Top 99 Quotes & Sayings by Mel Giedroyc

We human beings are very dark, strange things.

When you have a baby in showbiz, people think you've died.

I'm not a trained actor, so there was always going to be a certain amount of bringing my own... I was going to say skills but they're not really skills, it's just stuff that I know how to do I suppose.

Mum was in her early 50s when she had four strokes in quick succession that almost took her off. I'd just come down from Cambridge with a rubbish degree. I spent a year reading to her - her eyesight was badly affected - and making sure she got proper rest. It was a special time but very intense, too.

Funders, financiers why don't you support childcare? Make it a budget line in your productions and please please let's not be ageist.

We love live because of the roughness round the edges, the excitement, the madness, and stuff going off on all sorts of weird tangents. It's like hosting a jolly in your house. We're welcoming people in and giving them snacks.

My father describes himself as a Pole of Lithuanian descent. At Southampton University, he read aeronautical engineering and then the family moved to Hong Kong - this was before I was born - where he designed aeroplanes. Back in the U.K., he worked as a civil engineer, although every spare minute was spent researching his family's history.

I love acting, I really do, I've always loved doing it, and it's a joy to be asked to do this. I mean, to do Beatrice, for God's sake, it is the best comedy Shakespeare role for a woman, and to be asked to do it.

The strength of 'The Gift' is that the people featured and their stories are given the space to speak for themselves.

It was very hard not to get utterly and wholeheartedly drawn into the stories on 'The Gift.'

You can do a lot worse than spend an hour a week singing. We should prescribe choirs on the NHS for anxiety and stress.

It's a blessing to be able to do different things really, I feel so lucky.

I'm bad on passive aggression. I know that.

We would pay for our own shows, we would put them on, we did everything ourselves, so I've always totally loved being on a stage in front of an audience, that is where I feel most happy really.

Hate showers, they're weird.

Friends before work.

My job with Sue on 'Bake Off' was to look after the bakers - and to be honest, a lot of that was done off screen as well as on screen. It's very much the same on 'Let It Shine.' You get to know people, you get involved, you want things to be alright.

The Gift' doesn't deal with the neat, tie-me-up-with-a-bow kind of stories - they are grittier, messier, and not all of them have a happy resolution. You are following people and events that are more difficult, more elusive, and therefore harder to pin down.

You can't hurry a loaf of bread. You have to wait for it to prove and rise.

I can't speak for every mum but once you have children, I find that I don't really get through the day without grinning about five times!

Maternity bras are the Alcatraz under-wear. If they were a door they'd have a mortise lock, a padlock and the rest.

We all have somebody in our lives, that however closely related or not, is affected by terminal illness and these amazing nurses, who often work through the night with people, not only suffering from a terminal illness but their families, they're just extraordinary people.

I like Joan Jett's 'I Love Rock 'n' Roll' because it's got a nice low singing voice.

The Bake Off' taps into nostalgic feelings about your mum baking in the kitchen. It's a big ruddy comfort blanket, and you get attached to the bakers. It also genuinely has a good heart.

I had to go to an audition for a rather large West End musical set on a Greek island. I didn't realise that you had to go with sheet music to give to the pianist. I took a Mark Bolan CD, a small ghetto blaster and then sang along. It was absolutely appalling.

Christmas traditions are important in my family. Being half English and half Polish-Lithuanian, we have two separate celebrations.

There have been a lot of technical advances in the bra industry over the years, (such as those with Cellophane straps that are supposed to look as if you're not wearing them), but the maternity bra is still stuck in the 1940s.

My daughters have become little judges. If I do produce a baked item, they tut at the soggy bottom and advise me to try harder next time.

I feel very warmly and joyfully towards BBC Children in Need.

I'm not on Twitter because I'm worried I'd be really dull, which would be tragic for someone who's supposed to be funny.

Give more acting roles to 48-year-old half-Lithuanians who just don't want to be pigeon-holed as bakery presenters.

There are different types of double act: the classic dumb-and-dumber, like Morecambe and Wise; the good cop/bad cop, where one's a bit spiky and the other's daft. Sue Perkins and I take what we might call the Ant and Dec approach: the double act came out of our friendship.

People are used to seeing me with Sue but for Sue and me, the most important thing is always going to be our friendship. We were mates at university - very close mates - long before we did any telly. The work is like a nice little cherry on the cake.

I wish I could play electric guitar.

I'm the youngest of four in a large, exhibitionist family. The only way to get attention was to throw yourself off the top of a ladder - as one of my cousins used to do - or make people laugh.

I'm completely recipe-bound. Everything has to be prepped and laid out in separate bowls with a Do Not Disturb sign on the door. I've no flair.

I love a bit of Saturday-night TV.

I'm going to be 50 in 2018 and I figure that I should try to get as much in before then. After 50, you never know what might happen.

I don't like it when people leave their takeaways on the street: it makes me sad and it draws foxes and rats.

Normally we go in, we do a series and then that's it, we're axed!

There is a baked item in the show, I'm there.

There is surely a finite amount of European baked goods, isn't there?

I don't have a problem with the concept of a box set per se - we have many of them merrily lined up on the shelf above the telly. No, what gives me the pip is the fact that I'm never going to watch any of them.

My siblings and I have got the worst teeth in Britain.

It feels like you are in your own little bubble when you film 'Bake Off.' There is no noise, the outside world doesn't exist when we are filming. It's us, the tent and the bakers.

I love them all, there is not one member of Take That that I do not love.

I've spent my entire life spelling my surname.

The Bake Off' can get emotional, but 'The Gift' is a whole different league!

It's a very basic, simple idea, isn't it - saying thank you, saying sorry - and in the overcomplicated, over-busy world we live in it is very powerful.

Every year the British public are so generous. It is really moving living in Britain. Fundraising is something we do tremendously well.

I think if you're 50 you just ruddy say it.

I'm always ludicrously early/on time.

Family is everything to me.

A bloke once yelled out: 'You've got chubby knees.' I was 19. I've had a real complex about my knees ever since.

I don't like it when people lie about their age.

Any donation does make a difference. Getting involved is what makes BBC Children in Need so moving.

I talked to friends who are actors and who do Shakespeare loads, and they all said 'learn it so that your family wants to clobber you, they're so bored.' You can never relax, that's the problem, because when you do, a bit of Shakespeare comes up to bite your cheeky behind. It just does, if you're not really focused on it.

It's often the guests you don't expect to be interesting who are the best. On 'Light Lunch,' I remember a guest called Ivor Spencer. He was the Royal Toastmaster and he was great, a real good-time guy.

We're so used to seeing Agatha Christie's work on screen that going back to the original is a real joy.

I bloody love transport and plotting a route through London.