I was 15 working in Boots on Barnet High Street and it was terrifying. At coffee break you had to know whose cup was whose, and taking the wrong cup was a crime. I’ve met bitches, but I tell you they started out in Boots in Barnet.
What is the worst job you have done?
Question
Aside from a property, what is the most expensive thing you have bought?
Money & investment
Question
What does love feel like?
Relationships
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
Question
Who most deserves an apology from you, and why?
Failure & regret
Question
What scares you about getting older?
Time & hindsight
Question
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
Failure & regret
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's long-running Q&A repeatedly asks this standing question, with minor tense variation.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
When I started as a researcher in the BBC, I was working for an editor who was a self-confessed misogynist. He used to practise shooting by aiming his air gun at an aerosol can balanced just over my head. I made it a matter of pride not to flinch as the pellets whizzed by.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 17 February 2024 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 229 →
Angela Hartnett
English chef
Washing up in the Ford factory canteen in Dagenham.
Craig Revel Horwood
Australian-British choreographer and director
Potato-picking in my home town, Ballarat.
Robert Carlyle
Scottish actor
The worst was as a butcher, aged 17.
More from Esther Rantzen
View profile →My hybrid car. Not glamorous, not fast, but indispensable.
Like intoxication, sometimes followed by a hangover.
Alan Bates, Lord Arbuthnot and Nick Wallis for exposing the Post Office and Fujitsu and, let’s hope, for ensuring everyone is properly compensated.
To everyone I’ve bored.
Possible dementia.
Maybe I should have agreed to take the job of controller of BBC One when Bill Cotton offered it to me. I do feel a wimp; I would have been the first woman in the job.What do you consider your greatest achievement? I don’t really claim credit, I hope, for helping to launch Childline and the Silver Line and Silver Stories. It is an achievement that they all exist, but that is down to their amazing teams.
More on craft & work
- What do you consider your greatest achievement? 192 answers
- How do you know when a piece of work is finished? 67 answers
- What do you do when you feel creatively blocked or stuck? 66 answers
- How does a new work begin for you? 63 answers
- How much rewriting or revision do you do? 46 answers
- What is the part of your job that people would be surprised is most of your job? 41 answers
Also answered this · A–Z
Adam Kay, Adeel Akhtar, Adjoa Andoh, Adrian Dunbar, Adrian Edmondson, Aidan Gillen
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All craft & work questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject