You can generate a phenomenal relationship with an audience. It's very gratifying, a real privilege.

I particularly like Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. Both writers have wit and imagination and the breadth of stories they tell coupled with extraordinary artwork make for fascinating reading.

If you've got someone fighting your corner, someone who loves you and you love, and is also really, really clever, the battle is so much easier.

I have a family who are desperately not interested in sharing their life with the world.

I've got soft features, curly hair with blonde bits and dimples. People think of me as a singer, an entertainer, someone who's always there with a ready smile.

What does annoy me is when critics use me to ridicule my audience. All the stuff about 'Tesco housewives' and 'the blue-rinse brigade.'

I send a text every day to my partner Cath, saying 'I love you.'

I don't have hobbies. Other than watching telly and walking my dogs, what I do is work. That's who I am.

We're so stuck in our heads with social media that we don't get to meet people and go out to have a joint experience unless we go to a live event, like the theatre.

Ah, 'Kismet,' or Carry On Camel, as we called it. I thought the show was shocking. It was the worst designed production ever but it's got a fantastic score. It's not an awfully good book though. You really have to work hard to eke out any laughs from that script.

No-one has ever sung quite so beautifully as Karen Carpenter.

For the millennium, we flew to Kuala Lumpur and then on to Pangkor Laut, a nearby island.

When I was 19 and at drama school, a couple of friends and I decided to drive from Guildford through France, down to the heel of Italy and then take a ferry to Greece - in an MG Midget. On our second day, in France, we were in a very bad accident and wrote off the car so we had to go home. But we then flew out instead and went island hopping.

Country songs are theatrical songs, they tell stories, and wear the hearts on their sleeves and they have great melodies.

The first time I encountered Stephen Sondheim was like everyone else: through snatches of old songs people performed in drama school, through 'Send in the Clowns,' which everyone knew. I wasn't aware at the time that he was the writing force behind 'West Side Story' and 'Gypsy.'

Well, I try not to let people down in the work that I do or in how I conduct myself.

You can't get down and dirty at the opera.

You have to be on your game with a live audience because anything can change.

That's the only show where, if anyone says to me, 'Is there a role you want to play?', I say, yeah, I want to play Sweeney Todd. Stephen Sondheim's so clever; it's a profoundly brilliant piece of work.

This was a seminal moment in my life - my dad took me to see the original production of 'Jesus Christ Superstar' at the Palace Theatre in 1973. I thought it was just amazing, so powerful. The idea of using rock music to tell the story of Jesus was incredible.

I understand the power of music, I understand the therapeutic nature of music, the sense of community that music engenders, so I totally understand why it still goes on, choirs come together as a focal point for a community.

You can't ever make assumptions about a family tree.

I tap my fingers and cheekbones before going on stage to calm down. But nerves are necessary; if you ever lose them, it's a bad sign.

Bacharach has such a brilliant ear for melody and his music has a completely timeless feel to it; I thought it would be great to do a whole album of his music and to record with a full orchestra and big band which is something I hadn't done before.

As a performer, once you've understood the genre of musical theatre, you can tire very quickly of the two-dimensional stuff. With Sondheim, it's always a challenge. It's difficult and exhilarating and he's so good on the complexities of relationships and on things going wrong.

You can generate a phenomenal relationship with an audience. It's very gratifying, a real privilege.

I love a drink. But I've never, ever in my life been on a stage and done a performance with an alcoholic drink inside me. Never have, never would. I've seen people who do and invariably they're never as good as they think they are.

I will always tour, it's hard work it really is hard work, but the feedback and the buzz you get back from it is worth it.

Songs from the theatre can be taken and put on record in a commercial and contemporary way, be reinvented and become standout tracks on their own.

I used to bottle things up.

Try to leave people feeling better for having met you.