Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Asked in 52 of the 131 consecutive instalments of The Guardian's The Q&A harvested on 2026-08-29.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 October 2021 source ↗
When I found out that I was having my baby. They told me I was having a little girl and I named it Elizabeth. Then, when the baby was born it was my beautiful boy, Mark.
This is going to horribly upset my wife, my children and my grandchildren, but it was when I did The Greatest Snowman last year for Channel 4. Being let loose on an Austrian mountainside to build snow sculptures was my happy point, and who knew I’d find an icy G-spot at nearly 58.
I am happiest when I am working.
On childhood family holidays in Mallorca, with my mum, dad and sister, Amanda.
When my dog died a couple of years ago. We were in Greece on vacation and a friend was watching her at home, and she was bitten by a snake. We rushed home, but we were too late by a few hours.
When I was 16, at the beginning of the summer vacation, I worked in a factory that made industrial valves and I was a much worse industrial valve producer than historian.
On a personal level, the friend who is a single mum raising two kids by herself during this Covid era. She is a real hero. If a historical personality, I choose Mikhail Gorbachev, who probably saved the world from world war three.
That I still don’t understand life. When I was young, I thought at some point I would find somebody who does. I am 45, and there is a good chance that I’ll never meet somebody like that.
I would like to come out at 16 or 17, and not 21.
I was almost run over by a bus when I was 13. And in 1991, in the Gulf war, an Iraqi missile hit close to my house.
Ralph Ineson, Joan Bakewell, EL James, George Michael, Simon Callow, June Brown
Search the directory for somebody in particular.