Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
At school in the 1970s, no one cared about bullying. I spent the first four years being the apple of the teachers' eye and being bullied for it.
We have our detractors. If we didn't, that would be weird. That would make me feel, 'Oh God, we must be really bland.' You have to have detractors.
It's a very basic, simple idea, isn't it - saying thank you, saying sorry - and in the overcomplicated, over-busy world we live in it is very powerful.
Look at someone like Mary Berry, for God's sake, that woman is just such an inspiration... what's to say you can't do stuff for years and years and years?
I can't take UKIP seriously. I should, I must, it's our duty to take them seriously, because they're coming out with some really heinous old crap about immigration.
I'm really proud of 'The Gift.' There are stories we can all relate to - a first love that went wrong, a person who bullied us at school, a kind person we took for granted.
It feels like you are in your own little bubble when you film 'Bake Off.' There is no noise, the outside world doesn't exist when we are filming. It's us, the tent and the bakers.
The older I get, as well, bloody hell - time's running out. I just feel, jeez, there's so much to do. I'm not going to try to change the planet but make changes just in a small way.
The Bake Off' taps into nostalgic feelings about your mum baking in the kitchen. It's a big ruddy comfort blanket, and you get attached to the bakers. It also genuinely has a good heart.
It was an honour to be asked to do 'The Gift.' The producers took a risk asking me because, coming from a comedy background, I am not known for this kind of highly-charged, emotional show.
I've never seen 'Light Lunch' - only clips. But I do remember from those clips that there was a lot of bounding about and energy and I think that's probably slightly lessened over the years.
I'm the youngest of four in a large, exhibitionist family. The only way to get attention was to throw yourself off the top of a ladder - as one of my cousins used to do - or make people laugh.
I'm not a trained actor, so there was always going to be a certain amount of bringing my own... I was going to say skills but they're not really skills, it's just stuff that I know how to do I suppose.
It's often the guests you don't expect to be interesting who are the best. On 'Light Lunch,' I remember a guest called Ivor Spencer. He was the Royal Toastmaster and he was great, a real good-time guy.
Of course there's pressure on you whatever timeslot you're doing, but I think there's more pressure on you as you go into the evening and I think being tucked away in a nice teatime arena feels quite nice.
I don't have a problem with the concept of a box set per se - we have many of them merrily lined up on the shelf above the telly. No, what gives me the pip is the fact that I'm never going to watch any of them.
I love acting, I really do, I've always loved doing it, and it's a joy to be asked to do this. I mean, to do Beatrice, for God's sake, it is the best comedy Shakespeare role for a woman, and to be asked to do it.
This business is fickle. You have very good patches and less good patches, but you learn to ride them out. As long as you don't take yourself too seriously, you'll be fine. When you lose sight of that, you're in trouble.
There have been a lot of technical advances in the bra industry over the years, (such as those with Cellophane straps that are supposed to look as if you're not wearing them), but the maternity bra is still stuck in the 1940s.
We love live because of the roughness round the edges, the excitement, the madness, and stuff going off on all sorts of weird tangents. It's like hosting a jolly in your house. We're welcoming people in and giving them snacks.
My problem with present buying is usually lack of time. Not because I'm super-busy, I'm just super-lazy. I leave everything to the last minute and end up running up and down the high street on Christmas Eve like a crazed baboon.
Only now that I'm a mum can I fully understand the terrible pressure parents feel buying presents for their kids. My mum had four children plus all of the extended family and she not only had to feed us all but she bought presents for everyone, too.
My job with Sue on 'Bake Off' was to look after the bakers - and to be honest, a lot of that was done off screen as well as on screen. It's very much the same on 'Let It Shine.' You get to know people, you get involved, you want things to be alright.
People are used to seeing me with Sue but for Sue and me, the most important thing is always going to be our friendship. We were mates at university - very close mates - long before we did any telly. The work is like a nice little cherry on the cake.
At Trinity College there was a coterie of the poshest of the posh, people you didn't ever see, they were so posh. They went to each other's rooms and, at weekends, each other's estates. I preferred to be with the weirdo bunch of raggle-taggle thesps.
The Gift' doesn't deal with the neat, tie-me-up-with-a-bow kind of stories - they are grittier, messier, and not all of them have a happy resolution. You are following people and events that are more difficult, more elusive, and therefore harder to pin down.
I had to go to an audition for a rather large West End musical set on a Greek island. I didn't realise that you had to go with sheet music to give to the pianist. I took a Mark Bolan CD, a small ghetto blaster and then sang along. It was absolutely appalling.
For me, Christmas was always about presents. As a child, we each had an allotted place in the sitting room for the ceremonial unwrapping and mine was perched beside the telly on a Moroccan pouffe. We would watch our mum with bated breath as she divided up the gifts.
We all have somebody in our lives, that however closely related or not, is affected by terminal illness and these amazing nurses, who often work through the night with people, not only suffering from a terminal illness but their families, they're just extraordinary people.
There are different types of double act: the classic dumb-and-dumber, like Morecambe and Wise; the good cop/bad cop, where one's a bit spiky and the other's daft. Sue Perkins and I take what we might call the Ant and Dec approach: the double act came out of our friendship.
Mum was in her early 50s when she had four strokes in quick succession that almost took her off. I'd just come down from Cambridge with a rubbish degree. I spent a year reading to her - her eyesight was badly affected - and making sure she got proper rest. It was a special time but very intense, too.
People can now get to see anything they want, in any shape or form, anywhere, on laptop, iPad or 'phone. What's not controllable, though, is the live element. So there's still a real thrill for TV viewers in watching actors pulling it all together and performing live, and a real challenge for the actors.
I talked to friends who are actors and who do Shakespeare loads, and they all said 'learn it so that your family wants to clobber you, they're so bored.' You can never relax, that's the problem, because when you do, a bit of Shakespeare comes up to bite your cheeky behind. It just does, if you're not really focused on it.
My father describes himself as a Pole of Lithuanian descent. At Southampton University, he read aeronautical engineering and then the family moved to Hong Kong - this was before I was born - where he designed aeroplanes. Back in the U.K., he worked as a civil engineer, although every spare minute was spent researching his family's history.