Armando Iannucci – co-creator of The Day Today, Alan Partridge, The Thick of It, and now In The Loop – is an erudite classical music aficionado who raised the bar for swearing on the BBC. Yet no one (except Alastair Campbell) has a bad word to say about him

It is five minutes past nine in the morning, though you wouldn’t know it from the clocks in the Iannucci household. The one in the kitchen is ten minutes fast, in order to fool the children into not being late for school. The one in the study is an hour slow, or rather it has stopped, the time frozen until someone changes the battery. It seems an uncharacteristically nonchalant oversight.

Armando Iannucci – a busy, busy man – lives in a small village in Buckinghamshire with his wife, three children and two dogs. He has an office at the BBC – where he is a prolific producer of comedies – but it is here that he does his writing. The study is a wooden shed and, to reach it, you pass a trampoline in the garden. He overheard his middle child swear while playing on it a few months ago with a couple of friends – ‘This is f—ing great!’ Iannucci had to poke his head around the shed door and give it a stern shake, followed by a frown.

This may sound hypocritical given that, as the writer and director of the political satire The Thick of It, Iannucci is directly responsible for 93 per cent of the entire BBC output of the ‘f-word’. But he insists that the swearing in that comedy is not gratuitous. He wanted it to have a ‘realistic, documentary feel’ and all his research, talking to new Labour insiders, reading published diaries, revealed that this is how people in politics talk these days. ‘Besides, it’s not like anything else I write has swearing. There’s none in I’m Alan Partridge.’

And besides (again), the swearing in The Thick of It is funny, especially when Malcolm Tucker, the very angry and very Scottish spin-doctor based on Alastair Campbell and played by Peter Capaldi, does it. His most memorable line is: ‘Come the f— in or f— the f— off.’

Nevertheless, Iannucci found the experience of watching The Thick of It with his son Emilio, then 13, a little strange. ‘He laughed and then stopped because he thought he might be laughing at something I would disapprove of. It was slightly uncomfortable and confusing for both of us. He kept looking across at me to see whether I disapproved, sort of forgetting I had written it.

And I was feeling embarrassed about the language. We’d flipped roles.’

Alongside Peter Cook and John Cleese, Iannucci has been one of the most influential and innovative figures in British television comedy, first making his mark in 1991 when he assembled the team – including Steve Coogan, Chris Morris and Rebecca Front – that made the news spoof On The Hour on Radio 4. When it was transferred to television as The Day Today it became an electrifying and withering parody of television news. (‘Those were the headlines. Happy now?’)

It was also surreal. Chris Morris, who seemed more like Jeremy Paxman than Jeremy Paxman, would speak in headlines: ‘On The Hour and I am Christopher Morris – for it is I. Tonight’s sizey stories: Nineteen in fogbound bakery collision; Dinosaurs died out on a Tuesday claim experts; And where now for 107 of Ridley’s children?’

Iannucci, this giant of comedy, is not a tall man. At 44 he is wiry, balding and in possession of a fine set of dark and animated eyebrows. In repose he has an earnest expression which every so often, when you least expect it, is transformed by a toothy smile. He once described himself as a ‘big-nosed Jock wop’ – his father having been an Italian immigrant who came to live in Glasgow where he set up a pizza company. Though he is easy company and unspools articulate sentences in a mild and measured Glaswegian caw, Iannucci does have a tendency to say ‘yeahyeahyeah’ impatiently, when acknowledging a point.

His study-cum-shed reflects his three passions beyond comedy – classical music, the romantic poets and politics. The CD boxes on the shelves behind his desk all have the names of composers on their spines. (Somehow he has found the time to co-compose an operetta, which was recently performed by Opera North.)

The books on other shelves include some on Milton, who lived in a cottage 100 yards from here. (Iannucci is working on a documentary for BBC Two about Paradise Lost, which was also the subject of a PhD he began at Oxford but did not finish.) There is also a doll of George W. Bush on the shelves, one that spouts Bushisms when its string is pulled. Iannucci was given it by his wife [a former NHS therapist whom he met at university] while he was researching In the Loop, a film version of The Thick of It, partly set in Washington.

Simon Foster, a mild-mannered British minister played by Tom Hollander, inadvertently backs a war on prime-time television, bringing down on his head the wrath of Malcolm Tucker. Like all Iannucci’s Labour politicians, Foster is self-pitying, dissembling and vacillating, but not unsympathetic. In Washington, where a US General (James Gandolfini from The Sopranos) is trying to prevent the war, he rapidly finds himself out of his depth.

A crucial vote is pending at the UN Security Council. A dodgy dossier appears. Everyone stabs everyone else in the back…

When I ask if Iannucci’s observations about office politics are based on his experiences of working for the BBC, he shakes his head. ‘Actually they are based on my experience of the studio system in LA. You go there with high expectation and you think everyone sounds impressive but you soon realise that they don’t really know what they are doing either, you’re all bluffing but being paid vast sums to bluff.’

The film had its premiere earlier this year at the Sundance Festival and, such was the critical acclaim with which it was greeted, it was soon signed up for US-wide distribution, thus exposing Iannucci to the full glare of Hollywood ingratiation. But all that means in practice, he reckons, is that you get a lot of fruit baskets delivered to your hotel room.

Another thing he based his observations on is the way people in television are impressed by those who can make decisions quickly. ‘Unimportant decisions like which of five suitcases to use as a prop, and I think a lot of that must go on higher up. The busier you are the less time you have to make decisions. A minister will get a five-minute brief in the back of a car and then he will have to come up with a policy.’

The big question is whether The Thick of It, which began as six half-hour episodes and two specials from 2005 to 2007, will translate into a full hour-and-a-half feature film. In my opinion it does, hilariously. The cameras still skitter restlessly from character to character. And visually, it still has a news-as-it-is-happening feel, where actors are often only half in the frame or partly obscured while reciting a line of dialogue. But it has more variety of pace than the television version – more non-verbal cues, little looks, sighs – and that is as it should be.

But Alastair Campbell, who has also seen a preview, has dismissed the film as ‘unrealistic and unfunny’. He was, he said, ‘too bored to be offended,’ adding that he despairs of Iannucci’s cynicism, and wonders whether the satirist really thinks all politics is basically crass, all politicians venal. Campbell twists the knife by suggesting that Iannucci ‘like Rory Bremner’, is becoming less funny the more serious his subject matter gets.

Ouch. But he would say that, wouldn’t he. And anyway, Iannucci doesn’t think he is being cynical. ‘We try to show the politicians not as evil, but as morally tortured and compromised. I find that more interesting than goodies and baddies. The audience wonders whether they would do the same. I suppose delusion is better than cynicism.

‘Clare Short really believed she was doing the right thing in the run up to the Iraq war and managed to convince herself that it was better not to resign. There is a scene in the film in which the minister does something similar, trying to convince himself that war can sometimes be a good thing. What about the Crimean War? We got nurses out of the Crimean War.’

And, to be fair, Iannucci always does his homework. He established via research trips to the Pentagon and the CIA’s HQ in Virginia, for example, that a lot of Washington is run by ‘very intelligent but fairly un-streetwise 23-year-olds with degrees in Terrorism Strategy Studies’.

Though he is fascinated by politics, he doesn’t think he is a political animal as such. ‘I hate the idea of labels and saying you are member of one party or another and signing up to all sorts of policies that you don’t have a view on or don’t believe in. Because I’m not a politician I don’t have to be consistent in what I say and how I behave.’

The media, I point out, is always accused of undermining the political process, but surely comedies such as his are much worse offenders, undermining and ridiculing in a much more ruthless and efficient way. ‘Yeahyeahyeah, I know.

I don’t know whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. Hazel Blears said a few months ago that The Thick of It put people off politics and why can’t we make the West Wing? Show our British politicians being noble? But I think people would laugh at that for the wrong reason, because they wouldn’t believe it. It’s to do with our natural default position of disbelief and cynicism.’

Though The Thick of It was a critical hit, plans for a second series were derailed when the deadpan actor at its centre, Chris Langham, was arrested and charged with possession of indecent photographs of children. ‘My instant reaction was to think about Chris and how I could be supportive,’ Iannucci says now. ‘Not, oh, what will this mean for the project? It was more puzzlement than frustration. I didn’t want to do any more of the series until we knew the outcome of his trial.

‘We were able to do a couple of one-off specials which didn’t write Chris’s character out of the script but said he was in Australia.’ The two met up just before Christmas and would like to work together again, but not on The Thick of It. The BBC won’t even show repeats of the first series. Both accept that Langham’s rehabilitation will be a long, slow process.

When I ring round a few of Iannucci’s friends and colleagues, several mention his loyalty. Rebecca Front, who has known him since Oxford, says she has never seen him lose his temper. ‘If he ever gets frustrated he hides it – he doesn’t like conflict. He’s easy going but he will let you know when he doesn’t like something you’ve written, and he’ll do it in a way that doesn’t leave you feeling offended, which is a great skill. There is an “Armando Way”, an “Armando House Style”, and he tends to work with people he feels can deliver it. He tends to lose interest rather than lose his temper.

‘We had him and his family around for lunch the other day with some other friends of ours and they remarked afterwards about how low key he was. I think they had expected this full-on King of Satire to walk in.’

The playwright Patrick Marber was also one of the Day Today team. ‘I feel I owe my whole career to him because he saw things in me which I couldn’t see in myself,’ he says. ‘I think he’s like a good football manager, a Cloughie figure. Not a great praiser but he wouldn’t diminish you either.’

Iannucci is a fastidious man who worries about his diet: he won’t eat carbs at lunch, as he is convinced that they sap his energy levels. He admits to a certain physical awkwardness, saying that he finds kicking a ball and trying to look cool impossible, but reckons that he has become much more comfortable in his skin since turning 40 – he had always felt that was his natural age.

‘Armando always looked and behaved as if he couldn’t wait to turn 40,’ confirms Chris Morris, who then does an uncanny impression of his friend for me. Back in 1990, he says, Iannucci approached him and the two drove round and round in a car talking through their ideas for a new and experimental type of comedy.

‘What we both liked was the idea of delivering absurdity in an authoritative voice. Making the ridiculous appear sensible. Sometimes Armando would be downcast when he felt things on The Day Today were too floppily formed and needed tightening, but he was always able to make subtle-minded decisions that were, in the best sense of the word, cool.’

Iannucci doesn’t know whether this is a product of being not quite Italian and not quite Scottish, but he has always felt slightly detached from whatever community he is in. ‘Without being weird,’ he adds, ‘I don’t want you to think I’m a sick loner.’ Though he was a studious child who immersed himself in the world of books and classical music, he got the comedy bug at an early age. ‘I started quite young at school,’ he says, ‘compeering a charity event at an old people’s home. I would do stand up and impressions and enjoyed the laughter. It’s very addictive. It’s a lovely sensation to say something and hear a whole room laugh.’

Though he likes to leave comic acting to ‘proper comic actors’, he does perform himself from time to time, fronting some of the shows with which his name is associated, such as The Friday Night Armistice, or The Charm Offensive on Radio 4. ‘I was aware when we were doing The Day Today that if it was successful the public would home in on the cast rather than the creators,’ he says now, ‘and I did agonise a little with Chris over whether I should be in it. But then I realised I simply wouldn’t have been good enough compared to him or Rebecca or Steve.’

He knew he had found a gem in Alan Partridge on the first day working on The Day Today. ‘As soon as Steve did that voice we knew this Partridge would fly. It was very much Alan in the room, not Steve. Steve doesn’t write at a laptop, he paces up and down. So it was me and Peter Baynham taking turns on the computer, writing ideas down while Steve stayed in character. The trouble was he would keep it up all day. He would be Alan all day.’

That must have been a laugh, I say. ‘You’d think so but after eight months of it I just wanted to kill him. I remember thinking “I’ve been in a room with f—ing Alan Partridge for eight months. Won’t someone just shoot him.”’

