Is there anything we can do about these Professors? Like drag them kicking and screaming into the real World...

There's nothing wrong with the macho English male but they're not romantic enough.

[on Jon Pertwee] He was a big man in every way, with a wonderful sense of humour and sense of the ridiculous. Last time we met in the Garrick Club, he was handing round a bag of fried locusts.

[on Fanny Craddock] The lethal combination of Margaret Thatcher and Vlad the Impaler.

[on the late Sir Jimmy Savile] He had no talent, except for bombast and self-promotion. You kind of admired him for doing as well as he'd done, without any talent whatsoever.

[on the late Sir Jimmy Savile] He always struck me as creepy. I've talked to people and not one of them has said: 'I really liked him.'

I was sitting at a table having lunch and Savile was sitting one up from me, and also up from me was Jean Rook. And Jimmy Savile got up to go to the loo, and she looked across at me and said: 'When are they going to expose him?' And I said 'that's your job.' And nobody ever did, even though everyone had heard the rumours. This whole Savile thing has poisoned everything.

The Irish want you to like them. The English don't care if you like them or not.

A Yorkshireman said to me once: "I'm only rude to people I like."

It is an Irish tradition to leave.

I get a lot of letters from people saying, 'How do I get into radio, how do I get into telly?' and I wish there was an answer, because there's no ladder. There are no parameters. You've just got to go in wherever you can, make the tea and slowly make your way up the ladder. And that's the only way in. As far as television goes, it's all about experience. You'll get better at it as you do it. When I started in television in Ireland there was no autocue, nobody was terribly certain of what they were doing, so it was absolutely the most frightening thing you ever did in your life. So when people say, 'How do you stand seven hours of live television for Children in Need?', I say, 'I started on Irish television.' Now that was frightening, because when you stand in front of a camera, you haven't got an autocue to tell you what to do, and you're not an actor so you're not playing a role - you haven't learned anything off by heart - you look like a seagull because you're staring at the camera and all you're trying to do is remember what to say next. So you lose all humanity whatsoever, you just look totally frightened. And it's a frightening medium, television. But if you do it long enough, you get used to it.

I was brought up in that ethic that 'It's your job, you do it and you do it cheerfully.' Nobody's paying you to be a miserable geezer at all hours of the morning are they?

I see people like Jamie Oliver use the F-word in an attempt to achieve what I think he assumes to be credibility and I think it's reprehensible and demeaning. And in terms of someone like Gordon Ramsay it's ultimately self-defeating. Just because that's the way some people speak in everyday life, it's a different thing to put it on television where young people can be influenced by it.

Television has changed. It's not what it was like 50 years ago. Light entertainment is no longer the expensive quality that it used to be. It's all quiz games, reality TV and talk shows. Talk shows these days are just cheap TV. In the same way that reality TV is cheap television that humiliates people. There's no point saying there can't be any humiliation, because the public seem to respond to it, it seems to be something they want. But then again the public liked mass executions as well, but we don't do those any more. To be honest, I don't know where we go from here.

Newsreading is not something to get self-important about. Get your good suit and tie on, a quick dab in make-up (in Fiona Bruce's case, the lippy is going to take a tad longer), make yourself comfy and here comes the six o'clock news, all written nicely and clearly before your very eyes. Read it clearly and distinctly, ask the reporter the questions you have written down in front of you. And before you start with the 'fair play old boy, there's more to it than that', I was a radio and TV newsreader and there isn't.

Who knows what hellish future lies ahead? Actually, I do. I've seen the rehearsals. (Commenting on the Eurovision Song Contest in 2007)

We tend to look to the Americans for a guide-line for what's popular in chat, quiz and game shows. These days those awful "face to face" (Face to Face (1959)) confrontations which were fine for the time are not viable now. People are not impressed by watching interviewees cry. People recognize chat shows with personalities as the trivial things that they are. They're not designed to be deep. Quite frankly, people in show business don't stand up to in-depth scrutiny. A television chat show is light entertainment so it is trivial by its very nature. It is hardly the place to get people to reveal their innermost thoughts. Then it becomes sensationalism and you lower yourself to the level of the popular newspapers.

I have always believed in conversation rather than a deep interview. The essence of the chat show should be like a daily radio show. The audience like familiarity, repetition and a comfortable relationship with the presenter. The logical thing is for me to do five nights a week to make the continuous link with the public. Then one show blends into the next. It's part of the chewing gum for the eyes. I'd very much like to do five nights, then the show doesn't have to be World War Three, the big event, which people expect of the old once-a-week chat shows on a Saturday night. I am not supposed to be God so I can't get it right all the time. Some days you are going to be better than others.

BBC TV gets hold of an idea and beats it to death until we're all heartily sick of it. They buy people without thinking what they're going to do with them. It's the wrong way around. What they should be doing is employing really good ideas people to come up with good ideas. That's what they used to do at the BBC. (Speaking in 2005)

You might say the lunatics have taken over the asylum. The culture now in television is that the presenter calls the financial and, increasingly, the creative shots. It is comparable to what happened in Hollywood 15 or so years ago. Agents have become far more powerful, and through them the stars are able to dictate their own terms. (Speaking in 2006)

It's amazing how scared people are of doing live TV these days. (Speaking in 2005)