When I started as a researcher in the BBC, I was working for an editor who was a self-confessed misogynist. He used to practise shooting by aiming his air gun at an aerosol can balanced just over my head. I made it a matter of pride not to flinch as the pellets whizzed by.

Shucking oysters one summer in Nice.

I shucked oysters for a day without the proper knife or gloves. I had to go to hospital as I’d ripped my hands up. I can’t recommend it as a career option.

The Wimpy in Kingston when I was 16. I’d recently become vegetarian, and there weren’t many veggie burgers in 1988.

I’d like to go all melodramatic and have Vide cor Meum by Patrick Cassidy from Kingdom Of Heaven. It’s also in another Ridley Scott movie, Hannibal. It’s an operatic piece and absolutely amazing. Obviously Ridley Scott thinks so, too..

Fame. The upside is not worth the downside – you can’t turn fame on and off, and have privacy.

In the 1990s in New Jersey, being driven to a radio station early one morning. Our driver fell asleep and we were on the other side of a dual carriageway with cars coming at us. We all screamed and banged on the seat, and he woke up and pulled the car back across.

When I was about 14 and got my first drum kit, I wanted to be a drummer in a band like the Police.

I think I’d just like to be chilling out really, so it’s like real summer family holidays where the most important things to decide are what are you going to have for breakfast, what are you going to have for lunch, what beach are you going to, and what are you going to have for dinner.

My wife, because she manages me and sometimes there isn’t time for niceties and we have to talk in a language that isn’t very marriage-like.