When he and Baynham (who co-wrote Borat) get together with Coogan they often find themselves wondering what Partridge would be up to now. ‘I think Alan is desperate to get on one of these has-been celebrity reality shows,’ Iannucci says. ‘I think he’s feeling bitter about being so low status he hasn’t been asked on one. I think he is cornering the producers to get on living TV or Bravo.’ He claps his hands. ‘Ghost Hunt! That’s what Alan would like to be in at the moment.’

Steve Coogan has a reputation as a party animal – the drink, the drugs, the womanising – whereas Iannucci is, by his own admission, more a cardigan and comfortable shoes type. ‘I would never give Steve advice about his lifestyle. It is so alien to me. He knows that and I know that there is nothing in my life I could compare his situation to. We have a great relationship that tends to be very much about work. But I think recently his experiences have… well, he has turned a corner, as he puts it. Put it like this, I don’t counsel him, nor do I think he would accept counselling.’

When I ring Coogan, who is on tour in Australia at the moment, he describes Iannucci as a private person, not overly demonstrative or theatrical. ‘He’s not given to grand gesticulations and is economical with his emotions,’ he says. ‘But I think what we have in common is that we both like to expose the underbelly of things and prick pomposity.

Coogan says he always felt protected by Iannucci, who acted as a ‘buffer’ between him and the bureaucrats at the BBC. ‘He is the senior party, he’s like the sensible older brother,’ says Coogan. ‘Our relationship has never been about who is the funniest. I was more instinctive, he was more intellectual. My creativity was directionless so he could always rein me in and give me a focus.’

Coogan says the Day Today team knew right from the moment Iannucci gathered them all together in a studio that what they were doing was cutting edge and uncompromising. ‘He sort of unleashed us. In a way it was anti-comedy, not chasing the laughs, not doing comedy to win the approval of the audience. There was an attractive coldness to it. I think Armando’s taste has evolved since then. There is a painful vulnerability to his characters that wasn’t there before.’

Though his work can be politically attuned and socially topical, it can be whimsical and absurd, too. In his brilliant 2006 television series Time Trumpet, a nostalgic ‘list show’ set 30 years in the future, Charlotte Church vomits herself inside out while exploring the outer limits of binge-drinking, Tony Blair pays television cameramen to expose themselves while filming Gordon Brown, thus causing him to lose the thread of his argument, and Tesco mounts an invasion of Denmark.

Comedian David Baddiel first met Iannucci on The Mary Whitehouse Experience in 1989. ‘Armando has never given up on the idea that comedy, as well as being silly and making you laugh, should also be an intellectual pursuit at some level,’ he says. ‘His linguistic humour was apparent, he was always coming up with new words that seemed somehow right, like “mentalist”. I love the way he uses the

f-word in The Thick of It. There is a real poetry to it. You know like, “what’s the story in Bala-f—ing-mory?” The “f—ing” is so well placed there, giving an almost Rabelaisian lyricism to the obscenity.’

Though Iannucci is associated with what is known as ‘the comedy of embarrassment’, there also seems to be an anger behind his comedy. I ask him if he worries that as he gets older and more comfortable he will lose his edge? ‘Not really. I have never felt as angry about anything in my life as I felt about the invasion of Iraq. I went on the march and took the train from Gerard’s Cross, which is in the stockbroker belt, and to my surprise it was packed with protesters with lunch boxes and sturdy walking boots, and polite notices like “Really, Mr Blair, think again”.’

He was 17 when his father died, did that leave him angry, thinking ‘why me?’ ‘Yes, but it’s more I…’ He hesitates. ‘He died the summer before I went to Oxford and he was so pleased… He had this van he drove around in and he said he was going to drive down to Oxford and see me… So the immediate thing was sorrow that he never got to see that moment happen. He hadn’t been to university himself. He had been 16 in the war and joined the partisans and left afterwards to come here. Just got on a boat.’

There was no swearing at home when Iannucci was growing up in Glasgow. ‘Well, there was some swearing, from my dad. But it was in Italian. Because he was always working hard, it tended to be more my mum that I saw and it’s nice that she was able to come to the premiere of In the Loop in Glasgow, with two of my aunts. She was used to the swearing, having seen The Thick of It, but still, we have this photo of three little old ladies in the front row watching a 40ft Malcolm swearing his head off and…’ he gives an embarrassed shrug and his unexpected, toothy smile.

Jerry Springer’s stranger-than-fiction life has seen him move from politics to trash TV, surviving scandal after scandal to become an unlikely voice of reason in an unreasonable world. But how will that voice hold up when he takes the stage in Chicago?

This may sound ingratiating, mainly because it is, but as I’m leaving the house to meet Jerry Springer for breakfast in Soho, I remember a small metal brooch I have somewhere and go back to dig it out. It’s one of those Stars and Stripes presidents have in their lapels, only this one is crossed with a Union Flag. I picked it up in 2003 – that strained time in Anglo-American relations – and I have never found the right occasion to wear it, until now.

When Springer, a trim 65-year-old with collar length, silvery-blonde, centre-parted hair, notices it, he leans across the table and, being long-sighted, lifts his glasses up to his forehead, so that he can see it better. ‘God love you,’ he says with an easy smile. ‘I’m right in the middle. A true Anglophile. Born in Britain, raised in America. You knew that, right?’ I did know that. He was born in an East Finchley Tube, during an air raid in 1944.

I also know that the talk-show host feels comfortable here: likes the tea; likes the humour; likes the politics (he began his career as a politician, a Democratic mayor of Cincinnati, before becoming a local television news anchorman). And I know he (mostly) appreciated Jerry Springer: The Opera, an extravagant joke at his expense, or rather, a uniquely British take on his notorious American daytime, blue-collar television show – the one featuring assorted inbreeding, punch-throwing, exhibitionist trailer trash.

(The opera, more a musical, featured a nappy-wearing Jesus declaiming he was ‘a little bit gay’, and when the BBC screened it in 2005, it prompted 63,000 complaints amid claims that it was blasphemous.) Such are Springer’s bona fides as an Anglophile, he has spoken at the Oxford Union, appeared as a guest on Any Questions and Question Time and been the subject of Who Do You Think You Are? He wept on camera when he learned that his grandparents had been tortured and killed by the Nazis at Theresienstadt concentration camp. And from June 1, for six weeks only, he has, to his surprise – because he can neither sing nor dance much – accepted a role in a West End musical, Chicago.

We shall come to that. For now we are talking about how our attitudes to Americans have changed since Barack Obama came to power. ‘Before, when I would come over here, I would sense a hostility to Americans. Now that Bush has gone you can sense the good will. Hey, we’ve got Obama. Who is cooler than Obama? I know the anti-Americanism was only on the British left, but even there I think most of you guys accepted that if you are going to have a bully in the world, America is not a bad bully to have.

‘I never noticed the animosity being personal towards Americans, though. I guess it’s like being angry at your parents – ultimately you know they are on your side.’

Oof! A little patronising perhaps, but we’ll let it go. While Springer doesn’t think too much should be read into Obama returning that statue of Churchill to us, he can see that there might be a parallel between the new president’s attitude to the British – informed by his grandfather’s persecution in colonial Kenya – and his own attitude to Germany, informed by the Holocaust (Springer’s mother, a bank clerk, and his father, a shoe shop owner, were forced to leave their parents behind when they fled Nazi Germany for England in 1939).

‘But I don’t hold it against modern Germans, just as I don’t imagine Obama would hold what happened to his family against the modern Brits. I recognise clearly, having been there, that the people responsible, the Nazis, have long gone. This wasn’t always the case. When I first went there in the Sixties, right out of law school, every time I saw a man in his fifties or sixties waiting tables I thought, could he be a former Nazi? It reminds you that this happened within my lifetime. This wasn’t something from a thousand years ago. It reminds you that, if it could happen there, in one of the most civilised countries in the world, it could happen anywhere.’

Springer believes his Jewish identity enables him to identify with the marginalised and dispossessed that he has on his show. ‘No question. Why have I always been such a liberal? I’m convinced it is because of my family Holocaust experience. It has taught me never to judge people on what they are, only on what they do. If people could live by that, there would be no discrimination in the world.’

Ah, his first homily of the interview! For those who haven’t seen his show – for people who have jobs, say – there is always a moment at the end when the tears dry and the teeth stop gnashing, a moment when Springer stands back and reflects. What have we learned here today? It is this that (sort of) makes it OK to watch the exploitational parade of low IQ misfits that is The Jerry Springer Show.

Clearly, he is an educated and urbane man, one with nice manners and a warm and crinkly personality. With him in charge the programme doesn’t feel like quite so voyeuristic and seedy, doesn’t feel as if you have come to stare at the lunatics in the asylum. Incidentally, what does he see as being the difference between what he does, and what went on at Bedlam Hospital, a mile or so from where we are sipping tea this morning?

‘Well, for one thing, people on our show volunteer to do it. People come on because they want to get something off their chest. They say: “You can hoot and you can holla all you want, but I’m going to say this.” I would never go on the show. You would never go on the show. But 10 per cent of the population of America would. I hate the snootiness of looking down on people like that. Be honest, when you meet a snob at a cocktail party you are thinking, he’s a fine one to talk.’

But is it fair to say that his role is like that of the Greek chorus? We look on these chaotic events, the swearing, the chairs being thrown, through him. He allows us to indulge our morbid curiosity, legitimising it because he has had a good education, he is one of us. ‘My role is to stay out of the way. The less I talk, the better the show is. I’m totally non-threatening. I’m the guy next door. I just bring out the acts. I’m non judgmental.’

What about when he gives a platform to a bigot – does he find himself judging them?

‘Me? Absolutely not. Nor do I ever endorse what they do or say. I can’t recall one occasion where I said something like: “You know, incest is great, give it a shot.” ‘

So he never wakes up in a cold sweat at 3am and thinks, I’m going to burn in hell for this? He grins. Nods. Acknowledges the reference to Jerry Springer: The Opera. ‘Look, the show – and I have to keep emphasising that it is a show, a show, a show – is about people who are outrageous and outside the norm. I’m hired to do a show about dysfunction. But if you watch the 18 years of shows, I think you would be hard pressed to find an example of me being mean or disrespectful. When all the media is coming down on them, saying “How can you give these people air time?”

‘I want to say, “What is the difference between you and the people on this show?” You dress better. You are richer. You had a better education. In the genetic lottery you had better parents, but you didn’t choose your parents. It was luck. What’s the difference between a person on my show and me, or you? Luck.’

It smacks of an intelligent man trying to justify to himself a job of which he is, if not actually ashamed, then certainly not proud. I suspect he feels cursed by the show’s huge ratings – 25 million viewers in the US, and many more in the 40 or so countries it is screened in around the world. He uses humour to deflect this unease, joking that he thinks it saves defence dollars. ‘When other countries see our show, they no longer want to take us over.’

In more serious moments, though, he will admit that he wouldn’t be doing the show if his mother was still alive. He would be too embarrassed. She had wanted him to be a doctor or a lawyer, but his early career in politics met with her approval, too. Springer read political science at Tulane University in New Orleans before becoming a campaign aide to Robert F Kennedy. After the assassination of his boss in 1968, he joined a law firm, and in 1970 ran unsuccessfully for Congress. He was elected to the Cincinnati city council the following year. But then, in 1974, Cincinnati police raided a brothel and found a cheque he had signed.

Springer admitted he’d been well and truly sprung, and resigned. The voters rewarded his honesty by returning him to his seat the following year; and his triumph was complete when he became Cincinnati mayor in 1977-78. But realising that the sex scandal would always be dragged up if he tried to go any further in politics, he decided to try his hand at television instead.

I think he could have made a good career politician, possibly one in the Bill Clinton mould. Warm, reassuring, unflappable. Does he wish his political career had gone differently? ‘No. Every day I think maybe I could give all this up and go into politics again, but then I realise that politics is part of my life anyway. I spend most of my time in the States making political speeches, raising money, campaigning. So I have never left politics, in a way. Besides, once you make politics your career you become intellectually dishonest because you have to win the next election to put food on the table. You compromise. You couch things.’

