It's been delightful if sometimes gruelling, webchatting to you all. Let's do it again sometime!

I think it's quite important with Wagner to distinguish between German nationalism as espoused by the new German Reich, from Wagner's conception of a cultural phenomenon, which is a fundamental kind of Teutonic conception of life. Which is semi-mystical, and almost anthropological, with its roots as Wagner conceived of it, in pre-history. Whether this is an attractive or real thing or not is obviously a matter for discussion, but it's a different thing from a specific nationalism of a kind that Wagner was increasingly prevalent in the 19th century across Europe and beyond. Wagner was intellectually an extraordinary mix of influences, he was never as far as I know a Marxist - he certainly read Feuerbach. And his vision at least until he discovered Schopenhauer, was libertarian and anarchist in the sense that he believed that authority was an inherent ill and the people and the the people's will was paramount, and the sooner that authoritarian structures were dismantled, the sooner humankind would live productively. It is an anarchist view, technically, although he didn't want to throw bombs at people (though he was briefly involved in that) - it involved trust in your fellow humans, and that the law will fall away eventually, because people will live happily together if they are not oppressed. In Wagner's case it becomes more complex because he believes the people can only be true to themselves if they're true to their roots, the roots of their own community, their own tribe. He felt a tribe is conceived very differently from a nation - an entity that has profound connections to its own traditions, language, culture. This cannot simply be acquired, because if you come from the outside, you can never be an authentic member of the community. And he believes that people are at their best expressing themselves culturally, in music or literature or art, and anyone who comes from the outside and tries to engage with those activities will not be authentic. That's the story of thinking he was engaging in, and he did it by plunging into anthropological studies, the rituals of his tribe the Teutons, and entertained some fanciful notions that they were the aristocracy of the globe. You can see where his thinking and Hitler's merge, but Hitler's was a political and militaristic, authoritarian and centralised organisation.

The Maestersinger is an aberration in Wagner's work - he proclaimed it absurd and demeaning to depict psychologically complex human beings in a realistic way onstage, what one had to do was connect to myths and archetypes, whereas the setting of Die Maestersinger is bourgeois. He realises it with great affection and detail, and breaks all his own rules about not writing arias or duets or ensembles. He writes in fact the most opera-like opera he wrote. It contains a great deal of sometimes abstruse philosophising, but in the end of the piece he does indeed celebrate German art. It's a source of now huge embarrassment to Germans themselves. In the production by his granddaughter I saw a few years ago, it was relentlessly attacked in the production, this notion of German art, but the music that expresses it is as tender and lyrical and affirmative as can be - there's nothing militant about it. But it sticks in our craw to even hear the words spoken, because of all the associations with the Third Reich. There's no point in me defending him - it's important to explain his thinking though, and not tar everything with one brush. "Wagner was a Nazi!" - he wasn't at all, though some of his views were extremely unpalatable.

Which relates to this idea of the inauthenticity of outsiders - to him, Jews were rootless outsiders who came into his culture, and having no culture of their own as he saw it, simply imitated the culture they found. And extraordinarily the person he attacked was Mendelssohn, though I defy anything to find anything Jewish about his work, except a sonata with a Jewish melody. But Wagner insisted he was a fraud, his music shallow, and a cheap imitation to a form he couldn't write - because he wasn't German. And that's where this little anthem to German art becomes uncomfortable.

But in answer to your question - it isn't about German nationalism as Bismarck or Hitler understood it - it's about a dream of the German soul, which as I said, has itself a very bad name. But I suppose here in Britain we don't think about Britishness until very recently - but we're starting to bureaucratise that. We do have some sense of what it means too, as with Elgar, which we think could only be written by an English composer. It's a complicated situation. You'll find very little nationalistic music in Wagner, no folk tunes.

