People are used to seeing me with Sue but for Sue and me, the most important thing is always going to be our friendship. We were mates at university - very close mates - long before we did any telly. The work is like a nice little cherry on the cake.Collection: Friendship
There are different types of double act: the classic dumb-and-dumber, like Morecambe and Wise; the good cop/bad cop, where one's a bit spiky and the other's daft. Sue Perkins and I take what we might call the Ant and Dec approach: the double act came out of our friendship.Collection: Friendship
At Trinity College there was a coterie of the poshest of the posh, people you didn't ever see, they were so posh. They went to each other's rooms and, at weekends, each other's estates. I preferred to be with the weirdo bunch of raggle-taggle thesps.
Christmas traditions are important in my family. Being half English and half Polish-Lithuanian, we have two separate celebrations.
Any donation does make a difference. Getting involved is what makes BBC Children in Need so moving.
My siblings and I have got the worst teeth in Britain.
This business is fickle. You have very good patches and less good patches, but you learn to ride them out. As long as you don't take yourself too seriously, you'll be fine. When you lose sight of that, you're in trouble.
I don't have a problem with the concept of a box set per se - we have many of them merrily lined up on the shelf above the telly. No, what gives me the pip is the fact that I'm never going to watch any of them.
At school in the 1970s, no one cared about bullying. I spent the first four years being the apple of the teachers' eye and being bullied for it.
I love them all, there is not one member of Take That that I do not love.
I had to go to an audition for a rather large West End musical set on a Greek island. I didn't realise that you had to go with sheet music to give to the pianist. I took a Mark Bolan CD, a small ghetto blaster and then sang along. It was absolutely appalling.
I like Joan Jett's 'I Love Rock 'n' Roll' because it's got a nice low singing voice.
It's a blessing to be able to do different things really, I feel so lucky.
I love acting, I really do, I've always loved doing it, and it's a joy to be asked to do this. I mean, to do Beatrice, for God's sake, it is the best comedy Shakespeare role for a woman, and to be asked to do it.
I'm not a trained actor, so there was always going to be a certain amount of bringing my own... I was going to say skills but they're not really skills, it's just stuff that I know how to do I suppose.
I talked to friends who are actors and who do Shakespeare loads, and they all said 'learn it so that your family wants to clobber you, they're so bored.' You can never relax, that's the problem, because when you do, a bit of Shakespeare comes up to bite your cheeky behind. It just does, if you're not really focused on it.
I can't speak for every mum but once you have children, I find that I don't really get through the day without grinning about five times!
Every year the British public are so generous. It is really moving living in Britain. Fundraising is something we do tremendously well.
I feel very warmly and joyfully towards BBC Children in Need.
My daughters have become little judges. If I do produce a baked item, they tut at the soggy bottom and advise me to try harder next time.
Friends before work.
Give more acting roles to 48-year-old half-Lithuanians who just don't want to be pigeon-holed as bakery presenters.
Funders, financiers why don't you support childcare? Make it a budget line in your productions and please please let's not be ageist.
We're so used to seeing Agatha Christie's work on screen that going back to the original is a real joy.
When you have a baby in showbiz, people think you've died.
I'm the youngest of four in a large, exhibitionist family. The only way to get attention was to throw yourself off the top of a ladder - as one of my cousins used to do - or make people laugh.
A bloke once yelled out: 'You've got chubby knees.' I was 19. I've had a real complex about my knees ever since.
I wish I could play electric guitar.
I've spent my entire life spelling my surname.
Mum was in her early 50s when she had four strokes in quick succession that almost took her off. I'd just come down from Cambridge with a rubbish degree. I spent a year reading to her - her eyesight was badly affected - and making sure she got proper rest. It was a special time but very intense, too.
Family is everything to me.
My father describes himself as a Pole of Lithuanian descent. At Southampton University, he read aeronautical engineering and then the family moved to Hong Kong - this was before I was born - where he designed aeroplanes. Back in the U.K., he worked as a civil engineer, although every spare minute was spent researching his family's history.
Maternity bras are the Alcatraz under-wear. If they were a door they'd have a mortise lock, a padlock and the rest.
There have been a lot of technical advances in the bra industry over the years, (such as those with Cellophane straps that are supposed to look as if you're not wearing them), but the maternity bra is still stuck in the 1940s.
We human beings are very dark, strange things.
I love a bit of Saturday-night TV.
You can do a lot worse than spend an hour a week singing. We should prescribe choirs on the NHS for anxiety and stress.
I'm going to be 50 in 2018 and I figure that I should try to get as much in before then. After 50, you never know what might happen.
Normally we go in, we do a series and then that's it, we're axed!
I'm always ludicrously early/on time.
I'm bad on passive aggression. I know that.
My job with Sue on 'Bake Off' was to look after the bakers - and to be honest, a lot of that was done off screen as well as on screen. It's very much the same on 'Let It Shine.' You get to know people, you get involved, you want things to be alright.
The Bake Off' can get emotional, but 'The Gift' is a whole different league!
The Gift' doesn't deal with the neat, tie-me-up-with-a-bow kind of stories - they are grittier, messier, and not all of them have a happy resolution. You are following people and events that are more difficult, more elusive, and therefore harder to pin down.
It was very hard not to get utterly and wholeheartedly drawn into the stories on 'The Gift.'
The strength of 'The Gift' is that the people featured and their stories are given the space to speak for themselves.
Hate showers, they're weird.
I bloody love transport and plotting a route through London.
I don't like it when people leave their takeaways on the street: it makes me sad and it draws foxes and rats.
It's a very basic, simple idea, isn't it - saying thank you, saying sorry - and in the overcomplicated, over-busy world we live in it is very powerful.