And nowadays, I suggest, politicians can’t be ‘normal people’ anyway because their records have to be squeaky clean. Even as students they have to avoid sex and drugs and potential scandals. ‘Actually, I think we are probably over that. Maybe 20 years ago that was the case. Even with the [Monica] Lewinsky scandal, Clinton left office higher in the opinion polls than when he arrived. People may have told jokes about him at cocktail parties, but there was never a question that if he had been able to run again, he would have won.’

So Springer was a victim of bad timing? ‘Not exactly. Back in the Seventies when I came clean I found the public were totally understanding, I think because I was the one who broke the story. I figured I would be blackmailed forever on this so I may as well just hold my hands up and say I really f—– up and I shouldn’t have done it.’

Was it liberating to get it off his chest? ‘With hindsight possibly, but at the time I felt like a piece of crap. I make no excuses for it. But again, there was a record there that people could judge me on, as a councillor, I mean. I had balanced the books. They figured that I shouldn’t be judged on something that lasted an hour. It was flat-out wrong, sure. But there are worse things a guy can do than go with a prostitute.’

I ask if now that he has reached official retirement age he looks back on his life and feels fulfilled. ‘Yeah. ‘Course. I mean, what a life. I don’t need to make a living now, so I can do things because I want to, because it gives me a kick.’

Like this musical? ‘Exactly.’

Did he also agree to do it because he knew it would take him out of his comfort zone? ‘Way out! It wasn’t something I saw coming. I mean, I haven’t acted since college. My agent called me while I was in London last summer and said, “Do you fancy it, Jerry?” I said, “Sure, why not?”

‘Then he said, “You’re going to have to audition.” Audition? “Sing. They need to find out if you can hold a tune. Go along to the Cambridge Theatre at 4pm this afternoon.” So I showed up and there were six people sitting in folding chairs. They said, “Let’s hear it”. I thought it would be a train wreck. I was with Bob.’

Bob is his bodyguard in Britain, a burly, deadpan cockney who is sitting one table away from us now. I ask Bob what he thought of his boss’s singing voice. ‘Fantastic. He was like a nightingale.’ Pause. ‘A nightingale being shot at with an air rifle.’

‘But it will be fine,’ Springer continues. ‘They will coach me and I’ll be having a singing instructor. Sure, I’m going to be nervous. Why wouldn’t I be? There’s nowhere to hide. I’m already memorising the script so that I am word perfect by the first day of rehearsal.’

How are his moves? ‘Someone yesterday pointed out that I was the oldest person ever to play Billy Flynn. Jeez, you really don’t need to hear that. They have told me that I have to get in shape because
I’ll be singing while I’m dancing. Well, I’m a circle, is that a shape? [He’s not, actually. He’s pretty lean.] Luckily, drinking and smoking aren’t among my vices.’

What is among them? ‘Well, I do smoke the odd cigar. And I eat horribly and I don’t do exercise. A round of golf once in a while. I’m going to have to go on a treadmill. I’m going to treat it seriously.’ His biggest fear is going blank and when I tell him that performers can now have a concealed earpiece through which prompts can be heard, he leans forward excitedly. ‘They can do that?’ He turns to Bob. ‘Have you heard about that?’ Bob: ‘Course.’

Jerry: ‘Oh, I am so happy. So if they see me hesitate they will cue me?’ Bob: ‘Yeah, and it’ll be handy because they can shout “duck” when someone from the audience throws a bottle at you.’

Springer’s fellow cast members look rather glamorous, I note. ‘Boy, you’re telling me, it’s a very visual show. A period piece playing with the stereotypes of Chicago gangsters.’

Come on, he knows what I mean. Day after day rehearsing with beautiful young women. Will he be tempted? Will he flirt? ‘Hey, I’m 65. I just want to be still breathing at the end of this.’

I only ask because in 1998 it was rumoured that Micki, his wife of 35 years and the mother of his grown-up daughter, left him after he slept with a porn star the day before she appeared on his show to discuss her attempt to beat the world sex marathon record. He will neither confirm nor deny the story, although he does describe himself to me as still married. ‘When I’m not working, I like being at home with my family. I don’t go out much. But like I say, I’m 65. What do you expect? That’s why most people don’t have room-mates.’

Room-mates? What does he mean? Does he not have a room-mate at the moment? ‘I’m not, I haven’t, since I was in a fraternity… I mean, yeah, I’m married. But when you go home, if you’re not with your family, then who do you want to be with? No one. You want to be on your own.’

Part of the problem, he admits, is that he is too recognisable. People chant ‘Jer-ree, Jer-ree’, at him when they see him walking down the street, as they do in the television studio. Generally, he has a sunny disposition, he says, but if he is in a rare dark mood, he won’t go out because he doesn’t want to be horrible to members of the public. ‘I love being alone but that’s because I don’t have a normal life,’ he says in a low voice, leaning forward. ‘As we sit here I have already noticed someone point at me.’

And there is the need of a bodyguard. His show plays a dangerous game, stirring up emotions in people who find it difficult to control them. In 2002 a man killed his ex-wife after they both appeared on the show. More typically, though, people find it cathartic and shake hands afterwards, feeling relieved they have aired their grievances. As host, Springer is keen to stress that the show is supposed to be entertaining rather than uncomfortable.

That is why it is layered with knowing, self-mocking allusions. The titles of the episodes are intended to raise a smile: ‘Honey, I’m a Call Girl,’ or ‘Pregnant by a Transsexual’ or ‘Mom will you marry me?’ (that was about a divorced woman who was engaged to marry her ex husband’s son from a previous marriage, but you probably already guessed that). One of the most watched clips on YouTube is of two dwarfs having a punch-up on the show, while the studio audience holler their approval. It makes the circus at Rome look tame by comparison.

It all makes you wonder, though, how a man obsessed with serious politics from an early age could end up presenting such a frivolous show. When the camera pans around to see his reaction, he does seem detached, nodding sympathetically perhaps, but his mind elsewhere. He is defensive about accusations that he has not only dumbed down television but that his show is vulgar and exploitative. ‘What critics mean by that is that guests on the show are vulgar. Snobbery again.’

Is there anything that shocks him, anything at all? ‘No, but neither are you shocked by anything. You can’t be a grown-up in the modern world and be shocked. I mean, we have had a Holocaust, a presidential assassination and 9/11. You may be surprised, because it happens to someone you know, but that is different.

‘What fascinates us is human reaction to certain behaviour. You look to the person you think will be most surprised. In other words, if someone comes out on the show and tells his girlfriend, “I’m really a woman”, everyone will look at his girlfriend. You are not shocked that a guy could really be a woman. That stuff has been around for as long as there have been humans. I mean, read the Bible. What is new in our show that you can’t find in the Bible?’

Um, how about “I married my horse”? ‘OK, that one might not be in the Bible, but you take my point. We did a follow-up to that one. The horse had left him. The point is, it is human nature to gossip. ‘You could take an Oxford professor and say, “Did you know Mrs Jenkins down the road is having an affair?” and he would lean forward and say, “Really? Tell me more.”e_STnS’ He grins. ‘Look, I don’t know why I’m defending this because I don’t even watch the show. Why would I? It’s not aimed at 65?year-old men. Our main audience is students.’

What about the relentless swearing on the show? Does that make him uncomfortable? ‘Well, we’re different in America because we bleep it out.

‘But anyway, television did not invent swearing and I personally don’t have a foul mouth, unless maybe when I’m with my buddies, telling dirty jokes. The people I work with will never have heard me curse. And I never lose my temper.’

I turn to his bodyguard again. That true Bob? ‘I’ve never seen him.’

‘Maybe, I’m passive aggressive,’ Springer concedes.

Certainly he seems self-contained. When not in England, he divides his time between the television studios in Chicago and his second home in Sarasota, Florida. The thought of living in Hollywood does not appeal to him and he doesn’t have celebrities as friends.

Part of him may revel in his reputation as an outsider who pushes the boundaries of taste too far, but another part seems to cringe at the thought that this, and not his political life, is what he will be remembered for. In 2003, Stewart Lee, the British comedian who wrote Jerry Springer: The Opera, invited the presenter to the first night of his musical and, afterwards, asked him to come up on stage. When the applause died down Springer simply said: ‘I’m sorry’. It got a laugh.

On my way to meet Andrew Marr, I get a call from him. A meeting has finished earlier than he expected so could we bring our interview forward by half an hour? Such is his frenetic life. It is Monday afternoon. This morning, he hosted Start the Week on Radio 4. Yesterday he presented his weekly political show on BBC1. On Thursday (tonight) his latest documentary series, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, will begin on BBC2. Oh, and he’s just delivered the manuscript for the second volume of his best-selling History of Modern Britain. I imagine it is another doorstopper, the first having weighed in at about 30 lbs.

He will be 50 in July, which makes him too old to be having a mid-life crisis. So what is it all about, this freakish workload?

When he arrives at our rendezvous in Holborn, holding a BlackBerry to his ear and carrying a framed painting he has just bought (those spare minutes weren’t wasted), I ask him. “It’s fear of laziness,” he says. “I have an indolent streak and would lie around on a sofa eating chocolate all day if I didn’t fill up every minute. It’s also that I have an unbelievably short attention span. A grasshopper mind. Spending time focusing on one thing drives me nuts with boredom.”

Bet he’s relaxing company at home. “I am capable of relaxing. I run. Is running eight miles a week relaxing? I don’t know.” Well it’s not exactly standing and staring. “OK, I draw and paint.”

Activity again. “Yes, I suppose it is doing something, rather than relaxing in the sense of doing nothing. Um, um, OK, I drink. And eat chocolate.”

What’s slightly galling about all this activity, this quantity of work, is that it has real quality. His new documentary not only has the production values of an Attenborough wildlife programme, there is also an original and thought-provoking thesis behind it. Over three, hour-long episodes, Marr explores Darwin’s influence on thinkers as diverse as Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.

The Freudian ideas, especially, seem poignant in light of our discussion about Marr’s restlessness and drive. He reckons that Darwin inspired Freud when he concluded that all human behaviour could be explained in terms of our sexuality.

“Not all, most,” Marr corrects now. “There are other things going on for Freud. Fear of death. Primal things. Competitive issues. But certainly in terms of showing off, the peacock aspects, yes. It’s all about sex.”

Marr has form on the subject of Darwin, having championed him in 2002 for the poll to name the Greatest Briton. (He is also the president of the Galapagos Conservation Trust.) But it seems everyone wants a piece of Old Beardie now, and it’s not just to do with the anniversary of his birth. I mean, we’re talking about a cult here, aren’t we?

Marr nods earnestly. “Yes, thanks to popularisers such as Richard Dawkins. The cult of Darwin is also to do with the recent leaps in our understanding of genetics and climate change. They have made an interest in biology a crucial area of debate. There is a danger in Darwin becoming an ersatz deity, though. I thought of that going into the Natural History Museum. It’s like a Gothic cathedral. There Darwin is, where the altar would be, with his god-like beard and domed head. He’s got his bishops and there have been schisms.”

While Darwin was agnostic, his disciple, Marr, is a full-on atheist. He was brought up a Christian, but at the age of 15 had “a blinding moment of disbelief”.

Marr was born in Scotland and went to boarding school there – “all Latin, the cane and unheated swimming pools” – before going to Cambridge, where he took a first in English. His intellectual confidence; was it nature or nurture? “I don’t know. My parents were bright. My mother went to Cambridge and my father was an investment trust manager. At my first school, I was an academic catastrophe, so my parents took me out at the age of eight or nine and sent me to a boarding school. I was a daydreamer there. And an obsessive bookworm.”

In the introduction to his book My Trade (2004) he writes that he couldn’t sing, act, tell jokes, play an instrument, catch a ball or speak another language, “and I had the iron determination of a butterfly. Journalism seemed the only option”. It is nice self-deprecation, I say, but disingenuous surely.

“Actually, there was some truth to that. I remember applying for a job in a second-hand bookshop and not getting it.” He went on to become an award-winning columnist and, in 1996, the editor of The Independent. But his time in newspapers also represented a moment of failure for him. “Absolutely. I was sacked. Twice. From the same job. A rare distinction.”

