Once, the arts were opera, ballet, classical music, and everything else deemed highbrow.

I wanted 'The South Bank Show' to reflect my own life and that of the team around me; to stretch the accepted boundaries and challenge the accepted hierarchies of the arts; to include pop music as well as classical music, television drama as well as theatre drama, and high-definition performers in comedy.

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.

I enjoy what was called 'swotting' in my day.

I've been writing since I was 19.

I don't want closure, I don't know what that means or why you would want it.

Work is a great blotter up. It stops you thinking, which is useful. No, it stops you feeling.

The BBC does a sterling job, but I'd like to see it do more. ITV does four arts programmes a year; it used to be 28. At least Sky, with its two arts channels, is trying.

The driving force behind 'In Our Time' is that I want an education. I want to know more about science, say, and if I want to know, then other people probably do, too.

I don't go around thinking I'm attractive or not attractive. It has never occurred to me. People don't think like that where I come from... No one has ever said, 'Oh, he's a good-looking bloke.' They just didn't use those words about men.

Now, perfectly ordinary people will give each other hugs. I mean, it used to be that a hug was reserved for if you came back from Australia - you know, back in the '40s and '50s.

That's why writing is important to me. Time goes past, and you've been somewhere and come back that hasn't hurt you, and you've been somebody else.

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

A structure is a bit like a story. People will go along with you - they see where you're going.

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.

Sometimes, you're just moved by people's journeys.

People in jobs that they hate must be worn out.

I like the fact George R. R. Martin took Shakespeare's political plays as material, but he also took on all sorts of other sensational stories and mingled them in together.

I'm addicted to 'Game Of Thrones.'

My memory seems to be holding on quite well. There is no reason why it shouldn't if you keep training it.

Darwin talks about evolution, but he doesn't say how it started. Maybe the sense of mystery will dissolve in the face of science, but I am not so sure. We are all described by the human genome, but it's getting people nowhere.

I'm going to try and make you take the Beatles and Eric Clapton as seriously as the Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle.

I was born in a radio world, and I got so much from it.

I'd been writing fiction for 50 years, since I was 19. And when you write fiction, it becomes a way of thinking: there's always a novel around. The strange thing was that after 'Remember Me,' there wasn't.

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.

In music, the Specials brought a city, Coventry, bombed out for a second time and riven with racism, to a celebration between black and white musicians and their music.

In the 1990s, from the estates of Scotland came the phenomenon of Irvine Welsh. 'Trainspotting' demanded its place not only in the high ranks of contemporary fiction but as a describer of a Britain that literally and metaphorically was in a deep mess.

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.

In 1997, the Labour government set out to strengthen funding for the arts - and achieved it.

Control, like curiosity, can be an exterminator.

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.

In an arts programme, my job was to go where the talent was. And the talent was in popular culture.

I love writing, and I love making arts programmes.

Autobiographical fiction is very tricky.

A lot of the novels I admire are 'admirably provincial.'

I actually admire some of the books by a lot of the writers who write magic realism very much, but it's not for me. It's not what I can do, but even if I could, I don't really want to try.

A lot of the novels that I've really enjoyed in my life, whether it's Tolstoy's 'Cossacks,' or 'Sons and Lovers' or 'Jude the Obscure' or 'David Copperfield' or 'Herzog,' have an autobiographical spine.

Writers are looking for a story. Using your own life as the basis for a story gives it an association with reality that's a wonderful starting point.

The theatre always seems to be in trouble but always thriving. It's deeply comical to me that we agonize about our crap football teams and indifferent Test sides when in front of our noses is a great world success story that no one's interested in apart from those who work in it.

Film has changed the way we look at the past.

One of the great things about making 'Reel History' was meeting British people from all over the class system. It made me realise that London is a different country.

I sometimes think the only true record of England is the 'Cumberland News.'

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

I'm a Labour party supporter, but I'm also a democrat.

I enjoy writing. Would I rather be playing golf? No. Would I rather be fishing? No.

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.

I was the only BBC graduate trainee in 1961 interested in arts broadcasting. I knew I wanted to write, and I had to make a living.

Grime reminds me, if there is an echo, of sort of near enough like Liverpool in the very early Sixties. It's a lot of kids obsessed with music - obsessed with it.

If you look at the creative economy in this country, it's per capita way bigger than any other in the world.

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