Failure. I hate losing, particularly at football and politics. I play five-a-side every week – middle of midfield, barking orders. Some people say it’s the taking part that counts. I am not in that camp. It’s the winning that counts.

Losing my husband. We are properly codependent.

I know we all have to die, but when my time comes, I’d rather it not be because a goose flew into the engine of a plane I’m on.

That we’re going down the tubes as a country (make that the whole world).

He was vulnerable to all the sorts of contradictions that every human can be subject to.

In the series I’ve got massive slabs of dialogue so I had to understand the scientific principles involved and then fake it to credibility.

I tend to shape my life through aesthetic principles rather than economic ones – I’ve never been very good at maths.

The only experience I’ve had, in the early 90s I was working in the theatre and I went through a very bad period, 3 or 4 years, of dread inducing panic attacks before going out on stage and then I got an international film career and they sort of disappeared [laughter].

During my Queensland childhood, on the days when I avoided the chlorine-infused shower gauntlet and being corralled into the deep end of the school pool.

A panic attack on stage during The Importance Of Being Earnest. Well, it felt like death.