How did his ego recover? “It was a big blow because I was relatively young, late thirties, and I had had a seamless, upward trajectory and was bumptiously self-confident. It was fairly brutal – the bin bag at the bottom of the stairs. But the thing about being an editor is that it turns your head. Everyone defers to you. I was probably quite difficult to deal with, because I thought I was so clever.”

Then the BBC picked up the phone and he became political editor? “More or less. As one eminent newscaster said to me, ‘Don’t worry, think of it as a conversation – a conversation with five million people and everyone wants you to screw it up.’ My knees were trembling and my palms were sweating for the first few months. I did once go blank. I wanted to say, ‘Blair picked up a stick and jabbed it into the middle of an anthill.’ What I actually said was he jabbed it ‘into the middle of a hill of… flying flies.’
I crept away, thinking I was going to be fired. No one said anything until the next morning, when the gatekeeper at Millbank looked over her glasses and said, ‘Hmm, a little bit Salvador Dali last night, Andrew.'”

I ask him what morale is like at the BBC these days. From the outside, it looks like the place has had a collective loss of nerve. “I think that when the Jonathan Ross salary thing came up it was too much for some people. There is an element of 1789 and the tumbrils about what is going on. But in our defence, I would say the BBC was never intended to be all things to all people.”

His own BBC salary must be quite sizeable; is it the money that motivates him to take on so much work? “No. Though I do have certain financial responsibilities as a father.”

Marr lives in East Sheen with his wife Jackie Ashley, the political columnist, and their three teenage children. As one of his daughters is coming back from holiday today and he would like to see her “before she crashes out”, we call it a day and share a taxi to Waterloo. Seems he’s a wage slave like the rest of us, I say, but what about if he won the Lottery? “I would become a full-time painter.”

Really? Surely he would go mad with boredom. He laughs. “Possibly. Yes, possibly you’re right.”

The prima donna-ish behaviour is there in the subtext, between the lines of those around her, in the way the air seems to tighten before she enters a room. I’ve been told, for example, that it is ‘very’ important that I arrive on time – 3pm sharp – because ‘Miss Midler likes things to run smoothly’. Best to get there 15 minutes early, actually.

As it happens, train times dictate that I am there an hour early, but I figure the foyer of the Connaught hotel is as nice a place as any to kill time. I’m just settling into a book when the air tightens and a strong-voiced American asks who is joining her for lunch. I look up to see Bette Midler, all 5ft 1in of her, with a green pashmina draped theatrically over her shoulder. Three men and a woman are hovering around her, a dance of attendance. The singer/actress/comedienne is 63, but the blondeness of her hair and the smoothness of her skin says 10 years younger. Certainly she is recognisable. The high cheek bones, the full mouth, the chin like the prow of a ship. Once she and her entourage have taken their seats in the restaurant, a couple of the waiters nudge each other and whisper her name.

I get a message to say what I already know, that Elvis, as it were, has entered the building. It also says that she is ‘in good spirits’. Well, phew to that. She can be very difficult, with one interviewer describing her ‘terrifying gaze that threatens to turn you to stone’. Strong photographers have been reduced to tears, apparently, and one boyfriend who crossed her found that his car had been crashed into. She tells the story herself. She was in a Jaguar that was insured. He was driving an Oldsmobile that wasn’t. You don’t mess with Midler. You arrive on time.

Needless to say, it is 3.45 before the interview starts. We are upstairs in her suite, a suite with several doors leading off it. She has entered through one of them, having changed out of what Americans call slacks into a just-above-the-knees skirt, high heels and a bright red top that shows her cleavage. She now has big eyelashes, two black butterflies resting on her cheeks. Show time.

‘I hear you’re in good spirits,’ I say.

‘And if I wasn’t I would know how to pretend,’ she says crisply.

And presumably if you pretend to be happy, you become happy. ‘Exactly, I try to be upbeat and that can be self-fulfilling. It is about acting “as if”. Act as if everything is just great. Things lighten up when you do that. It’s about stepping into character.’

Let’s address this character she steps into first, then. It, she, ‘The Divine Miss M’ as she used to style herself, is warm, funny and camp. To emphasise a point she rolls her eyes and pulls faces. She is or was (she always wore wigs on stage) a larger-than-life, wisecracking redhead who could be bawdy and insinuating one moment and then sing a tender ballad the next. A fairly gentle example of her humour is what she once said in her act about Madonna: ‘Pity the poor soul who has to rinse out that gal’s lingerie.’ But actually her comedy route was so spectacularly lewd, even now, 30 or so years on, I struggle to find an example I can quote or even allude to in a family paper. Think cunnilingus, erections, flatulence…

One of the alter egos she does in her show is a mermaid in a wheelchair. That says it all really. ‘I didn’t invent tack,’ she once said. ‘But I definitely brought it to its present high popularity.’

As a film star, her most memorable characters were versions of herself, from the self-destructive rock star in her Oscar-nominated film The Rose (1979), to those string of comedies in the mid-Eighties – Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Ruthless People (in which she played an obnoxious wife opposite Danny DeVito, one who became more sympathetic as the film progressed) and The First Wives Club.

She was good, too, opposite Woody Allen in Scenes from a Mall – again, a version of her own character. In truth, she was so charismatic playing herself that it was hard to cast her as anyone else.

There is something very glitzy and Vegas about this character, then.

Very Caesar’s Palace. She is doing a two-year residency there at the moment – performing about 200 days, in rotation with Cher and Elton John. She got off lightly. Celine Dion had to do five years before she was given parole. They do it for the money. Midler is reportedly being paid $150 million. Her show is called The Showgirl Must Go On and everything about it is big, big, big. Twenty high-kicking showgirls.

More sequins and feather boas than the imagination can cope with. Midler describes it as ‘not only the biggest show of my career but the biggest show in the history of showbusiness’.

We talk about how Las Vegas has its origins in the Great Depression. The town wouldn’t have been built there in the desert had it not been for the construction of the Hoover Dam, that towering symbol of Roosevelt’s New Deal. It soon became a place for people to escape the doom and gloom, live out their fantasies. Presumably she is noticing history repeat itself at the moment? ‘Definitely, my audiences want spectacle and glitter. They want escapism and I give it to ’em, right between the eyes. That’s what entertainment is, escapism. People in my profession give themselves airs and graces, but essentially it is about entertaining, helping people forget their lives. I used to be mortified in the Sixties at the thought that that was what I was. I didn’t want to be known as this kind of entertainer, I wanted to be a serious actress, a serious singer, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve realised an entertainer is not such a bad thing to be. I’m kind of proud that I’ve survived and that I’m good at what I do. I must have had some talent and done something right to be still doing it. Most of the kids I started with have given up.’

This sounds modest enough, it is even said with a slight stutter, but when she returns to this theme, as she does from time to time, she speaks more quickly and her resolve hardens. Increasingly, she bigs herself up, tells me several times about how proud she is of her achievements. But the secret, she reckons, is to think you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread but know you’re not. With Midler, it seems, there is a mask of confidence covering her insecurities. Is that fair? ‘Sure I feel like an impostor sometimes. Everyone does. I’m a worrier.’ It’s a Jewish thing, she adds. Worry, worry, worry. She’s a bit of a hypochondriac, for example. And she says that however confident you are about your skills, you are never quite sure how divine you actually are.

But is she happy more often than she is unhappy? ‘I’m happy at the moment. Happy that I’m not touring because the market has fallen out of that for a lot of people and being in one location, Vegas, is a good alternative. The population there changes every three days. They want to see the one big show. They are laughing and crying and it is therapeutic. They come away feeling buoyant. My husband stands back and sobs openly.’

Oh come on, she’s not that bad… (No, I didn’t really say that. Of course I didn’t. She means her husband Martin von Haselberg weeps with pride.) Is that when she sings Wind Beneath My Wings? ‘He loves the flights of fancy in the show. He likes the wackiness. He thinks that’s inspired. He loves it back stage. But yeah, when I sing Wind Beneath My Wings, that’s my guy.’

Because? ‘When I was on the road and on location he had to pick up the slack with our daughter. He sacrificed a lot. He kept her on the straight and narrow, knew how to reel her in.’

Their daughter was a handful? ‘No, it was more my daughter never wanted to hear any advice, always wanted to go her own way. You know, she was like, “If you say that one more time I’ll never speak to you again”.’

Sophie, their daughter, looks spookily like her mother. Midler calls her Mini-me. She has just graduated from Yale. Now that must have made her proud. ‘Hey, we must have done something right. We were proud, so proud. One of the best days of my life. She read Chinese at university. She lives in China now. Martin taught her German and she is trilingual.’

Midler went to Hawaii University. Read drama. She had grown up there, the third of four children and had worked in a pineapple-canning factory. While she sorted she sang ‘at the top of my lungs’ and no one could hear. She reckons this is the reasons her lungs ‘are made of leather’. She has said that nothing beats working in a pineapple factory. It was one of the happiest jobs she had, along with go-go dancing. For all this happiness, though, she was desperate to leave the island. Now she says that her fellow citizen of Hawaii, Barack Obama, has made much better peace with the place than she has.

The problem was she grew up in what she describes as ‘dire poverty’. Her father ‘worked like a dog all his life’ as a painter for the Navy. Her mother was a seamstress. Her parents weren’t very demonstrative. They showed her ‘plenty of emotion’, but they didn’t give ‘much love’. ‘There was a lot of yelling going on. It made me self-centred, a result of not getting any attention as a child. If you are neglected, you go for it elsewhere.’

I ask whether, as a mother to Sophie, she has consciously tried to avoid being like her own mother was with her. ‘My mother didn’t know we were there. She was in her own world trying to make ends meet. I was more hands-on, trying to make a well-rounded person. But it was Martin who provided Sophie with everything she needed, when I wasn’t there.’

It is touching the way she refers to her husband. She uses words such as ‘cosy’. Talks about how they ‘suit’ each other. Says their relationship is nothing to do with drugs and alcohol or having a ‘whoopee life’. She is the breadwinner. He does the cooking. He used to be a commodity broker, and some-time performance artist. That was how they met. Their marriage got off to an unconventional start. It was in Vegas. An Elvis impersonator conducted the service. ‘Yeah,’ she says now. ‘We only got our wedding pictures back last year after 24 years. Got a letter from a guy saying, “I’m closing my chapel and I thought you would like these”.

‘He sent us our pictures and we looked like children, even though we were quite old. I was 37, Martin was a couple of years younger, and all his hair is dark, no grey hairs. I’m a redhead. My hair is silver now, but you can’t tell. It was frivolous to do it there with an Elvis impersonator but it was a whim.’ It took them a long time to get to know each other properly, she adds. All their friends said it wouldn’t last.

She shakes her head, gives her easy smile. ‘Boy, the time. Time used to be so sleepy and slow. I swear they have cut an hour down to 15 minutes.’

How does she keep the spark in her marriage alive? ‘We don’t always. There were plenty of times we felt like throwing in the towel because it was so hard, with my working. But we kept putting one foot in front of the other. It was hard. We kept plodding along and each success you have within the framework of the marriage you build on.’

They live in New York but her husband goes with her to Vegas for her residencies. Does she have homely touches in their rooms there – family photos, ornaments, flying ducks? ‘No, we live in the hotel and it’s OK now that I have moved rooms. I was getting distressed because everything in the suite they gave me was grey. Grey walls, grey rugs, grey furniture. Grey, grey, grey and right across the road they were putting this new tower up, so for the first 77 shows I was tearing out my hair. I’m an artist so I’m sensitive to colour and light. I was getting depressed. Getting the blues. I begged them to move me and they gave me the Asian suite which is where all the high-rollers from Asia stay… It has doors and you can breathe the air and that has made such a difference.’

The worst part of success, she reckons, is finding someone who is happy for you. She has a new album out, a collection called Best Bette, and it shows her range – pop, jazz, soul, swing, music hall. Since its release in this country it has sold 400,000 copies. I’m happy for her, I say. ‘Thank you, thank you. This album has taken me by surprise. No one ever told me I had so many fans here! It’s strange to find this out at my age, but then everything surprises me about getting old. I’ve never been this old before. I never thought I’d feel this good.’

