“We now know so much about the way in which messages are carried from generation to generation, be it in our genes or in terms of the bias we are exposed to growing up, that we accept it as normal. But, while we can’t rewrite our DNA, I think we should all try to attend to our attitudes and behavioural patterns and understand where we’ve come from so we can have control over where we’re going.

“The bulk of our society, which is a feudal one, has an inbuilt sense of knowing its place, which I think is wrong. Why should we be reduced by our backgrounds in that way? Ultimately, we’re each responsible for our own happiness and our own misery. We have to take ownership of our lives, rather than waste time blaming our shortcomings on our parents, our backgrounds, other people.

“Unfair things happen, of course, and we don’t all get the best start [the youngest of five children, Cox lost his father, a weaver in the Dundee jute mills, when he was nine, and his mother subsequently suffered several nervous breakdowns] but, by the time we reach adulthood, how we respond to the cards we’ve been dealt is down to us and no one else. Live in the here and now, not the past, and visualise what you want for yourself in the future – that’s how you change things, that’s how you get to where you want to be.”

The pearl: “Too many people go through life asleep instead of awake and alive to the world, and it’s a dreadful, criminal waste. Wake up. Participate. Get involved. Live the life you’re lucky enough to have been given.”

Brian Cox plays an East End crime baron in Sky 1’s four-part adaptation of The Take, based on a Martina Cole novel, beginning on June 17