On 'EastEnders' everyone's bitter, angry. Where are the wonderful characters that I lived with, who could find humour even in the lowest form of living?

Don't get me started on BBC salaries. We were never the big league. Situation comedy has always been the poor relation in the television entertainment business.

Miley Cyrus epitomises what we have allowed. She has done it to break the mould. I can understand why, but we have given her the oxygen of publicity and encouraged it, so young girls will think it is the right way to attract men. We've lost our standards.

The ups and downs are part of what has made you.

Missing out on 'Monty Python' was a real blow at the time. I sometimes wonder how things would have been different if I had been invited to join 'Monty Python,' but as the saying goes, one door closes, another opens.

It's very nice to meet people who just get on, work hard, and don't have things handed to them.

What intrigues me is that there are funny people in the real East End. It's famous for it. There'd be blokes dressing up as women as a lark, but 'EastEnders' seems blind to the fact that they enjoy a laugh. There should be a cheery chappy on there.

When I was a lad, my parents and all their equivalents never lusted after other people's riches or success.

My life has been in reverse. It wasn't fame, and it wasn't money, but I always wanted to succeed. The only way I could do that was to try with every job to be better than I was in the last one, and to learn.

Driving a Model T Ford was extremely difficult. The pedals are reversed from the way they are now. It's so crude, but that was the motorcar that started it all. It's an incredible part of history.

Classic comedy is classic comedy, and it will go on for years.

When I made my first decision, come hell or high water, that I would try to be a professional actor, I was burnt. Emotionally, I was burnt.

People tend to feel that if you're a comedian, you can't act.

We have more and more rules coming out of Europe telling us what to do, and I think people are getting a bit fed up with it. This was supposed to be a common market. I don't remember them ever saying we would be governed by Brussels and become a satellite of Europe.

Some actors retire, and some don't.

I want to encourage young people to get up off the sofa and get out there - as long as you want something hard enough, you can do it.

Working on 'Open All Hours' had some unexpected perks, not least the attractions of the canteen at the BBC's rehearsal studios in West London.

My father used to say, 'What the hell are you listening to? Put that bloody rubbish off.' And it was The Beatles.

In 1977, while I was performing in a play in Cardiff, a friend introduced me to a striking redhead called Myfanwy Talog, famed for her appearances on Welsh television with the comedy duo Rees and Ronnie. We were instantly smitten and eventually moved in together, sharing 18 happy years.

There are certain values that, in my opinion, television has lost - various moral lines. How far you go in, say, revealing what people get up to on reality TV, and also graphic violence and swearing - the taboo of various swear-words is no longer there. It's worrying.

I was very shy and had low self-esteem; the only way to stop yourself getting beaten up was to turn your hand to being an idiot. At the beginning, it was survival, and after that, it became second nature.

I joined an amateur drama group as a teenager, fell in love with theatre, and it totally changed my life.

A lot of TV has moved away from family viewing. But with 'The Royal Bodyguard,' we have tried to make a show when no one will be worried about sitting there with their kids or their grandma.

For me, the making of a documentary to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain was an intensely personal journey. I was born in February 1940, so I was just six months old as the battle raged overhead.