Her career began in earnest on Broadway in the late Sixties when she starred in Fiddler on the Roof. One of her two sisters was killed by a taxi on her way to see the show and it took Midler a long time to recover her equilibrium, and career. In the early Seventies she reinvented herself as Bathhouse Bette, a cabaret act singing in New York’s bathhouses, a meeting place for gay men. Her accompanist on piano was one Barry Manilow. ‘It was such a fun time,’ she recalls. ‘Camp. Frivolous. I was getting a chance to do all the things I dreamed of. It was kind of a wave you rode. You didn’t want to look too closely. I didn’t think it would ever end. I’m happy I didn’t know better. If I had known then what I know now, what a struggle it can be, I might not have done it.’ She adopts a squeaky voice: ‘How did I get so far on sooo little?’ But when she takes stock now, does she feel fulfilled? I mean, isn’t the fact that she hasn’t got performing out of her system yet tantamount to a kind of failure? ‘When I was 50 I had a big party and I looked back and felt good about it. It hadn’t all been for me, me, me. I had done stuff for other people. Yes, I had done some beautiful shows and I had sung some beautiful music, but sometimes I was in too much of a hurry. On the whole, I was very proud of myself.’

And her film career? ‘Yes, I’m very proud of that, too.’

Even Jinxed!, the 1982 film that received such poisonous reviews it nearly finished her career for good? It bombed. Everybody blamed her.

She didn’t work again for a couple of years. ‘No, Jinxed! was a turkey.’

She flutters her hand, waving the memory away. ‘People ask if I’m pissed off I don’t make pictures any more but I’m not. I had a good run. You have to make your peace with that and not cling. You know, you can’t keep saying, ”Why isn’t it me, goddamit.” You can’t be bitter.’

Sounds like something she might have been told in therapy, something she doesn’t entirely believe. Still, what about her life generally? Has she done things she is ashamed of? She gasps. ‘Oh! SO many things. I can’t even talk about it. I wake up screaming in the night. Some things, I’m so appalled at the way I behaved!’ I lean forward. Like what? Like what? ‘I really can’t talk about it, but I was cruel more than once. I never wanted to be like that but the DEVIL made me do it. Even I was disturbed by my behaviour. I felt ashamed. I still wake up shivering. But I feel I have done enough good to balance it out.’

Blimey. Does she sleep well? ‘I don’t sleep at all. Sleep really badly. Always exhausted. It’s a function of getting old. No more melatonin. No more hormones. I have to do a lot of exercise. That helps a bit. But I still sleep badly.’

Bette Midler is more delicate and dignified than I had imagined. She has better posture, too, sitting straight-spined in her chair, her hands cupped demurely in her lap. And while it’s true that, as someone once wrote, she always looks like she is on the brink of an amusing rebuttal, she is, actually, for all the cheerful brassiness of her stage persona, quite ladylike.

She says she would never discuss money because she is ‘a lady’. It’s meant as a joke but you suspect she thinks that a lady is exactly what she is, or would like to be. She mocks herself, her shallowness, says she is like a magpie because she loves ‘shiny stuff’, but you suspect this is a defence mechanism, that she is saying it before someone else does. She wishes she had been taken more seriously, especially in her film career.

One of her most memorable roles, after all, was not a comedy but a weepy – Beaches. Hers was an odd film career. She began to think Hollywood was out to get her, but in fairness she did make some bad calls – she turned down the lead role in Misery, and despite the fact that Sister Act was written for her, she turned that down, too.

She admits she does still call around from time to time. ‘I get on the phone and I ask people, “Is there anything out there?”‘ And when she quickly adds that she has no regrets now and that she accepts her film career is over, you know that she protests too much.

Is she any good at switching off, chilling out? ‘The trouble is I overcommit myself. I just keep thinking I don’t have much time left! There are so many things I haven’t done that I wanted to do. Darn, I should have learned French.’

Does she keep a diary? People find that therapeutic. ‘I don’t, no. But I have started photographing everything. If I don’t photograph everything there are months when I don’t know what I’ve done. My memory is so shabby. I put the photographs in a scrapbook then I have a record of my life. It’s a full life, no question, but it’s not all meaningful. There is a lot of crap. There are highs but then there is also garbage, garbage, garbage.’

She sits up and widens her eyes. ‘Shall I take your picture? May I take your picture? Ken! Ken!’ A member of her entourage appears from behind a door. ‘Ken. Take his picture.’ She bounds over from her chair and cuddles up next to me on the sofa. I battle momentarily with my English reserve then put my arm around her. Click.

When Ken turns the digital camera to show us the picture, we are both grinning like lunatics.

It is Annie Lennox weather outside – the bruised clouds, the chill, the darkness at noon – and we are contemplating it from under a long skylight, in the empty café of a north-west London art gallery. ‘I come from a place in Scotland that is very grey and flat,’ the singer says as she gazes upwards. ‘Bleak atmosphere, pretty much like today. Granite buildings. I think it informed my character. As an only child growing up in the tenements of Aberdeen, I had a lot of time with my own thoughts. All my reports said, “Ann could do better if she stopped daydreaming,” but I couldn’t help it. Growing up, I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want normality.’

Her skin is the colour of a mushroom; her short hair is equally pale, in contrast to the dark brown of her fake-fur coat. Scotland is still there in her breathy, rolling vowels. ‘Aye,’ she says when I ask if pessimism is her defining characteristic, ‘you’re not wrong. I’ve been a pessimist most of my life and it doesn’t always serve me well. The black dog. That cycle that takes you down.’

Has that pessimism been the price of her creativity, though? For being able to write such dark and potent lyrics? ‘It has. How perverse. Then again, I’m not a total nihilist because if I were I would have done myself in long ago. Killed myself. There is a part of me that is still quite like a kid. I meet some people my age and think they seem older, because they are stuck in convention.
My spirit sees things just as I did when I was a kid. I get enthusiastic about beautiful things, like berries in autumn. The colour of leaves in the spring. Colour and beauty. It’s in contrast to my dark side.’ She gives a rictus grin and shakes her head. ‘I’m a fairly intense person, as you have probably gathered. Everything affects me. I’m not detached. I have a lot of empathy. When I was little if I saw someone or something suffering I would cry.’

She finds mass suffering equally unbearable, hence her crusading work on behalf of HIV/Aids sufferers in Africa, for which she won a Red Cross Services to Humanity Award last year. She has various other charity commitments, but one that is especially close to her heart is Hear the World, a campaign to spread awareness about the deafness that afflicted her late father, a boilermaker in the Aberdeen shipyards. More recently she was seen leading the protest marches against the Israeli attacks on Gaza. As she talks about it I can see she is blinking back tears. ‘Yes, I find it hard to detach myself. It’s there on my surface. The Gaza protest was because a million and a half people were trapped in a relatively small space. When I saw the bombs dropping, I knew what was going to happen. The Israelis could say that they weren’t targeting civilians but there was nowhere for the civilians to go. They were trapped.’

I take it she rules out the possibility that Hamas was using them as human shields? ‘Aye, I do. There was nowhere for the civilians to hide. Even when they went to UN buildings they were attacked.’

She was limping on those protests, and she still has that limp today. But she is grateful to be walking at all, because last August she had surgery on her spine. Sounds scary, I say. ‘Didn’t have time to be scared because it happened so quickly. I had a bulged disc and I went to see a chiropractor who popped it out and damaged a nerve. I’ve never had so much pain. A thing called drop foot. My left leg was paralysed, basically. I couldn’t move my toes. I was in Mexico City attending the international HIV/Aids conference. Had to cancel everything and get home. Got an MRI scan and at the end of that week I had surgery. They had to scrape the bone to make more space. Some people were, like, “Don’t do the surgery. It’s too risky,” but I thought, “I don’t want to be disabled.” I was warned the surgery could go wrong and had to sign a liability waiver. I made a decision to just do it and not freak myself out.’

I imagine there was a psychological toll, though. ‘To be honest with you, it has taken a lot of my self-confidence away. My physicality, my limping has made me feel vulnerable. It’s shut me down a bit. My foot is numb all the time. Pins and needles. Like it’s in an icy bucket of water. I’m dragging my foot and… this is boring.’ She grins again, short and tight. ‘This is the sort of thing you talk about in your sixties. I looked at my toes and was saying, “Come on! Come on!” And then I thought, “Heigh-ho, I’ve had 53 years of very good service from these toes so I’ll have to accommodate them.” I’m hoping it will get better eventually. Maybe in a year’s time.’

Meanwhile, Lennox has a new collection of her solo work out called… ‘The Annie Lennox Collection’. After dropping out of a degree course at the Royal Academy of Music, she spent the 1980s as one (androgynous-looking) half of Eurythmics. Her solo career, which began with the album ‘Diva’ in 1992, has been even more successful, to her surprise. She has sold 80 million records, all told. ‘I look back on “Diva” and think that was when I was expecting a baby. My whole adult life seems to be measured in albums, and album covers – all those images of me down the years.’

I tell her that I have fond memories of ‘Diva’ because it came out the year I got married. We listened to it again and again on our honeymoon and, to this day, I find its gorgeous melodies and Lennox’s velvety, contralto singing voice intoxicating. It was only when I was listening to some of those tracks in the new collection that I heard, almost for the first time, how haunting and melancholy her lyrics are. Walking on Broken Glass is a good example: an upbeat tune overlaid with dark lyrics, such as ‘I’m living in an empty room/With all the windows smashed’.

Her high-boned face lights up. ‘Albums can mean different things at different times in your life,’ she says, nodding earnestly. ‘All my lyrics are dark, and the darkness is concealed behind the beauty of the music and the production. I am very aware of that irony. My lyrics have always expressed my melancholy, actually. While the music has always expressed my deliverance from the melancholy. I see it like that. Life is about the balance of the two. Positive and negative.’

Her first marriage, to a Hare Krishna monk, was short-lived. Her second, to the Israeli film and record producer Uri Fruchtmann, ended in divorce in 2000 after 12 years. Her two daughters from that marriage are in their late teens now. She took a break from recording and touring when they were young. Had they left her feeling fulfilled creatively? ‘It is quite challenging to do both, and I have done both. I sort of stepped back, but I found I had that schism – when I was with my kids I missed being in the studio and when I was in the studio I missed being with my kids. You are never quite 100 per cent focused on one or the other.’

One thing she didn’t miss when she stepped back from her career was the attention that comes with fame. ‘Some celebrities like to stoke the fire and like to be in the papers all the time because that is their currency, but I have no interest in that kind of attention. What would I want that kind of attention for? People sometimes forget that I am an ordinary person and I want to walk the streets and sit in cafés and mingle with the crowds.’

In person, partly because of her fragile appearance and her whispery voice, there’s a vulnerability to Annie Lennox. She doesn’t do glib or frivolous. And when she smiles, which she does quite often, it can look more like baring teeth. I ask about the chemistry between her and Dave Stewart, her partner for many years and the other half of Eurythmics. Was she drawn to him because he was an extrovert? ‘And I was an introvert? It kind of works like that with people. We had different qualities certainly and it worked for a decade. I was drawn to him because he was a sweet, funny, eccentric person that I got. Completely out of the box. When it works it’s a great thing because you get strength from a relationship, but after a while you want to do different things and it starts to feel restrictive. I needed to stretch myself on my own terms, to find out where I was without Dave. I was very surprised to sell any solo records at all. I didn’t even go on tour with “Diva” because I was having babies.’

Three more solo albums followed, but only three. She likes to write songs at her own pace, ignoring commercial pressures. And she finds the touring that comes with a new album mentally and physically exhausting. ‘When I come off I am always exhausted. I need to rest. I’m full of adrenalin and fear, because it’s not normal to face a crowd of people. When I walk on stage I feel that flight-or-fight instinct, this nervy energy. I want to run off. I used to feel that a lot and I had to fight it. The night before a gig I would be quaking and would sleep badly. Things going round my head.’

