As I watch what is happening in the Middle East and the carnage that comes over our television screens every evening, I cannot help but ask myself, what is wrong with humankind that we cannot stop the killing?
Growing up, I remember my parents feeling a little wary of 'The Simpsons.' This was the late eighties, and there was a wave of articles about TV shows that were bad for America. Then we all started watching it and loved it.
And we do talk a lot about my past and my impression of things and how it relates to what we're doing now. The Brady Bunch, in its heyday, was really the genesis of when TV started to become the force that it is today.
The burden of originality is one that most people don't want to accept. They'd rather sit in front of the TV and let that tell them what they're supposed to like, what they're supposed to buy, and what they're supposed to laugh at.
It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.
If I told my 18-year-old self that one day I'd have a sitcom and a sketch show on TV, I think he'd just drum his fingers and go, 'When? How long is that going to take?'
Narration, after all, isn’t just a literary function. It represents the human capacity to tell stories in such a manner that they yield meaning. Television replaced this concerted quest for meaning with a frantic pursuit of wonder.
Agatha Christie holds special personal memories for me because my mum, a television producer called Pat Sandys, had been the first person to persaude the Agatha Christie estate to put one of her stories on T.V.
I used to get out of bed sometimes and feel depressed and watched a lot of reruns on TV to get over it. I should have allowed myself to be a little more human and not worry about trying to be a superwoman.
Theatre has always been better disposed to colourblind casting than telly or film. Given that most television is contemporary, and it reaches 56 million people, I am disappointed there still isn't more representation.
The thing with TV and filming is the timing is all faked anyway. You do it so many times, from so many different angles. You never really do it all in one go anyway, so they just fix it all in the edit.
If I can go through what I've been through and do a television show with my son and then be a boy from the hood making records for the people I make records for, that's reality.
I didn't have parents who were, you know, racing to get a reality television show, you know? Or looking to benefit in some way from their daughter's fame.
I did some theatre. I had some smaller roles in a couple TV shows and films. I used to think I did a lot of acting, but my 'career' started when I started 'Homeland'.
I know it sounds silly, but in auditions for film or TV, the words aren't as important - you need to get into the character and have the gist of the scene. But in theater, if you don't do it word for word, then you throw off your scene partner.
Take what you see on TV, mix in a guy who's turned 30 and still doesn't have a job, throw in some Uncle Remus stories and add a few flies in amber and you have America.
The more you have, the more you are occupied, the less you give. But the less you have the more free you are. Poverty for us is a freedom. It is not mortification, a penance. It is joyful freedom. There is no television here, no this, no that. But we...
I hated my brief fame. We had TV vans camped outside my house, reporters hounded me... people i'd know for years started treating me differently.
I meet many people, I talk with them, like a TV show host. I show what's going on with Greenpeace, interesing political things, I have artists, musicians and bands.
If a hit came along, I wouldn't be unhappy about that. But I'm a bit too old for that now-doing videos and all those types of TV shows. I've kind of done all that, in the '70s.
Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? Is it a legacy of our colonial years? We want foreign television sets. We want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported?
