Profiles

"I never thought of it that way, I never considered my own fame in this and playing any part in it at all and nor can you. As an interviewer you have to back off being a star and pushing yourself forward.

Freeman pictured in 1959

"When I was a very young reporter working in my first stint in television for Granada going back to the '60s, the guy who was known as the best known interviewer in Britain at that time was a man called John Freeman. He did a series called Face To Face.

"He was the most famous face in Britain, yet you never saw his face. The camera was always on the person he was talking to, yet he became hugely famous, and I thought 'there's a lesson there, that's exactly what you must do'.

"You're part of the furniture, you're not that star, back off, they're the star, let them speak and by association you will actually achieve a kind of celebrity yourself. At the end of an interview you should actually sit down and think 'oh, that was interesting', not 'oh what a fine fellow that interviewer is'."

The changing industry

"The nature of fame has changed, celebrity has changed. Nowadays they have schools in how to be a celebrity and it's become a kind of profession.

"I think that a lot of these programmes nowadays, Big Brother kind of programmes where people are demeaned and humiliated... I can't watch them. I think they're so humiliating, and offensive quite frankly. I think that the people who volunteer for them have something seriously wrong with their heads.

"I mean that part of tele' has always been there in one form or another, nowadays it's more prolific and profound than it ever was, and we've always had crap TV [laughs], it's been there since TV was invented. I distance myself from it, I set my own standards in anything I do.

"I set my standards in television, and my decision at a very early age was that these people who made instant celebrity, if you like, had no place on the show. If you look through my shows you wouldn't find them there. But it's changed now to a point where celebrity has become a profession."