Does she have anxiety dreams? ‘Oh, yes. Had one a couple of nights ago. Forgetting my lyrics. The whole thing about performance is rehearsal, though. I know I can do it on demand. My voice is like a secret I carry around with me. If I suddenly burst into song now I’d be embarrassed and you’d be embarrassed, because there is a time and a place. That’s why it is so ritualised. It’s a very physical state and very disciplined. I’m not with you when I’m performing. I’m somewhere else. You can’t walk up to me and start chatting. I get transported and want my audience to be transported, too.’

She tries to avoid reading about herself in the press because, she says, she finds it painful. Quite what she has in mind I cannot imagine – most of her press seems to be pretty much reverential. Perhaps she is thinking of her activism, for which she does get teased a little. I guess she is sensitive. That vulnerability again. Her alabaster skin is not thick. ‘You feel you want to retaliate. If you are attacked you want to fight back. If I had been a man I know I would have got in fist fights all the time. I have that anger in me. I love the idea of peacefulness but I don’t trust people. I can find myself fighting back, losing my temper.’

Do her daughters share her temperament? ‘Not in that respect. They are both articulate and big-hearted. Thankfully, I don’t think either of them has my melancholy.’

Has she ever tried therapy? ‘I dabbled but, to be honest, I’m not convinced it worked for me. It can be a crutch for some people.’

Actually, it is her political campaigning that she finds most therapeutic. ‘I want to engage with the world at a deeper level. I can’t bear cocktail parties and lunches and superficial conversations. Can’t stand that. Cannot. Stand. That. Cannot stand being in a room full of strangers with a glass of wine in my hand trying to make light conversation. That never was who I was. I’m never going to be that person. I feel more comfortable when I am politically engaged. More dignified. I don’t have to feel guilty about the frothiness and the privileges of my life – not so much my wealth, but Western wealth in general, our whole Western society. I want to use my fame to facilitate others.’ That quick and tight smile again. ‘As banal as that might sound, that’s a good feeling. I can grow old well with that.’

As he rises from the BBC Breakfast News sofa and disconnects his mike, Jamie Oliver looks suddenly tired. It’s partly to do with the bags under his eyes, partly with his tousled hair and unshaven chin. They give the impression that he left the house in a hurry, that he doesn’t have enough time, that he is running on empty.

He was talking about his latest campaign – to persuade the public to buy British pork, because our welfare standards are so much higher than those in the rest of the EU – and now, as I walk with him back to his dressing room, he slips back into character: becomes more animated, bantering, blokey. Bish, bash, bosh.

It is 10 years since he first appeared on our screens as The Naked Chef and now, at the still tender age of 33, he is the head of a multi-million pound business empire: the Jamie restaurant chains, the Jamie TV shows, the Jamie books, the new magazine (called Jamie), the Jamie cookery schools, even the Jamie video game. And the Jamie brand is global, with his shows being broadcast in 106 countries. He had to turn down a request to cook for Obama’s inauguration because of an earlier commitment.

As if all this wasn’t enough, he has an image to protect – Vespa-riding, organic veg-box buying, and a father of two (with a third on the way). It must be exhausting being him, I say. Does he ever have duvet days? “Not during the week, they come at the weekends. But even then Jools forces me out. She runs a pretty tight ship and doesn’t like looking at her husband in bed. And if she can’t wake me up, it will be the kids sent in to jump on my goolies – that quick jump with the knee pointed down. That usually wakes me up.”

As well as being a global brand, Jamie Oliver is also a formidable political lobbyist, his most dramatic and successful campaign being that to improve the quality of school meals. Not only did he raise public awareness, he persuaded the Government to pledge to spend £280 million on his scheme – out with the Turkey Twizzlers, in with the fruit and veg. Tony Blair acknowledged the change in policy was Oliver’s doing.

Since then, animal welfare has become his main cause. After his programme last year, which exposed the conditions in which battery hens were kept, chicken welfare improved almost overnight. And sales of free-range chickens trebled.

Now, he has turned his attention to pork. With a programme to be broadcast this Thursday, the supermarkets are in a panic, worried that they won’t be able to meet the extra demand for British pork. The power of brand Jamie, eh?

“I know, I know,” he says. “It’s bizarre. I’ve become a professional s—stirrer. But I think if you credit audiences with being able to take the truth, then they will change their shopping habits. I know we’re in a recession, but it only costs an extra 3p per rasher of bacon to buy British. At the moment, 80 per cent of the bacon we eat in this country comes from Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany where they still keep sows in these inhumane stalls. The welfare standards on British farms are so much higher. Our pigs get treated decently. It’s something to be proud of. For Christ’s sake, look for the Union Jack when you buy pork or bacon.”

As the face of Sainsbury’s, Jamie Oliver experienced a conflict of interest last year. When he criticised the supermarket for failing to appear at a public debate about chicken farming, they were not amused. He later wrote an open letter apologising to its staff. Yet with this programme, he is at it again. You almost feel sorry for Sainsbury’s having such a rogue ambassador.

“I know,” he says with his lopsided grin. “But I try to avoid doing what I’m told or what is suggested. Sainsbury’s probably do worry about what I’m going to do next. They get a bit of a bing in this new programme because I think even the good supermarkets are guilty of some misleading labelling. Sainsbury’s was way less guilty than others. Some were guilty of really naughty labelling, using images that were provocative [he means evocative] of the English countryside. The interesting thing is that the day after these programmes go out, the supermarkets see a big difference in sales. So they sit up and take notice. Cash is king.”

Not that the British public always does his bidding straight away. After his school dinners campaign, a group of mothers in Rotherham were filmed passing burgers through the school railings to their children. Those pictures, I ask, did he take them personally? “Well, that happened about six months later, and it was certainly made to look as if it were a response to me. But Julie, one of the mothers, told me later that she didn’t even know who I was, so that couldn’t have been it. Still, it was good in a way, that image, because it did sum up everything I was trying to say. It helped my cause.” It emerged that some of the mothers had never boiled a pan of water or peeled a carrot; that they lived on kebabs and crisps.

So what did Jamie Oliver do for his next campaign? He made a programme called Jamie’s Ministry of Food and featured those same Rotherham mothers, with him heading north to try to teach them how to cook. “Obesity caused by unhealthy eating has become a health epidemic,” he says. “And what we saw in Rotherham was a snapshot of England today. It was a metaphor for every town in this country. You could say I live in a bubble in London, so Ministry of Food was really about me saying that, after 10 years, I felt I was largely preaching to the converted. Rotherham was about persuading people who would never watch a food show to change their eating habits and learn a new life skill.”

Even so, his stock fell last autumn when Ministry of Food was broadcast. “All the coverage in the papers was about me swearing. I even had my mother telling me off. But I don’t think I swore more than on School Dinners. And no one complained on the night of the broadcast. It was because it was the same week as the Jonathan Ross thing. There will always be a number of people who are offended by swearing, but I do think people get a bit holier-than-thou about it. I guess every three years or so, the press feels it has to kick my a—.”

Why does he suppose that is? “I must be Marmite to them. Even if you breathe you offend them.”

As one journalist noted recently, it’s not that you love Jamie Oliver or hate him – it’s that you love him and hate him at the same time. You can hate his mockney banter, yet love his recipes; hate his matey Sainsbury’s ads, yet love his school-meals crusade, and so on.

“I get a bit of stick about the magazine,” he says, “about how egotistical it is.” (There are 27 pictures of him in the launch edition.) “But it is providing a lot of much-needed work for writers and photographers.”

He began diversifying because, he says, he was feeling frustrated with his life. “The frustration was to do with being brought up in a family where money was a private thing. You didn’t talk about it. We were embarrassed about money and then my life had become very public and everyone knew exactly how much money I was making through publishing. You know, when you sell 20 million books, people notice. Even the two times when the media hated me and tried to get the public to hate me, the books went on selling.”

It is usually reported that he is worth £25 million, but he claims that he doesn’t know how much he is worth. “Do you know, I haven’t a clue. You could probably find out from your economics expert on the Telegraph better than I could. There’s certainly not a lot of dough sitting in the bank.

“This recession feels a bit like when my Dad advised me not to do Fifteen [his chain of restaurants staffed by local underprivileged youths]. You see, he has never earned an easy pound in the industry [Oliver’s father, Trevor, is an Essex pub landlord], and he thought I was doing this soft, cuddly, do-gooding thing. But I was on a different journey. I was feeling guilty about my sudden wealth. There are now four Fifteens.

“It’s the same now with the recession. Everyone is advising me to slow down and pull in the reins, but I’m not listening to them. We’re opening five restaurants this year. We’ve got people queuing up every night. You just have to get your pricing structure right. I don’t think it all has to be doom and gloom.”

So he’s going to spend his way out of this recession? “When I’ve earned cash, I’ve never put it in the bank or sat there looking at it. I’ve always invested it. Invested in people. Ten years ago, I had no one. Now I have 100 people in my office and 500 across the restaurants. And by the end of this year, it will be 5,500. We want to make a dent in some of those people made redundant by Woolworths.”

Blimey. Jamie saves our bacon again. Is he difficult to work with? “I think the people I work with think I’m a bit of a lunatic. They can’t read me. I keep getting approached by think tanks wanting advice because they think I’m strategically driven or that I really know about marketing, but I only do things that feel right. You can’t bottle that.”

Hitler said he made his strategic decisions as if sleepwalking – can he relate to that? Oliver laughs. ‘That’s a f—ing tough comparison! When I’ve done stuff wrong, I’ve always known it was going to be wrong, and when I’ve done it right I’ve always known it was right. I’m not academically bright, so the things I do are based on touch, smell, and what feels right. Gut feelings.”

He clicks his fingers in three directions; left, right and straight up. “I’m like that.”

There is an etiquette to meeting a Hollywood star for breakfast. Certain do’s and don’t. Do be on time. Don’t be late. That’s about it, really… Unless the Hollywood star is Kevin Bacon. Here you have some latitude, as I discover when I arrive a little late for breakfast with him because my train has broken down. My grovelling apologies are met with a friendly: ‘Hey, no worries, man. It happens. What you going to have? Think I’m going for the vegetarian with poached egg and wheat toast.’

He looks like he could do with a square meal. He is a knife thin 5ft 11in, and the black shirt he is wearing open down to his ribs makes him look hungry and lupine, an impression compounded by the tufty whiskers on his chin. The depth of his voice, meanwhile, seems to belong to a heavier man. Though there is something cold about his looks — he has a crooked smile, angular cheekbones, an upturned nose and deep-set blue eyes that seem chilly — his manner is warm.

His nice guyness is legendary in Hollywood. Actually, he is a legend in Hollywood, full stop — the 50-year-old actor who has a connection with just about every film that has been made and ever will be made. This phenomenon — his being the centre of Hollywood gravity — was turned into the popular Internet game, book and board game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. It challenges players to link other actors to Bacon in six films or fewer. The ‘Bacon number’ of an actor or actress is the number of degrees of separation he or she has from Bacon. The higher the Bacon number, the farther away from Kevin Bacon the actor is. For example, John Wayne has a Bacon number of two: Wayne was in The Longest Day with Robert Wagner, Wagner was in Wild Things with Bacon.

At first Bacon was suspicious that it was a joke at his expense, that it showed he was too promiscuous as an actor — he has been in more than 50 films — and that, while not unattractive, he wasn’t matinee idol handsome enough to be the leading man.’

But his niceness prevailed. He went along with it. Set up a charitable foundation on the back of it. Now, when I ask him whether it has been a blessing or a curse, he says: ‘I don’t think it’s been a good thing for my career. I thought it was going to go away a long time ago but it’s still there. It’s so random that it should be me. The name “Kevin Bacon” sounds a little like “separation”, that’s all it is. With me in it, it is silly and fun. Take me out of it and the idea of connectivity is kind of beautiful. A powerful, small world idea that says that whatever you or I are doing will effect other people down the road for good or ill.’

