What do you wake up to?

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Today. Then I make a cup of tea and walk my dogs. Late at night, I love listening to the World Service because you suddenly realise how microscopically irrelevant the UK is.

What’s your guilty pleasure?

The Cube. Don’t tell anyone.

What makes you blush?

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I’m fairly impervious. I can happily eat a full spaghetti bolognese while watching Embarrassing Bodies, invasive surgery, animals giving birth, exploding uteruses…

What makes you reach for the hankies?

I’m ashamed to say: the 90s kids’ film about a friendly ghost, Casper. I watched it with a friend one Christmas and we were on all fours, sobbing. I nearly threw up I was crying so much.

What makes you shake your fist at the TV?

The endless proliferation of sub-category attic shows. I love Antiques Roadshow but it’s as if they’ve photocopied it a billion times and it’s so pale you can’t really recognise it.

What film can you watch again and again?

Together, a life-affirming Swedish film directed by Lukas Moodysson. It’s about sexual politics, football, communism, communes, relationships - but lightly, brilliantly done. It’s also pant-wettingly funny and the only film that can make total sense of Abba.

Who was your first crush?

Buck Rogers as played by Gil Gerard - and even more embarrassingly - I quite fancied Jan-Michael Vincent, the guy from Airwolf for a while. There’s no accounting for taste when you’re pre-pubescent.

Any other childhood favourites?

Doctor Who. I’d scream and scream in terror at the brain of Morbius and Davros and all the other baddies, but I was compelled.

What to do you tune into while you’re driving?

I’m not Jeremy Clarkson so I don’t have a driving CD. I put the radio on and move through all the gears. I remember one trip to Cornwall, I went from listening to Rob da Bank on Radio 1 to Robin Lustig on the World Service. I’m not snobby.

You described the first series of World’s Most Dangerous Roads as a "near-death experience". So why did you get back behind the wheel for series two?

The world is rapidly becoming the same everywhere you go – the same hallmarks, the same big brands – so I felt jaw-droppingly privileged to be somewhere genuinely unspoilt…

And dangerous?

It was pretty interesting! Liza Tarbuck and I were the first women to self-drive the Ho Chi Minh Trail in that part of Laos. We met machete-carrying tribes who had never seen a Western woman or a car, and we knew that if we drove a metre off-road we could detonate because those mountains and jungles are littered with unexploded bombs dropped during the Vietnam War.

What would you delete from your CV?

Celebrity Big Brother. I look back and think: “God, I must have been at a low ebb to have ever agreed to do that.” But seen through the telescope of history, it was just a tiny thing and I’ve done so many interesting things since. So I can chew it up and be philosophical about it, I hope.

QUICKFIRE Q&A

1. Jamie Oliver or Nigel Slater?

Nigel Slater

2. TOWIE or Made in Chelsea?

I'd rather dip my head into a sheep's intestines than watch either.

3. Graham Norton or Alan Carr?

Graham Norton

4. Jeremy Kyle or Clarkson?

Jeremy Clarkson. I think with him you get a slightly better class of misogyny.

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Sue Perkins is in World’s Most Dangerous Roads – tonight at 9:00pm on BBC2

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