I was a loner as a child and happiest at home launching toy rockets and aeroplanes. When I started causing trouble in my third year at grammar school Mum was really surprised. My parents sent me to a child psychologist who suggested I might have Asperger's syndrome.

You can only get really unpopular decisions through if the electorate is convinced of the value of the environment. That's what natural history programmes should be for.

In the old days... it was a basic cardinal fact that producers didn't have opinions. When I was producing natural history programmes I didn't use them as vehicles for my own opinion. They were factual programmes.

Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme.

Ladies if you want to know the way to my heart... good spelling and good grammar good punctuation capitalize only where you are supposed to capitalize it's done.

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

My duty as a teacher is to train educate future programmers.

I can tell you dearest friend that if it became known how much friendship love and a world of human and spiritual references I have smuggled into these three movements the adherents of programme music - should there be any left - would go mad with joy.

I was at a party and some squiggly looking dude with a bow tie came up and said 'How'd you like to be on TV?' Turns out he was the programming guy at the Food Network. They had me come into the office and I did a 'Ready Set Cook' with Emeril Lagasse I believe.

Ever since grammar school I knew I wanted to be famous - I always wanted to be a singer.

By measuring the proportion of children living with the same parents from birth and whether their parents report a good quality relationship we are driving home the message that social programmes should promote family stability and avert breakdown.

Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.

Writing is an act of faith not a trick of grammar.

I had the closest thing I have ever had to an out-of-body experience lying in bed one morning. I turned on the 'Today' programme and item four on the news was: 'The shadow chancellor has ruled himself out of the leadership.' I lay there thinking that's interesting then I realised it was me.

My father was an autodidact. It wasn't a middle-class house. Shopkeepers are aspirant. He paid for me to go to private school. He was denied an education - he had a horrible childhood. He got a place at a grammar school and wasn't allowed to go.

There were all us baby boomers who had a grammar school education started to learn then went on the pill the whole thing and so there are today a lot more women writers editors producers and so a lot more women's stories. God the BBC's practically run by women.

My background is in hardware design. I found hardware work to be a welcome change from thousands of hours of programming and that led to the designs you mentioned.