You step over the threshold of your parents' home, and you're instantly transported back to your childhood. It's like time travel. You revert at once to a place of arrested development.
If you stop being scared, that's when entropy sets in, and you may as well go home.
I am interested in shows that are not out-and-out gag fests: you see the truth of a broken heart behind them. That is what life is like: it's really funny, you see funny things as soon as you step out of the room, but underneath that is a whole bag of broken hearts. It's that real pain and that real hilarity that makes life so intriguing.
When I was growing up, I was obsessed with 'Cagney and Lacey.'
Carelessness makes me cross. And unkindness.
Dad was a retired chemist who, in his 60s, fathered and fed me and my two sisters while Mum worked as a secretary. He made us curries, Chinese meals and strange concoctions. He was often unsuccessful.
I knew a homeless guy who'd give all the copper coins that people gave him to charity. So I think there's something that makes us want to give. For me, it's quite a selfish luxury: you feel enlivened, deepened and self-nurtured by generosity.
I'm quite an odd little part of the Venn diagram. I'm not a movie star and beautiful in that way. I do an odd thing that's funny and sad, and my face and my old body can take that.
Writers have to be very careful and discerning because so much of the machine is out of their control.
I was a cleaner while at university. The job wasn't bad, but I was amazed by how badly cleaners are treated - how disrespected they are by the people they work for.
I can do a little bit of comedy. I can be in an in-between place, where I can do a little bit.
I've long thought that for my last meal on earth I will be perfectly happy with a granary loaf toastie with melted crunchy peanut butter and banana.
I think going from doing TV and straight plays to Shakespeare is weird enough because you have this heightened language, and you are telling a story through metric poetry. But I think music is that place beyond poetry.
A lot of middle-aged women are children still trying to find their way.
Scientifically speaking, if I say something, or it gets misquoted, or people put a spin on it... I mean, are you interested, really, in what people are saying?
Going to rehearsals of school plays got me out of science. It became clear what inspired me and what dampened my spirit. The only other thing I could do at school was trampolining - it didn't seem to have much future in it.
I did a drama degree, went to secretarial college, then got a job with a theatre company in Birmingham. It's been a slow burn, which doesn't seem to have gone out.
When I was 17, a neighbour I knew well died of cancer, and I became au pair to her three little girls. In circumstances like that, when you can't really help, I think it's a human response to do something beyond oneself. So I did a sponsored parachute jump for Cancer Research. It was exciting and ridiculous.
I'll read a recipe but then decide, 'Well, it's sort of like this, then.' Or I'll go to the fridge and think, 'I'll see what I can put together,' and I'll combine beetroot and sausage and prawns with goat's cheese sprinkled on top and think, 'I like that they're all slightly pink. It looks fine and... actually, it is fine.'
