What is the worst job you have done?

Unpacking scenery from a pantechnicon for the Carl Rosa Opera Company.

I worked in a petrol station on the A1 one summer. I enjoyed it except when I was on latrine duty.

That would have to be a film called Pickup On 101. It was a very interesting story, about a wandering musician and an old guy on his way back to his home town to spend his last days, but they made it into a pile of dishonest trash.

Secretary to a lawyer. I was sacked after a week.

A cabaret act with Agnetha, Frida and Benny. It was in a nightclub in Gothenburg and one night we had seven in the audience. It was before we found out that we were a pop group.

Scrabbling about under dusty floorboards as an electrician in my early 20s.

Working as the assistant to an agony aunt on a women’s magazine. When we didn’t get enough heartbreaking letters, we made them up.

I just hate to work, so I can’t choose one.

Doing an episode of Doctors was a bit of a nadir.

I worked in a Helms Bakery assembly line that separated egg whites from the yolks and from time to time a box of rotten eggs would come through. Need I say more?

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.

When Rufus first came out, it was all white guys and myself, but then the band changed and Tony Maiden, Bobby Watson and Andre Fischer came in. This guy booked us for a gig in Illinois, based on our original album cover, and when we got there he said that there were too many black people in the band. He actually put some white guys on the stage with us.

Treating a flock of sheep for foot rot when I was a farm labourer.

Standing outside a pub in Acton on a freezing February day in a threadbare overcoat doing market research.

Giving barium enemas. I used to be a radiographer in Coventry.

Shucking oysters one summer in Nice.

I was 15 working in Boots on Barnet High Street and it was terrifying. At coffee break you had to know whose cup was whose, and taking the wrong cup was a crime. I’ve met bitches, but I tell you they started out in Boots in Barnet.

In a Dagenham factory at 6am, picking soldiers’ greatcoats from wars around the world to sell at the market in Chelsea. I smelled like mothballs, and no one would come near me.

I worked in the stores of Edgware hospital when I was about 17, and it was grey and depressing.

Picking up RAF pilots’ parachute packs and gear they dropped off in a pile.