-fighting and all that sort of stuff, but in the end, we are purveyors of entertainment. Viewers are not really bogged down in who's doing what and who hates who and who's doing best in the ratings. They watch television to be entertained.
The decline of practical skills, some of them very day-to-day, among a generation of British men is very worrying. They can't put up a shelf, wire a plug, countersink a screw, iron a shirt. They believe it's endearing and cute to be useless, whereas I think it's boring, and everyone's getting sick of it.
The Amazon lot are perfectly reasonable, level-headed people who just want to make TV programmes. I don't think they are the enemy of the BBC or the other way round. It's not a war; these things can coexist. We can have Amazon and Netflix and the BBC and BT Sport, and people can make choices. That's what modern life is all about.
The three of us may be reunited on screen, we may go our separate ways, or we may disappear from the television altogether and each assume a place, alone, in the corner of a pub where any unsuspecting passing drinker who strays into an exclusion zone studiously avoided by the locals will be subjected to a predictable 'I used to be on TV' routine.