Journalist

To give religion two minutes a day, in its own space, isn't exactly selling general morality or atheism short.

I don't believe in a personal God, no. And I don't believe in resurrection as it is in the New Testament.

Film has changed the way we look at the past.

Britain is undoubtedly becoming more cultural. No question of it. People who say it is dumbing down simply don't look around enough. They don't know enough.

Few places on earth have been as affectionately alchemised into literature as the Lake District.

The arts stimulate imagination. They provoke thought. And then, having done that, all sorts of other things happen.

My life is not very different from what it was 20 years ago. In fact, my career hasn't changed much since I was 22.

There's a lot of hours in the week if you use them properly.

We got a copy of the 'New Statesman' at my grammar school in Wigton, Cumbria, in the 1950s. It sat mint fresh every week on the library table, with two or three other bargain-offer magazines. The 'Statesman' came out of the unimaginable Great World. I started to read it then and have pegged along ever since.

I got the job I wanted when I was 22, and I'm not going to give it up now.

I don't get nervous when I'm interviewing someone on film - it can be cut, and we can do it again. It is quite nerve-racking doing things live.

I am 74 now. Looking back, I have a sense of not really being in control of my career. I just went where it took me.

The idea that popular arts were shallow by definition and the traditional arts were profound was dead, I thought, and I wanted to prove it.

We start out as sand and soot out there in the universe, and who knows, in 40 trillion years' time we might come back. But if we come back without memory, it doesn't really interest me.

Magna Carta has become totemic. It is in the comedy of Tony Hancock, in the poetry of Kipling, never far from the front pages in a constitutional crisis.

I just got fed up with the Protestantism that I'd been brought up with being rubbed out, disregarded. There's an awful lot of frailty and doubt about it, which I understand and share, but there are certain things you just have to acknowledge.

It is very difficult for middle-aged, institutionalised males who have done so well out of subsidy - and, fair play, given much back - to realise that there is a time to be a well-heeled revolutionary.

We listened to a lot of drama, adaptations of books, comedy. There was a real love of music expressed in choirs, because you didn't have to have instruments except your voice.

Is it rather stupid and dangerous to take Magna Carta so much for granted, as many of us seem to do, and to think of this attitude as 'very English?'

I don't feel like I'm slowing down.