"I’m just obsessed by Lionel Bart. He’s just an amazing character. When you get someone like him who really understood Dickens, you’re away, it’s a chain of brilliant people. I think these songs are very similar to what dad was writing, I mean he pre-empted him, Lionel Bart, but ‘Pam’s Moods’ and Oliver are really similar in the construction of language. The language is so fucking brilliant in Oliver, the melodies, it’s just unbelievable songwriting. That 1960 production, Ron Moody who plays Fagin is particularly brilliant."

"Who Will Buy?' turns into an awesome round, "ripe strawberries, ripe!" It's good, Oliver! is pretty flawless. It's the same as The Sound Of Music: these are classics for a reason. You know every single fucking song. You've been brought up with it. It's a shame Bill Sikes doesn't have a song, and I wonder if that's because Lionel Bart understanding that when a character sings a song they are given some kind of motivation for their acts. He is the most evil character."

"Number five — this is a tough one. I think the one I would like to say, though, is one — when I was a kid, this is the one that I watched all the time. I had it on VHS tape and probably wore the tape out – I know just about every line from the movie. I don’t know why I loved it so much, but the movie Oliver. The musical version. The Lionel Bart one. Ron Moody was the guy that played Fagin. Growing up, we never went to the movies. I grew up in a pretty rural town in Alabama, and we just never went, and so our big excitement for the weekend would be to go to the video store and… We also didn’t have a VCR, but you could, back in the day, rent a VCR. So, we would rent a VCR, and for some reason, we owned the movie. We owned two movies; we owned Oliver and we owned The Wiz. Whenever we would rent the VCR, we would watch the movies that we rented, but then, because we had the VCR, we’d always end up playing Oliver and The Wiz again. I think that’s probably why I fell in love with it. And then, ironically, it wound up being the first play that I ever did in community theatre. Although I’m [also] obsessed with The Wiz. It terrified me, as a kid. That was gonna be the other one I was gonna say. It was either Oliver or The Wiz, but The Wiz is just amazing."