Horrible gigs at the beginning, when no one’s interested.

There was a period when I did four or five terrible films. My agent said: “Don’t do them.” But it was my month’s rent for a day’s work. One time, my green room was a lorry. It started snowing and it was just me and a plastic chair in the back of an open lorry. It was pretty grim.

At King’s College hospital when I was 16; the job was putting hundreds of pieces of A4 paper into A4 transparent envelopes. I lasted one day.

At the BBC, in the old days, a piece of paper was sent to various households for them to report on what they’d watched that week. In my early 20s, I collated the data. It was deeply boring.

It’s like digging a field together: it’s hard work, not very glamorous, but you can stand back and think, “We did that.”

I had no female role models growing up. I lived an incredibly sheltered life: there was no TV at home and we had no visitors. It wasn’t until rock and pop came into my life that I concocted myself as a role model.

I wish I’d told my mother that, in all the years I knew her, she was never once boring. We weren’t demonstrative, so that would have meant that I loved her.

Romantic love – what a con. (I do still believe in it.)

The moment my daughter was born in 1999, because it took me seven years to conceive.

I am going straight to cremation like David Bowie, so there would be no funeral.