Quotes

I hate classical music in all its manifestations.

[at the Lord Of The Rings premiere] Did I like it? Well, it's like Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) but without the jokes.

My CD collection has become The Fall and the rest. This is terrible. I've got the new Sigur Rós album, which I really like and I'm thinking, 'this is great, but I could be listening to The Fall'.

You know, Chaucer (Geoffrey Chaucer) used swearing. It's a very time-honoured language part and shouldn't be ghettoised the way it is just because some people don't like it. I don't want people using so much swearing that there's a blanket ban because there won't be then any room for the clever swearing, the beautiful, eloquent swearing. So I just think we need to back off on the stuff that's not necessary. But I think it's absolutely important that we keep swearing as a tool, a comic tool for television and any other area of comedy.

[on presenting Panorama (1953) in 2009] If you're going to have tennis coverage, you ask Sue Barker. If you're going to have something about offensive material, you ask me.

I don't watch cookery programmes. Not because I don't like the swearing, I don't like the cookery.

As you get older you get your priorities straight. I don't have children but I have the Albion.

I quite like the Germans. They're like us: they drink a lot of beer and they dress badly. And I think we could learn a lot more from them about football than we could from, say, the Italians, whose players are so different from ours.

I'll watch it, obviously, but I'd much rather Albion stay up than England win the World Cup. No contest at all.

I vote Labour because I have an emotional attachment to my working-class background and I like the idea of being someone who cares about the lowly more than my own tax rate. Obviously, that wavers but I feel like the moment I vote, I am seeing through that ideal of myself.

[on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)] Is it just me or are Indiana Jones and Freddy Krueger getting closer together?

[on suggestions Trading Places (1983) is racist, sexist and homophobic] In those days that was a rattling good review.

Occasionally you have to stand back and think: don't just listen to what everyone's saying, what do I think? What do I think? Queen! No! I don't like Queen. They weren't a serious band. They didn't use to be a serious band and people have misremembered them. They were like Showaddywaddy to rock music, what Showaddywaddy was to rock and roll. I'm not condemning anyone who loves them, I'm just saying my own personal thing. I don't object to other people liking it, I just think there's a thing that happened that Freddie Mercury died and suddenly they became a serious proposition.

[on Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise] I'll tell you something about Morecambe and Wise, if you ever watch an entire Morecambe and Wise show, not just highlights, they're brilliant with André Previn and they're brilliant when they do that thing where they throw toast at each other. For 25 minutes in their 40 year career they were absolutely fantastic and that's the only 25 minutes. One year they showed a load of Christmas specials, the full thing. Watch the full thing. Terrible. But some brilliant bits but I knew the brilliant bits 'cause it's those 20 minutes of brilliant bits that you just see. Don't get me wrong, I think he was a naturally funny bloke, Eric, but most of the show, nowadays, would be torn to pieces.

[in 2015] I would say without doubt the last 20 years of American TV drama apart from Gotham (2014) I'd be happy to watch incinerated.

[on the 1966 World Cup final] I watched it live and I remember it being awful.