Director Jonathan Miller has turned sculptor. He spends time in junkyards finding pieces of scrap to weld together. “When I get called an intellectual or a renaissance man or a polymath I think about how my parents would have been embarrassed to be called such vulgar things. they were middle-class, cultivated people – my mother was a very good novelist – to whom knowing about books and art and speaking languages was normal, as well as taking an interest in science and philosophy. They were just educated people who had a lot of interests. It’s normal. And so it is for me. I’m just normally sophisticated, like my dear old dad and my long-dead mother, but I’m increasingly ashamed of the vulgarity around me.”