Lew Grade told my dad, ‘I'll make your TV show. I know it's going to be a big hit,' ... The show had definitely not run its course when my dad decided to end the show. My dad just liked doing a lot of stuff. He was so full of stuff he wanted to do.

With puppets, you follow the head and the arms will follow, but Frank didn't really do that with the Swedish Chef. He and my dad were best friends, but they were very competitive. They were always doing things to see who could be funnier and how could they upstage each other, ... Frank was often leading. He'd be picking stuff up and choking things. My dad would be talking mock-Swedish and he'd have to try to keep up. After a while, Frank would say, ‘Maybe someone else should do the hands,' but my dad would never let him. He said, ‘No, you're doing the hands.'

What we're trying to do is entertain ourselves, and we are mostly a bunch of adults, but at a basic level that works for everybody.

In going forward, I really am doing much the same as my father did. He sort of had a grand scheme that wasn't too specific. Out projects were always innovative.

I was very advanced in physics, so I thought that something in astrophysics was where I would go ? I was thinking about NASA and stuff like that.

It wasn't harder for me to direct than it was for me to run the company, which wasn't necessarily what came naturally to me.