It's sad when you see most of your friends in the business gone, like Tommy Cooper, Frankie Howard, Eric Morecambe, Roy Castle, Les Dawson. They were very dear to me. You no longer have the chance to bump into them at a celebrity do.
All kids love to get dirty, but if I wandered into the garage, my father would say: 'Son, you're not going to have filthy hands like mine. You're going into show business.'
It's frightening, the way life speeds up. When you're at school, time can't go fast enough.
When I was a child, life felt so slow because all I wanted to do was get into show business. Each day seemed like a year, but when you get older, years pass like minutes. I wish there was a tape recorder where we could just slow our lives down.
People think I rush around all day long like a raving lunatic. I'm much more relaxed than that.
Probably more than anybody else, I loved Nat 'King' Cole as a performer - not only his singing but his piano playing. Whenever he had a new record come out, I'd get it and try to learn how he was playing. And he was one of the nicest people I'd ever met.