The British actor Michael Sheen, who played Tony Blair in the Queen, now has a Bacon number of one. In the film Frost/Nixon, written by Peter Morgan, he plays David Frost. Bacon plays Nixon’s chief of staff, Colonel Jack Brennan, an ex marine who guides Nixon through the strategy of the 1977 David Frost/Richard Nixon interviews. For the actor, this film represents another collaboration with director Ron Howard, having starred in his 1995 film Apollo 13.  ‘I was really enthusiastic to come back and work with him again.’  Bacon says. ‘He joins a very short list of directors who’ve actually hired me twice.’

Frost was an unlikely choice as the man to do the first interview with the disgraced former President. ‘I think Nixon’s men thought Frost would be a safe bet,’ Bacon says, splashing Tabasco on his eggs. ‘To me the movie has a boxing element to it. You have a young upstart who gets in the ring with the hardened champion. No one thinks he is going to make it to the third round and they have their coaches, their teams. They went to great lengths to negotiate how the interview would go, what the terms were, what was off limits. My character was in Nixon’s camp anticipating questions, giving moral support. Nixon was fascinated by the armed services, especially the marines. There was a side to him that wished he was cut from that cloth. He was raised as a Quaker and had a different mind set.’

Bacon, who met Jack Brennan as part of his research, says he always gets on well with military types. He has played several, and was especially convincing as a cold-blooded marine in A Few Good Men. I ask if he has ever wondered whether he could have cut it in the Army. ‘I don’t have the right mentality. I was raised to feel disdain for the military. Raised in a liberal household during the Vietnam War. My mother was a political activist and was horrified when she saw me playing with guns. She was very progressive that way. I don’t think I could cut it in the Army but, hey, it was never going to arise. I’m an actor. I play marines. I’ve had them say “you could do it” and I say ‘“trust me, I could not”. I don’t think I have the marine mentality.’ He gesticulates with his fork, conducting the conversation with it. ‘But I don’t question my manliness. That’s not something I struggle with. One of the fun things about being an actor is that you can put yourself in situations where you test yourself. We all have fantasies about kicking someone’s ass, or shooting guns or going down raging rivers. Those are some aspects of being a man. You have to be able to do that stuff. I always try and do my own fight scenes rather than use stunt guys.’

For Apollo 13 he certainly tested himself physically. ‘We shot up there in zero G. Got a sense of what it was like. They took us up in this KC137 airplane over the Gulf of Mexico. You climb straight up then dive. Your stomach as you go over the top… Man. The centrifugal force throws you up and then the gravitation pulls you down. We did 40 runs and when I got down again I kissed the ground. Ron then said, “Why don’t we shoot the movie up there?” And I said “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” Then he said: ‘You don’t have to go. Absolutely no pressure. If you don’t want to go, you don’t have to go. Tom’s gonna go. Gary’s gonna go. Bill’s gonna go. I’m gonna go.” After that I had to say yes.’

I like watching that film with my sons, I say, because it teaches them, well, how to be men. How to have grace under pressure. ‘I know what you mean, you can be manly without having to kill someone or beat someone up.’

Bacon married the actress Kyra Sedgwick 20 years ago. They have two children, a boy now 19, and a girl 16. Did he watch Apollo 13 with his son? ‘To be honest I never watch my old movies. If they come on television I will flick on. I’ve no idea whether my son has watched Apollo 13. We never talk about films. I’m pretty sure they’ve never seen Footloose.’

Ah yes, Footloose. Another blessing and curse. It was the summer blockbuster of 1984 and it haunts him still. The story of a city boy who moves to a bible-belt backwater where dancing is banned, it was notable not only for it’s dancing but also its massively moussed hair and jackets with the sleeves pushed up. After that film he was more or less forced to give up dancing in public: If they went to a club, the DJ would eventually play “Footloose” and people would form a circle around him clapping their hands expectantly. Once, during the US Open, he was spotted in the crowd and Footloose duly came on the PA system. He has always played guitar and is to this day in a band The Bacon Brothers — his older brother Michael being the other frontman. They have released three albums but inevitably, when they play a gig, someone will shout out: ‘Do “Footloose”‘. Though it is not one of their songs, they usually oblige.

After Footloose, Bacon seemed to be a paid up member of the ‘Bratpack’ of 80s stars who included Tom Cruise, Christian Slater and his friend Sean Penn. It was assumed he would have his pick of leading roles. A string of box office flops followed and, in the early 1990, just after he turned 30, he was standing with his pregnant wife on the corner of 86th Street and Broadway when he had a panic attack and collapsed on the sidewalk. His mother had been diagnosed with cancer, he was in Tremors, a movie about underground worms, and as he said later ‘my career felt like it was completely in the shitter’.

After the panic attack it was time to reappraise. His agent reminded him of how he had played edgy roles on the New York stage – junkies, male prostitutes. She told him they should look for something small, something character driven. Oliver Stone was casting JFK. Bacon’s transformation into the swaggering gay hustler Willie O’ Keefe in that film was mercurial. And while he may not have had many lines, what he did say was memorable. “You don’t know shit Mr Garrison,” he told Kevin Costner’s character, “‘cos you ain’t never bin fucked in the ass.”

After this he was in great demand as a character actor. The hits followed: Sleepers, Murder in the First, The River Wild, Mystic River and Hollow Man.

All the while he was living in New York rather than Hollywood and his children were kept at arm’s length from the movie industry. ‘Their idea of us is as parents not film actors. We’re the people who tell them to clean up the room. Make pancakes on a Sunday.’

And walk around the house naked? ‘Not any more.’

Why did he stop doing that? ‘I’ve haven’t done that since…’ His sideways grin. ‘In fact I don’t think I’ve ever done that. It’s just one of those stories.’

Norman Mailer said that once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists, so perhaps that is it. Even so, Bacon was once quoted as saying: ‘There’s something therapeutic about nudity. Clothing is one of the external things about a character. Take away the Gucci or Levis and we’re all the same. But not when the nanny is around. I will with my wife and kids.’

The only time his children think of him as an actor, he says, is: ‘When I have to pack up my bags from time to time.  The idea of them watching us pretend to be other people is not that attractive. I guess in Hollywood all their friends’ parents would be connected with the film industry because it is a one-industry town but that is not true of New York. None of their friend’s parents are actors.’

I ask what his friends in New York do for a living. ‘I have friends who are musicians, one is a painter, one is a screenwriter. I know actors but it’s not like I hang out with them, so my kids don’t either.’

He reckons his perspective on life changed as soon as he had children. ‘Yeah that is the moment when you step out of yourself. My whole world evolves around them. I have accepted work I might not have wanted to do because I wanted to provide for them. You have to keep your family together. It is a responsibility. With a boy you work so hard because you know they have to have the right stuff to get out in the world and take the slings and arrows. It’s so bittersweet because you’re happy to see them take on the world, but it is sad when they need you less and less. You have to let go and they are going to have to learn about rejection. Rejection from a girlfriend. Rejection after a job interview. You want to warn them but you can’t.’

He speaks with feeling on this subject. He has been nominated for everything from Screen Actors Guild Awards and Golden Globes but an Oscar nomination always eluded him. His biggest indignity was being removed from the poster of Mystic River, while co-stars Sean Penn and Tim Robbins won Oscars.

The way he and his wife raise their children is different from the way they were raised. He rolls his wedding ring distractedly on his finger as he speaks of this. ‘I am so much closer to my kids than I was to my parents. Not in an overbearing, too involved, step over the boundaries way, but we talk about things. Spend time together. Enjoy each other’s company. My son plays guitar in a band. He hands down never wanted to be an actor. My daughter is still trying to figure out what she wants to do. My wife and I have pounded the table so hard about their not being actors that I think the only reason they would now do it would be out of rebellion. They have had so many years hearing my wife and I talk about the rejection involved. The heartache. Both of us, as well as we’ve done, felt we didn’t want them to be subjected to that. In retrospect I could probably have been a little less adamant.’

His son looks nothing like him, he says. ‘He’s big, dark haired, taller. Not like me, a skinny runt. He could take me down in a second. He has no desire to be famous whereas I had a strong desire to be famous.’

Er, why? ‘I grew up in Philadelphia, a big city but also provincial. It feels like a small town. My father was the head of the city planning division and had wide, sweeping ideas. Kind of he turned it into a platform for urban renewal and became famous in Philadelphia. Not wealthy but famous. He was on the cover of Time Magazine. I saw that and whether it was nature or nurture I don’t know, but I knew I wanted to be more famous than him. I knew I wanted to kick his ass. We got on OK but I had to beat him.’

What would Freud have made of that, does he suppose? ‘I don’t know. Was it Oedipal, you mean? I don’t know. But I do know I always craved love and attention. There was always a side of me that wanted to perform. That feeling of walking into a room and wanting everyone to look at me. I was the youngest of six and was trying to get attention.’

His parent’s didn’t pay him enough attention, he reckons. ‘Not as much attention as I pay my children. They were always supportive of what I did, but they were busy people. Every night they would be out at meetings.’

He doesn’t think he is like his father in terms of personality. ‘I’d like to think I’m not as self-obsessed. He was super self-involved in a way that I don’t think I am, even in this ego driven profession.’

His father never took the young Kevin to the movies and he wasn’t a movie fan until his late teens. ‘Part of the reason was that it hurt me to not be in the movie. It was killing me that I wasn’t in it. I was hungry. I would go home and want to act it out.’

By the time he was nine, all his five siblings had left home. At 17, he did too, skipping college to go to New York and study drama at The Circle in the Square with a view to becoming a film star. So which was the movie that converted him? ‘Midnight Cowboy. I saw that and thought yeah that’s what I want to do, that kind of acting, in that kind of film.’

He says that the dramatic ups and downs of his career have taught him that if he is to feel fulfilled he has to take three things out of the equation. The first is the size of his part. The second is the size of the budget. And the third is the size of his salary. Once you get rid of those things, your possibilities exponentially explode. You get to work with the directors who matter. You get to make movies like The Woodsman.

In that 2004 film, which he produced, he plays Walter, a reformed child abuser, out on parole. The tension in the film comes from the potential for abuse, as Walter struggles to control his proclivity. Bacon’s performance is immensely sympathetic. ‘Of course paedophilia happens way more than we hear about or talk about,’ he says now. ‘Because so much is ambiguous.’

What made his performance more arresting was his apparent normality. ‘Yeah I wasn’t drooling or hiding in the bushes. For me the first thing people do is call them monster. I’ve done it myself. “Monster. Monster.” The more frightening reality is that they might not be a monster. No horns. Just regular guys sitting in this restaurant, or on the bus, or in church and we are unable to identify them and that, to me, is so much more frightening.’

Kevin Bacon believes we all have darkness in our souls — anger, unhealthy sexual drives and violence — but we also have innate goodness. On balance, he tries to be a good person, he says. He tries to be positive too. ‘If you have a bad morning, it doesn’t mean you have to have a bad afternoon.’

There is, you sense, a discontent at the core of Michael Palin, one that gnaws away at him with steady purpose. It’s not to do with his manner, which is as amiable as you would expect. Indeed, when I tell him what my editor emailed — ‘God, I love her’ — in response to my email saying ‘Am interviewing Palin today’, he laughs vigorously. Says he gets that a lot and that during the US election he found it disconcerting to see headlines such ‘Palin’s daughter pregnant’. As his weathered and handsome face is carved with smile creases, you suspect laughter comes easily to him. So no, it’s not that.

Nor is it to do with him looking a little uncomfortable today because we have asked him to wear a jacket and tie, or rather The Reform Club, where we want to photograph him, requires that he wear a jacket and tie (he keeps touching his collar as he talks). This was the Club from which he began his first travel documentary twenty years ago, you see. Around the World in Eighty Days followed the route taken by the fictional Phileas Fogg, who also set out from the Club, and led to ‘a television series which stands as an unparalleled tribute to man’s ability to make life difficult for himself’.

Palin also ended that first series here amid the Club’s marbled columns and galleried arcades, or at least he tried to. ‘I came back in triumph with two hours to spare and they wouldn’t let me in because they had a function on, which I suppose was fair enough. Clubs are not there to get people in; they are there to keep people out. We had to take a spontaneous decision: do we pretend I got in, walk up to the door and cut there, or do we acknowledge what happened? As I was shagged out, I opted for the latter, a little piece to camera that worked wonders for us. The perfect ending. People love to see things go wrong.’

