But in a flash there came across me a great project. The chine which the bridge spanned was full of young fir trees. Their slender tops reached to the level of the footway. 'Would it not' I asked myself 'be possible to leap on to one of them and slip down the pole-like stem, breaking off each tier of branches as one descended, until the fall was broken?' I looked at it. I computed it. I meditated. Meanwhile I climbed over the balustrade. My young pursuers stood wonder-struck at either end of the bridge. To plunge or not to plunge, that was the question! In a second I had plunged, throwing out my arms to embrace the summit of the fir tree. The argument was correct; the data were absolutely wrong. It was three days before I regained consciousness and more than three months before I crawled from my bed. The measured fall was 29 feet on to hard ground. But no doubt the branches helped.

I had a cardiac arrest in 2010. I also had a close call in the early days in Cardiff when I was in a band called the Denims. We were in a van driving along a narrow mountain road. Somebody wanted to go to the toilet, so we stopped, and afterwards the driver took a wrong turn and we went careering down the mountain. Everyone was screaming, it was like a nightmare. At the bottom was the railway line, but the van stopped just in time. We were very lucky.

Falling off what we in Middlesbrough call a “tarzy”, a bungee rope. I was swinging on it, fell and broke my arm.

Last year, driving in California, I found myself on the wrong side of the road. I was 30 seconds away from hitting two cars coming the other way.

“Not interested.” Who? Many people.

I thought I’d be smarter by now.

My father – I think he doubted our closeness.

Watching the Olympics.

An elevator operator.

When I was 19 I worked at a gay bar while I was at drama school in London. One of the guys I worked with was Glaswegian and I learned the dialect from him. The acting teacher at the school said, “Liev, you’ve got the region but you’ve missed the character entirely” because I played Jimmy Boyle in a very camp Glaswegian accent.