De Muze tumbles

"[W]hen [the BBC] asked if I fancied doing a sort of Morgan Spurlock rip-off, set in the Edwardian Period, I thought, ‘Yup, sure, fine, no problem’. Well, strictly I first thought, ‘I wonder how much they’ll pay me’. But it’s not very much in my sort of telly (BBC, factual, not really watched by anybody) so I soon got over worrying about that.
Initially, they suggested I present the show with my sister. But she screamed with horror at the mere thought of it. And she had just won a million quid in a poker tournament, so wasn’t too fussed with working at the time. They said, ‘Well, who else then?’
I thought through all the women I knew in television, which was Sue Perkins, and suggested I do it with her. We’d met a few weeks before when she was a guest on my movie show and rather hit it off, in the sense that I quite fancied her and she told my sister (who was a friend of hers) that if, at gunpoint, she had to do it with a man, I would narrowly make the top half of her list."