I deplore the loss of arts on BBC One and Two.
The challenge is the culture. You have to have a vision for the BBC-it can't merely be that it's big and has a place in the market.
The moment seemed right to me for a full and, if possible, authoritative portrait of the life and character of the Prince of Wales.
I had no expectation that the Prince would offer me the unprecedented and unfettered access to the original and entirely untapped sources on which this biography is based.
Over the last two years, I have been able to comb through The Prince's archives. I have been free to read his journals, diaries and many thousands of the letters.
While I have corrected agreed factual errors, I have not been inhibited from writing what I felt to be the truth about The Prince of Wales.
I have to grit my teeth sometimes, knowing I am going to be written about. But I think it is my life, and I don't want to get people interested in debating it. But I do feel that if you are going to put yourself about as a public person on a television screen, there's a curiosity.
Food is important to me, but I wouldn't say that I'm a gourmet. I don't like tricksy food.
Travelling to make television programmes means I have some unusual food memories. In Pasto, Colombia, I was taken to a restaurant where I chose my meat for the evening from a cage of white rats. It tasted perfectly good - like rabbit.
Food is about communal togetherness. Our family does sit at the table. I think it's a great tragedy if a family doesn't have a table, as there is such an atmosphere of good will and warmth when we have eight people sitting around it.
I have a great deal of joy in my life, and I'm very fortunate. That combination makes you aware of just how wonderful life can be on the one hand and how dreadful it can be for people on the other. You can't be happy in isolation.
I cycle, I take an hour's strenuous walk in the evening, I play tennis twice a week with a trainer, and I sail. I used to ride horses professionally - I'd ride seven or eight horses a day, so I had to be fit for that.
Recently, I had a hip resurfaced. It's different from a hip replacement because it's done with titanium. I like to think that it's the consequence of riding horses so strenuously, but I fear it's much more mundane and was just early-onset arthritis.
My two great treats in life are baked beans and vanilla ice-cream.
I was obliged to play the piano, like middle-class children are. I didn't start to love it until I was 14.
My only real claim to fame is that I was southern England show-jumping champion in 1966. The day after my father died, 'Horse & Hound' magazine tipped me as a future Olympic champion, and I took it seriously. You can only really enjoy something if you take it seriously.
I adore Madonna. She reinvents herself like no one else.
I've never been a depressive, but I felt quite close to the edge at times. But you never know what's around the corner. Mercifully, what's around the corner is joy.
Rolling my trousers down to expose the upper part of my buttocks and having a knife pressed up and down my spine by a Russian white witch, as she murmured incantations, was certainly a new experience to cure my backache. It was surprisingly soothing.
I hate flying. My stomach churns at the mere thought of it.