Alice in Wonderland by Richard Burchall, for his group Cellophony - eight brilliant, attractive and witty cellists who have been working together since they met as students at the Guildhall - is enchanting and very talented piece, to which Richard has written a successor, a version of Wind in the Willows which we've performed and indeed recorded, and which will be heard around the country over the next year. Two ravishing pieces. As I'm not a musician but am patently addicted to classical music, there are a limited number of things I can do to be part of it all - one is to direct opera, which I have done, and there are also a large and growing number of pieces for actor and orchestra, or any instrumental combination. Last night I did two gigs at Ronnie Scotts with the great Jacqui Dankworth called Shakespeare and All That Jazz, in which she sang Shakespeare settings by her father John, and I spoke texts of Shakespeare, but we tried to weave the words and music together. As I actually once did nearly 40 years ago with Cleo and John on television, speaking poems of Shakespeare while John and the band riffed around them and Cleo scatted over and above them. And it was rather thrilling, 40 years ago, and last night even more so. I also am very heavily involved with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, a superb outfit. I directed a concert for them for Shakespeare's birthday last year, again words and music woven together as much as possible, and in April at the festival Hall I'll be working with them on Mahler's 8th Symphony. The second part of it - as close as Mahler came to writing an opera. So I'm a very lucky boy.

We hope and pray that the decision will be taken soon on that matter - we're all revved up and ready to go.

No, sadly Biff died in April last year, and his sister Roxy the year before that. I am now boxerless. Which is a very unhappy state to find oneself in.

It's a question I ask myself every day - I have yet to come up with a satisfactory answer. All contributions to the mystery gratefully received.

No.

For those who don't know what it is, it's the last major film that Welles undertook, of which he shot a great deal over many years, a story he lived with for some time. It's unlike anything he shot before, in some areas, parts of it are satirical on other filmmakers like Antonioni whose work he despised, and in some ways it has a possibly autobiographical dimension in that the central character, Jake Hannaford, is a legendary filmmaker stuck with his current film, and has an immensely complicated relationship to its leading man. This is played by no less a person that John Huston, and one of the fascinations of the material is that Huston and Welles were strangely similar characters in Hollywood, but their careers were absolutely different. Their first films appeared in 1941, Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon - Welles's was acclaimed as a masterpiece, widely held to be the greatest film ever made up until that point and a major box office flop. Huston's film is immensely elegant and witty and brilliant with no pretensions to be experimental, was a vast success and Huston was immediately asked to do half a dozen films off the back of it, a workrate he maintained until he died. Welles meanwhile only completed eight films. Huston, like Welles, was a huge larger than life personality, anarchic and anti-authority, but had the priceless gift of being able to charm his employers; Welles refused to do that.

I hope that The Other Side of the Wind won't ever be completed and released, because only Welles knew what he wanted to do with it, and only Welles could have forged the wonderful and diverse and fascinating material he shot into a coherent film, and even he might have been challenged by it. But the material, almost all of which I have seen, really deserves to reach an audience, but not with the pretence that it's a completed film by Welles. It deserves a superb documentary presentation, like the remarkable It's All True documentary masterminded by Welles's associate Dick Wilson. It needs to be put in context, all of it.

Prospero in The Tempest. A play which is exceptionally difficult to get right, for all sorts of reasons, but at its heart is a story which I think is absolutely critical for our times, which is that it concerns a man who is in the grip of violent revengeful anger, which by heroic effort of will, he overcomes and finds forgiveness in his heart. It contains some of Shakespeares' most remarkable writing, but it's a revenge play in which the revenge is converted to something better. That gives you a notion of how I would want to be playing Prospero.

I loved Chance in a Million, and still love it - it's on DVD but I don't believe it's ever been broadcast since 1984-6 when it was a big success. First of all on Channel 4 and then on ITV. It had fantastic reviews and an excellent viewership; the writing was uniquely brilliant and endlessly inventive, and Brenda Blethyn was extraordinary. It's a mystery as to why it disappeared for 25 years. I'm trying to persuade Brenda to revive it and show the characters years on, and inexplicably she hasn't risen to the bait. As for the beer - although I did drink a pint of beer in each half of every episode, it was a trick glass. It did involve drinking two thirds of a pint of disgusting fake beer though - greater love hath no man...

I haven't played quite as many as I would have liked - the devil has all the best tunes. But I did play the villain in Ace Ventura Pet Detective 2: When Nature Calls - not my finest hour, and not perhaps Jim Carrey's either, but a lot of people saw it when they were very young, and now think of me mainly as that person.