Unmissable show
When I started watching series like 24 I realised that I’d been watching an hour of something for 24 episodes and I thought, “That’s a whole day of my life, I can’t do that again.” So I don’t really watch the whole series of anything. I suppose Happy Valley was the last thing that I thought ‘I need to see what happens at the end of this’, because it was so brilliantly constructed.
Earliest TV memory
Lost In Space. It looks a bit kitsch now but it was for us state-of-the-art sci-fi set in space. We watched it religiously as a family, and I still remember – as a traumatic experience from my childhood – the ITV announcer saying at the end of the series “… and Lost In Space will be back next year,” and it never ever came back. I still slightly resent ITV for that, for lying to me as a small child!
Bring back…
The Time Tunnel. It was about two guys who got into a time machine and then got lost, in the “swirling maze of time”. Very American but I loved it, so that I would bring back definitely. Imagine me being in the new series of Time Tunnel and we go back to the 18th century and I’ve got to deal with the fact that I’m a modern urban black Brit and here I am in the middle of the American deep south. That would be brilliant, wouldn’t it?
Mastermind specialist subject
Shakespeare. When I watch Pointless and there are any Shakespeare questions I nearly always get them all, and I feel like I’d probably know more about Shakespeare than I do about anything else, as a sort of general knowledge thing. So yeah, it would be Shakespeare, but I’d have to read all 36 plays again.
Tv turn-off
Those CSI-type shows. I can’t be doing with them. Everybody looks amazing – all these doctors who’ve studied for 10 years, in dusty labs, but they all look like supermodels. I don’t believe a second of it.
Babylon starts 13 Nov, 10pm, Channel 4
