What is the worst job you have done?

A movie called The Return that was about cows from outer space.

Selling fire alarms at 18 or 19.

Scooping ice cream is tougher than it looks. … Rows and rows of rock-hard ice cream can be brutal on the wrists. … I was less interested in what the job meant for my future and more concerned about what it meant for my jump shot.

Telesales. I refused to wear a tie, but my argument that “They can’t see what we’re wearing” didn’t wash with the manager and I lasted a week.

Laying down slabs for the council.

A cafeteria in Glasgow where the manager was horrible. I walked out and got a great job in a betting shop.

I’ve been lucky. When I was a kid, I babysat and was a lifeguard, which I didn’t hate; and then I was a teacher, which I liked.

I’ve never had a terrible job. I’ve been a cook, waitress, bookseller, teacher, freelance writer. I know what the bad jobs are and I haven’t done them.

A 12-hour nightshift at a toy factory in Southend.

Putting ball bearings into Mum roll-on deodorant bottles in a factory, one summer when I was 17.

I’ve been lucky enough to act for 35 years. The only other job I had was as a cook at a drive-in restaurant, and I enjoyed that as well.

Serving tea in an insurance office to people who seemed to despise me at the age of 16 was pretty unpleasant.

At the BBC, in the old days, a piece of paper was sent to various households for them to report on what they’d watched that week. In my early 20s, I collated the data. It was deeply boring.

Having to clean out my daughter’s digs at university. The memory of the state of that toilet still lives with me.

Cleaning the freezer room at Bejam as a Saturday job, aged 13.

Gary and I worked in a greengrocer’s on Saturdays and in the holidays. One of my jobs was cooking beetroot – it used to make me gag.

A kitchen porter at some big telecom office in Wimbledon. I was also a kitchen porter at L’Escargot and, while I was there, a model for Gilbert and George. It was a quick £15 and they were terribly nice.

Doing the bins while working for McDonald’s in west Ealing.

I haven’t really had a job. I used to work at my dad’s garden centre in my late teens, but it was just messing around.

Potato-picking in my home town, Ballarat.