Maybe I should have agreed to take the job of controller of BBC One when Bill Cotton offered it to me. I do feel a wimp; I would have been the first woman in the job.What do you consider your greatest achievement? I don’t really claim credit, I hope, for helping to launch Childline and the Silver Line and Silver Stories. It is an achievement that they all exist, but that is down to their amazing teams.

My sister’s death – I would love to meet her kids. [Karen Grammer was 18 when she was abducted, raped and murdered.]

The floral waistcoat and shocking-pink shirt combo I wore on my 21st.

Nothing. Tony Benn, one of my favourite politicians, said, “I don’t care where you’ve been, I care where you’re going.”

In 1999, the British Library auctioned off some of its newspaper holdings. My wife and I formed a non-profit and saved more than 20 tons of these irreplaceable bound newspapers, including the last intact run of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.

It’s like all your emotions are apples and they get crushed all at once into cider.

When we had children at home. But recently I finished a book about old secrets that I’ve been working on for a long time, and when I was done, I felt a gigantic, joyful relief in having escaped from the corn maze of remembered facts in which I’d been wandering for so long.