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.
The world is such a blooming topsy-turvy, fragile, bleak place.
Maternity bras are the Alcatraz under-wear. If they were a door they'd have a mortise lock, a padlock and the rest.
Christmas traditions are important in my family. Being half English and half Polish-Lithuanian, we have two separate celebrations.
For me, Christmas was always about presents. As a child, we each had an allotted place in the sitting room for the ceremonial unwrapping and mine was perched beside the telly on a Moroccan pouffe. We would watch our mum with bated breath as she divided up the gifts.
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.
Funders, financiers why don't you support childcare? Make it a budget line in your productions and please please let's not be ageist.
You can do a lot worse than spend an hour a week singing. We should prescribe choirs on the NHS for anxiety and stress.
My problem with present buying is usually lack of time. Not because I'm super-busy, I'm just super-lazy. I leave everything to the last minute and end up running up and down the high street on Christmas Eve like a crazed baboon.
Any donation does make a difference. Getting involved is what makes BBC Children in Need so moving.
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.
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.
We all have somebody in our lives, that however closely related or not, is affected by terminal illness and these amazing nurses, who often work through the night with people, not only suffering from a terminal illness but their families, they're just extraordinary people.
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.
I don't like it when people leave their takeaways on the street: it makes me sad and it draws foxes and rats.
The Bake Off' taps into nostalgic feelings about your mum baking in the kitchen. It's a big ruddy comfort blanket, and you get attached to the bakers. It also genuinely has a good heart.
I feel very warmly and joyfully towards BBC Children in Need.
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.
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.
I met Sue Perkins at the Footlights, where she brought the house down at the auditions.
