Alexander Armstrong

“I am going a bit deaf and I am hoping that technology is going to come on leaps and bounds and that one day I will hear better.”

“I love 'Pointless', part of the genius of the show is that it's always a different story.”

“I'm dementedly optimistic, and whoever I'm with usually feels they have to balance my more wayward optimism.”

“There was a period in the Nineties when the BBC wanted to act as if it was a trendy Soho independent. They broke up all sorts of things and got people to work as freelancers who had previously been BBC employees. It corroded a sort of esprit de corps, I think.”

“I used to drive a scooter and once a minicab driver pulled a U-turn in front of me and I went flying over his bonnet. Happily I didn't do myself much of an injury at all. It was straight out of 'The Dukes of Hazzard'.”

“Andy Parsons was always very funny. He was in a double act with a guy called Henry Naylor. Dan Mazer was always a very funny guy.”

“At Classic FM we're not an exposed shoreline where anything might come in on the tide. We're a lagoon; it's safe. You can tune in late at night and know it won't be contemporary.”

“I have four boys aged 10 and under. Fatherhood is lovely but there is this slightly shocking moment when you realise it is not something you just wear and take off.”

“Danger Mouse' is James Bond essentially. A rodent James Bond. Oh and slightly Batman too I suppose. And let's chuck in a little bit Superman while we're there. He's an old-fashion swashbuckling hero.”

“I once started tennis lessons and turned some poor man grey overnight. Now I feign injuries when I'm asked for a game.”

“I lived on a barge for the first six months, with a cousin. Then on the floor of a friend's house.”

“Sherlock' is brilliant television. It has completely reinvented British drama, and upped the stakes for home-grown shows.”

“I would love to think I'd inherited my father's patience. He's a man who achieves a great deal through gentleness.”

“I do love a good atmospheric soundtrack, me.”

“Our main house is in the country, all our stuff is in the country, and that's home, though the boys, who are four, two and one, are in school in London during the week.”

“When I'm filming, my fitness levels fall off, but when I'm not, I try to go to the gym a few times a week.”

“I was quite an odd child. We grew up in the middle of nowhere in Northumberland - it was lovely, idyllic, but we had remarkably little contact with other people.”

“Actually, I've been doing stand-up on the quiet for the last 15 years, in the form of corporate gigs.”

“Someone put us onto 'Nashville' which we loved. To start with anyway. It was trash but proper trash if you know what I mean.”

“I don't know about scared, but 'Chernobyl' definitely made me deeply uncomfortable. Almost addictively uncomfortable: don't know what that says about me. But I came to love the tatty Soviet brutalism of it.”