Quotes

I'm no fan of Jeremy Clarkson's. He's right up there on my list of five most hated men.

Airbrushing irons out cellulite, smooths away muffin tops and eradicates pimples. It results in bland, homogenised images of women (and some men) who are eerily perfect. People you never see on the street, in everyday life, where we sweat, bulge and grow hairs in inconvenient places. Now, airbrushing is being applied to our social history. In the wake of recent scandals involving Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall and Rolf Harris, all sorts of organisations want to airbrush away their previous involvement with these repugnant characters.

Rolf Harris was a terrible artist as well as a creepy entertainer. He wrote asking if he could paint my portrait for a BBC series. I declined. But will the BBC now be wiping the tapes of all his shows? And what's its position on its extensive catalogue of Savile [Jimmy Savile] material? And has Hall [Stuart Hall] been deleted from the BBC library?

[on Sir Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall and Rolf Harris] Removing all these accolades and awards from sex criminals is pretty pointless. The fact that they were given in the first place tells you an awful lot about the society we live in. I don't want any of the television shows made by this ghastly trio to be wiped. I want them to be studied for future generations, to try to understand how none of us spotted what these men were up to. I want their honours to stand as a condemnation of the whole rotten system of dishing out tributes to those who don't deserve it. I don't want these three men to be airbrushed out of history, because that represents a futile attempt to diminish the horror of what they did. To stop it happening again, we need to keep their memory alive. And start asking questions about ourselves.

It would be embarrassing to get married again. It's something we've never talked about. Anyway, we've got our gay friends, they are all getting married, people like Elton (Elton John). They have taken the load off all us heterosexuals living in sin.

I find it all quite exciting. I think it's an exciting time when a pop star like Sam Smith can come out and say he's non-binary, he's a bit of a floating voter when it comes to gender and his fans will just accept that. We've come a long way in a very short time.