What research process do you go through to produce the lectures?

It's fairly systematic, really. For example, when I started to write Freud I go to a bookstore and whatever department the Freud books are in… and I read a beginner's book, so I'd at least know what the parameters of his life are, and then just start reading the biographies. The thing with reading is just that most people don't have the time, and you can read a four hundred page book in a day, if you have to. The reason why 400 page books usually take months to read is that you're trying to do it in and out of going to work, looking after kids, and so on. But if you sit down in the morning and take it bit by bit, over a period of about eight days you can read quite a lot of stuff. And in that, you're looking out for two things - first of all, I've got to work out who these people were, and what their interests were, what the arguments and debates were, and what I feel about all the various contentious points; and then having done all that, then I've got find all the funny quotes and the slightly manic things. Most of these people are so nutty they come at you fairly easily.

Have you ever had to abandon anyone because they didn't have enough quirks?

The one I started but couldn't get anywhere with was Boadicea, or Boudaca or whatever you're supposed to call her. Just because there's so little stuff about her - I got the four or five books that there are, and they were all about twenty pages and they all said the same thing. You realise we don't really know anything about these people. I did Hannibal on the radio and there are about three or four books, which all go back to Pliny; they're all pretty much the same, and then a couple go on at enormous length about the precise route he took across the Alps - who the hell cares, honestly? But I did do Hannibal in the end, and I really enjoyed it, but you realise the amount we know is very, very little and it just becomes difficult. We did Aristotle, but we say the truth is we don't really know anything about these people's personal life.

How was working with the Open University?

They were really good… they had academic people who helped us. The guy who did the Newton one was really good; the guy who they got to talk to us about Aristotle came up with a brilliant quote - about the rich judging everything by how much it cost; an ancient version of "the price of everything and the value of nothing." It was a brilliant quote to have over shots of Blair meeting the Hinduja brothers, and Richard Desmond and Rupert Murdoch, because that's how they judge everyone - if someone's rich, they're successful; if someone's done some extraordinary thing but haven't much money, therefore they're a failure.

Has your opinion of any of your subjects changed during the course of preparing lectures?

Yes, almost all of them. I can't pretend I'm some biographer who's spent three years digging through some sort of obscure archives, but even just looking through a dozen books or so you change your mind. Like Freud, I never quite fell in love with Freud in the way I did with the others, but gradually, since we ended up the filming, I think he was extraordinarily single minded; and Marx, I didn't realise he was a cantankerous old bastard, really, but something quite loveable there, the fact he was so flawed. I think that's the thing, you find these people are flawed and personally flawed, and that can be quite endearing. Because all we know of Isaac Newton is that he was a genius, then you find out that he was a miserable old bastard - it makes him human. It makes their genius more real - they weren't just born geniuses, they were living, breathing human beings who went through the same tribulations as other people, and within all this, they managed to come up with this remarkable stuff.

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