Before the BBC, I joined the Navy in order to travel.
I'm quite grateful to the BBC. They helped me back onto the touring circuit.
As soon as I got my proper first job, I never did acting again. I think the last thing I did was a Mike Figures film, and then I got a series with the BBC. I'm glad of the experience, because I think it's very, very good to understand what actors go through.
The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken.
BBC TV gets hold of an idea and beats it to death until we're all heartily sick of it. They buy people without thinking what they're going to do with them. It's the wrong way around. What they should be doing is employing really good ideas people to come up with good ideas.
My first job was a film called 'Storm Damage' for the BBC. I was 16 and working with really respected British actors. I didn't have an agent at the time, and it kind of threw me into real acting.
Professionally, I was at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and did lots of things there, and then I won the BBC Carlton Hobbs Award, so I did some BBC Radio drama work, which is a lovely way to start out because you work with lots of great people, and you're working all the time, so you're learning rather than sitting around and waitressing.
My parents were Northern Ireland Labour party people. We read the 'Guardian' and the 'New Statesman,' listened to the BBC. The house was full of books. We didn't get a television until 'That Was The Week That Was' started. There was nothing to do but read.
The other two things are... well, I had a huge appetite for old black and white movies on BBC 2. At the weekends they used to run matinees, and the more romantic the better.
I've also just finished filming the role of Robert Brown in 'Just William,' which is due to transmit on BBC One at Christmas.
It's very different doing a food show in America and doing one in Britain. I did a 20-part series for the BBC series called 'Eating With the Enemy.' The budget for all 20 episodes was probably the budget for a single episode of 'Top Chef.' It's the difference between making a home movie in your backyard and going to Hollywood.
I'm not certain that the BBC can claim to be making a wide enough range of distinctive programmes to make the case convincingly.
The BBC can be infuriating at times but I love it with a passion.
We had everything from the BBC on our TV, so British drama seems very close to home.
I've played the leads in two British TV series. I've done a bunch of mini-series. Everybody in Australia is a bit in awe of BBC. I've worked for there, and that was a great experience.
For a startling period of my life, I reported the Troubles in Ireland for the BBC. I lived in Dublin and was called out to all sorts of incidents that, if taken together, add up to a war - bombings, assassinations, riots, shootings, robberies, jailbreaks, kidnappings, and sieges.
It was an interesting question as to whether the BBC had a future in the digital world, and what form of market failure could justify the licence fee system.
I do have a regard for the musicality of language that came from BBC sitcoms like 'Fawlty Towers.'
There is an honourable tradition in British public life that those charged with authority at the top of an organisation should accept responsibility for what happens in that organisation. I am therefore writing to the prime minister today to tender my resignation as chairman of the BBC.
When I joined Granada - which, you don't want to start crying about these things, but Granada was a very, very hot place to be, it was my good fortune to be there at that time - the BBC was firmly asleep.
I'm working on a screenplay right now for the BBC, but I hope to have the decks cleared soon so I can get into the studio with my pals and put down some more tracks, try to get a strong dance single together.
For better or worse, MTV sort of bridges the whole country together almost like the BBC does in England. It's opened up everything so wide that it's possible for everyone to have different ideas.
As long as the appointment process is transparent and there is a broad mix of political views among the governors of the BBC, I think the public can feel confident that impartiality and independence are just as important to me as they have been to previous incumbents.
The BBC sports department when I was there was seriously to the right of Ghengis Khan, and if people think I am strange, they should have met some of the production staff I worked with. Margaret Thatcher and the Queen were the pin up girls for many of them.
I honestly don't think you're taken seriously until you're 30. Any ideas I've ever taken to the BBC, they've told me I wasn't ready for it.
The tsar of War and Peace, especially in the BBC version, is a complete popinjay and a useless character. The real tsar, Alexander I, had an amazing career.
In the summer of 2004, Malem Jan was sitting with Sirajuddin Haqqani, the second son of Jalaluddin, in their Pakistani base in the North Waziristan town of Miram Shah when they heard their names on the BBC. The Americans were offering $250,000 and $200,000, respectively, as rewards for information leading to their capture.
I have written favourably in support of subsidy for the arts since the 1960s, and I continue to believe absolutely in subsidy, as I do in the BBC licence fee.
I've been lucky to have made a number of travel programmes with the BBC, the object being to see places off the beaten track. As a result, I've often had a guide who's been able to show me things that you wouldn't see with a tour group.
Because of England's lack of social mobility, unless they make truly heroic efforts, writers who are privately educated and then go on to Oxbridge or an institution like the BBC will generally embarrass themselves when they attempt to have a go at working- or lower middle-class characters.
On Monday and Thursday, I eat fewer than 500 calories a day; then I eat like a pig for the other five days. You 'surprise' the body: keep it guessing. I got the idea from a BBC documentary about this Indian man who seemed about 138 years old and said his secret was severe calorie restriction.
When Bob Wilson left the BBC for ITV, I got the 'Football Focus' job, and it went from there. It came completely out of the blue, but the fact I had a high profile certainly helped.
Although being economics editor sounds impressive, it does not mean I actually edit anything. It mainly reflects two decades of title-inflation at the BBC, which has given ever more status to senior reporters, presumably because it is cheaper to do that than to offer higher pay.
All I can do is advocate changes at the BBC while respecting editorial independence upon which the success of the BBC rests. I can't do anything that requires the BBC to pay certain people certain amounts.
You know, the BBC had not been particularly generous in its deliverance of blues and esoteric kinds of music.
It's tough and it should be tough - it should never be easy to be given millions of pounds to make a drama. The coalition government is doing terrible things to the BBC, but drama will survive even if we end up putting on a play in a backroom of a pub.