There are a lot of images to be proud of. There are a lot of images that I’m very happy with, in the film context, that were very hard to do or that happened in the right moment, and that were the embodiment of the fact that I engulf myself in the spirit of an understanding of those animals at that time.

What makes me proudest about them is that they also don't get cynical about it. They have not assumed because their side didn't win, or because some of the values that they care about don't seem as if they were vindicated, that automatically America has somehow rejected them or rejected their values.

I didn’t realise I’m the oldest ever! So I just about made it, huh? Because you can’t be dead and win … If you’re a winner of the National Inventors Hall of Fame you can be dead. I won that prize a couple of years ago and I was very proud of that. That is the most, I would say, most important prize I’ve won.

If it’s one thing, obviously it had to have been being selected to make the first manned space flight for the United States. That was competition at its best, not because of the fame or the recognition that went with it, but because of the fact that America’s best test pilots went through this selection process, down to seven guys, and of those seven, I was the first one to go. That always will be the most satisfying thing for me.

It looked like an agricultural frame, something you might grow peas up – a lot of wires and cables strung from posts over a space the size of 57 tennis courts. It was actually built to study radio emission from quasars. I built the prototype and then six of us took two years to build the real thing.

Occasionally there would be something I didn’t recognise and I’d record it with a question mark or, as a joke, LGM for Little Green Men. It was easier than saying “you know that funny pulsing source at right ascension 1919, declination plus 20”. So, it became LGM.

They have a lot of extreme physics going on inside them and scientists use them to test theories of relativity on a cosmic scale. Einstein’s theories are checking out pretty well so far.

The next generation of telescopes will see millions of events per night with computers that sift through huge amounts of data. If we had had access to a computer, we would never have programmed it to look for something so unexpected. How do you pick up the things you don't know exist, the things you can't tell it to look for? My project was to study quasars, and then we accidentally stumble over these things called pulsars. They were totally unexpected, totally unknown – and it's been huge fun.

Tony was cautious. He suspected I’d wired the radio telescope up wrong. So we checked on another radio telescope on the site. The thing was pulsing nicely on mine but as we stood by the pen recorder of this other telescope, nothing happened. It was a horrible moment. And suddenly there it was, five minutes later because we had miscalculated when the telescope would see it. If we’d miscalculated by 25 minutes, we’d have all gone home and the story would be different.

Yes, in 2018, I was awarded the Breakthrough Prize for the discovery. I was a bit dumbstruck, never expecting that kind of thing to happen. I was keen that the money should be used well and the best way to do that seemed to be to encourage a more diverse research student population from under-represented groups.