With your own children, you love them immediately - and with grandchildren, it's exactly the same.

With something like cancer, there is a feeling that you can fight it in some way or control your response to it, but with dementia there is the fear of losing control of your mind and your life.

Being a grandparent is whole new phase in your life.

"Can you love your children and grandchildren equally, yet still have a favorite? The answer lies in the hourglass of time for each of us." ~Tom Baker

When you get to the end of a TV series, you feel totally out of sorts as an actor. You feel unfit; your voice box has collapsed on you because you've spent all day muttering into a microphone that's two inches from your head, and you feel desperate to spread your wings and do a bit of real thesping.

You get pigeonholed. Some people are film stars, and some are theatre stars who do one-off telly. Somehow, I get into long-running series.