Graphics, credits, pronunciation, anything you see or hear, we do. It is important to stay calm.

Probably the hardest days are when the presenters come in for rehearsal. We're lucky. We have a person from the academy who tapes the pronunciations (of the nominees' names) for us, so we don't usually find out we're saying someone's name wrong, but still you're running everywhere making changes.

At night we send a runner to drop all the changes off. They can never believe it when I tell them they have to leave the pages in a shed in a back alley. But that's how it works. And a runner picks them up there the next morning.

It's funny how a song can start in your mind, and then when it goes through all the filters, it ends up in a totally different spot.

As a five-year-old in Berlin in 1965, I didn't know that funny women existed. It wasn't until I got back to England that I realised women could be funny.

My privileged upbringing and education and linguistic fluency gave me such proximity to whiteness that it stung all the more to still find myself outside of it. My mother, on the other hand, not only accepted that she would always be an outsider in this country but also believed it to be a finer fate and home than any other she could have had.