Since hostile people still call me a former Playboy Bunny, even at 82, I probably shouldn’t have done that in my youth, even to write an exposé. And since a couple of times they’ve also referred to me as a former CIA agent, because I went to two Soviet-era communist youth festivals, I probably shouldn’t have done that, either. Yet if I hadn’t done both, I might have judged other people by such empty symbols, too.

I wouldn’t change anything. When I was 29, my first husband died, so I learned a new way of thinking about life, which is: there are many things that you can’t control.

I would have skipped the time my daughter was nine to 13, when I was in a toxic relationship.

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.

What I am now, but with a better singing voice.

Phoning my dad to tell him we’d won the Edinburgh Perrier award with The League Of Gentlemen in 1997.

Collecting glasses in a Lancashire pub. Try to take a pint glass with a millimetre of foam still in it, and you get a lit cigarette on the back of your hand.

Tears Of Laughter by Cheese and Crackers. We wrote it for an episode of Inside No 9 and it ends “Laughter is my memory of you...”