A few weeks ago, Palin relived the most memorable episode from that series, the one where he spent a week sleeping on the deck of a dhow as he hitched a lift from Dubai to Bombay (his lavatory was a box suspended over the stern). His researchers somehow tracked down the 18-man Indian crew that took him over in 1988 and his reunion with them is the subject of a new chapter in an anniversary edition of the book published next week. ‘There is a scene on the dhow where I am wary about being me because I think me being me will be dull,’ he recalls now. ‘I was kind of acting the role of Phileas Fogg, the old Victorian fogey, and then I got ill and just said so to camera. Said how lousy I felt and that I wanted to go home. It was a turning point because after that I could just be myself.’

And so a genre was invented… Around the world in 80 days became around the world in 20 years — with Pole to Pole, Sahara and Himalayas being among the variations on the original theme. Rating were enormous, as high as 12.5 million at times, which was unheard of for a travel programme. The books that accompanied the various BBC series sold in their millions, and continue to sell.

This popularity seems to have been down to a number of factors. 1) Palin was a former Python and everyone loves the Pythons. 2) He had a pleasing way with words, describing camels, for example, as ‘sinking down like collapsible tables’. 3) It was also to do with his sweetness of character, an obvious decency, likability and good humour that came across whenever he was in extremis, as for example when he discovered the Peruvian brew he was sipping was made from old women’s spittle. Such was the sense that viewers had of him being the ideal travelling companion, even The Dalai Lama, one of his fans, joked that he would like to be reincarnated as Michael Palin’s assistant.

In light of all this — what Palin has called his ‘ruthless niceness’ — there is an incident I want to ask him about which seems uncharacteristically cold and out of character. It concerns his wife Helen whom he met on holiday in Suffolk when he was 15, she 16, and married in 1966, eight years later, after he graduated from Oxford. When Palin was in Borneo filming Full Circle, he received a message to ring home. Helen had been diagnosed with a brain tumour and was about to have an emergency operation. He didn’t rush back. Does this surprise him in retrospect? ‘It was Helen who talked me out of coming back on the next available flight. She was very practical and sensible. She said, “I’m having the operation in four days. By the time you get back here it will probably be over. The doctor says it is a benign tumour. I’d rather you carry on.’ She was probably stressed at the thought I would be stressed.’

Must have been quite a poignant goodbye at the end of that phone call though. ‘It was very tough but she had the hardest job because there I was saying what a wonderful time I had just had up country with the head-hunters and she had to explain about the tumour and then talk me down from my shock. I spoke to the surgeon before and after the operation.’

Did he appreciate her more after that scare; find their time together more precious? ‘I was hugely relieved that she had got through it and was proud of the way she had dealt with it. I don’t think it changed our relationship. I think we felt we had made the right decision. Nothing more that could be said.’

Helen Palin trained as a teacher but in mid life became a bereavement counsellor, and Michael Palin is no stranger to bereavement. His older sister Angela killed herself in 1987 at the age of 52, leaving a husband and three grown children. Palin found the suicide hard to come to terms with and blamed his father’s withering criticisms of her as a child (she longed to be an actress but encountered only paternal scorn). Two years later he was with his friend and fellow Python Graham Chapman when he died of cancer. And when his friend George Harrison died in 2001 he said he felt as if a part of him had ‘closed down’. Given these bereavements and his response to them, I ask why his wife decided to become a bereavement counselling. ‘I don’t know, I think a friend of hers said if you have time on your hands and are good at talking to people you should do it. She keeps it quite. Doesn’t like it becoming public knowledge because when people come to her she wants them to come to their anonymous counsellor for that week, not Mrs Michael Palin.’

Fair enough. She must be a good listener because according to John Cheese Palin is a good talker: ‘“Yap, yap, yap”, he goes, all day long and through the night… and then, when everyone else has gone to bed, he writes a diary.’ Palin gives his room-filling laugh when I remind him of this Cleese quote. ‘Put it this way, there were no silent Pythons. We all had a lot to say and one person who has a lot to say notices when another person who has a lot to say interrupts them. John talks an awful lot. Doesn’t like to be interrupted… It’s true, though, I am a chatterbox. Can’t help it. I get enthusiastic about things. John and I were on holiday in Spain and I became obsessed with doors — leather and brass — and by the end he was pleading with me to shut up about the doors.’

Making travel documentaries was, of course, the second half of an already illustrious career. The first half could not have gone any better either. He was in the comedy equivalent of the Beatles, after all. In fact the Beatles, along with Pink Floyd and The Who, became not only fans but also friends. ‘Yes I was quite surprised by this extraordinary link between Python and the rock music world. Our comedy appeared to be provocative and mischievous and I suppose the rock bands identified with that spirit. I remember hearing very early on that Paul McCartney would always stop recording when Python was on so that he could watch it. We thought that was terrific.’

In his diaries, Palin gives a sense of how the Pythons behaved like rock stars, in terms of their competing egos at least and their demands for first class travel and special chefs when on location. ‘We were and we weren’t,’ he says now.  ‘In America our fans would wait outside hotels for us. A small band of very enthusiastic women. There was also the whole subculture of Python fans who were mainly college kids. If you do comedy you have to see the absurdity of adulation. We weren’t like rock stars in the sense of playing big stadiums, though I think we would have quite liked to have been. I suppose we did do the Hollywood Bowl but it wasn’t like we were going on stage every night and performing the dead parrot sketch. Our work was done on film and television.’

He writes in his diary about how he smoked grass in his Python days, but did he also do the harder drugs his rock stars friends were doing? ‘No I didn’t really. Not sure why that should be. Partly because Helen and I had been married ten years by the mid Seventies. We had three children and that kept my feet firmly on the ground. We drank a lot of wine. I was aware we were drinking a lot and didn’t want to end up like Graham [an alcoholic who would go on binges with Keith Moon]. I didn’t want to reach a point where I couldn’t function. Sometimes I could see Graham being loud and objectionable and I knew it wasn’t like him. I thought, I don’t want to be transformed by drink like that. I’m not very good at that drink/drugs thing anyway because beyond a certain point I become catatonic. It doesn’t make me witty or better company, just leaves me with a headache. I think it’s in my character. I’m fairly straight.’

When he says his three children kept his feet on the ground at this time, was it that he was trying to be a better role model to them than his father had been to him? ‘Yes, I wanted to set an example. I love the children and watching them grow up, and going to school plays, and taking them on family holidays was very important for me. I think because I was away a lot, travelling to the States four times a year, it made me feel the importance of coming home. It’s only when you go away that you realise what home means to you.’

His own father had been a frustrated man who had felt himself a failure. Cursed by a terrible stammer, he had never achieved the success he expected from having been to Shrewsbury and Cambridge. Palin used to shrink away with embarrassment when he brought friends home and he says he longed for his father to be like any other father. ‘He hadn’t imagined that he would end up a minor manager in a Sheffield steel works and I think he wanted to hang on to the old structures as much as he could. So even though he couldn’t really afford to do it, it was very important for him to send me away to boarding school. He wasn’t lacking in humour or emotion but he kept a lot in reserve. He saw acting as a terrible waste of my education and potential.’

Palin’s hero is the rugged Ernest Hemingway and, tellingly, the central character in Palin’s novel Hemingway’s Chair adopts the writer as the father figure he never had. Palin senior had one thing in common with Hemingway, a very quick temper. Palin junior recognises that he probably overcompensates for this by being nice to everyone. When filming Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the director asked him to crawl through the mud for a seventh time, and he had a little outburst. The other Pythons were so surprised they all stood up and clapped.

Palin went to Shrewsbury, too. Why didn’t he want to continue the family tradition and send his own children there? ‘Well I had been happy at Shrewsbury but my wife was certain she didn’t want to send her boys away to school. I suppose we might have had some discussion about sending them to a private school in London, but it was the Seventies. We all thought public schools were going to disappear. We felt politically that it was the right thing to send them to state schools. I’ve no regrets, but I do discuss it with my children sometimes and ask them if they ever wished they had gone away to public school and they all have said there is a certain confidence that people who have been to public schools have. It’s because you have a top-of-the pile mentality. But there were drawbacks. I can remember after Shrewsbury feeling a certain awkwardness when meeting people further down the social scale. A very English thing. How do you talk to people who live on council estates? I thought, I don’t want my children to have that barrier.’

So. This gnawing discontent. I reckon it is to do with a feeling he has that he has never left his mark, not properly. Never really done anything worthwhile. Never quite caught his own attention. Ultimately, it seems to be connected to the long shadow cast over his life by his father. Though Palin has been outrageously successful in two careers, he still hears a nagging voice — his father’s presumably — which tells him he has never had a proper job. Is that the case? ‘All the time, oh yes. Forty years without a proper job. What have I done with my life? What are my qualifications? I can make people laugh. I can talk to people. I can do a piece to camera without falling over. But these are not great talents. I should have learned something. I should have learned languages.’

He feels shallow? ‘I feel fortunate that I am able to do what I feel I want to do, but I’m not sure it amounts to much. I look at people like David Attenborough and think he doesn’t just travel, he is an expert in his field. He knows a lot about his subject. What do I know a lot about? How to make people laugh? Well that’s not much. Always the pupil never the professor.’

Has he considered pursuing the sort of academic life his fellow Oxford man and Python Terry Jones pursues? ‘I think I am too much a jack-of-all-trades. You’ve got to put in the time. Terry is very knowledgeable about medieval history. He has written serious books about Chaucer. There was never anything where I had that expertise. That focus. No equivalent. I think it is a character flaw.’

So he never had a clear idea of what he wanted to do? ‘I still don’t and I’m 65.’ In 1977, Palin recorded in his diary: ‘I don’t really want to do comedy all my life.’ So he proved himself as an actor instead, starring in two of the best British films of the 1980s, A Private Function and A Fish Called Wanda. Then he reinvented himself as a travel documentary maker. Now he says: ‘It is a question of what you are. What am I? Am I just me doing things? I don’t want to be a television celebrity. It doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m not a  bad actor, but I’m not a great actor. I’m not a bad television presenter, but I’m not a great television presenter. They are all thing I know I can do, but I don’t know where the point is where I can say, “I’ve done that” and can walk away.’

Blimey. Angst. Delivered with firm-jawed cheerfulness. He has done documentaries on subjects other that travel, notably on painting and, most recently, a moving Time Watch about the last day of the First World War. But you have to wonder why he doesn’t feel he can say ‘I’ve done that’ and walk away. Surely his record-breaking book sales alone are enough achievement for one lifetime? ‘There again, I never feel secure. You are only as good as your last book. I mean my Himalayas book might have sold, I don’t know, something like 600,000 to a million in hardback but my last one New Europe was different, it sold about 250,000 to 300,000 in hardback. You can’t take the euphoria too seriously.’

That sound you can hear up and down the country is authors falling off their chairs in astonishment. A good, healthy sale for a hardback is 5000 copies. If it sells 10,000 that is enough to get you onto the bestseller list. I ask about his motivation again. He can’t need the money. ‘These days, who knows? The people at Lehman Brothers thought they were comfortable. I’m fairly cautious with money so I’m fine but…’

Palin doesn’t play the stock market. Doesn’t understand people who change cars and houses all the time. Still lives in the three railway workers’ cottages, run together like carriages, in Gospel Oak that he has lived in for more than 30 years. He is, he says, ‘no good at extravagance’.

I ask whether he fills his days with work, even though he doesn’t need the money, as a way of avoiding melancholy. ‘I have good and bad days. I could happily spend my days swanning around galleries enjoying slowing down, not rushing at it, long lunches, but I would have to have something to keep me going, some project.’

The current project is the second volume of the diaries he has kept since 1969. The first covered ‘the Python years’ up to 1979. To him the exercise of keeping a diary is about proving to himself he has not wasted a day. He refers to his diary writing habit as a ‘tenacious parasite’. ‘It’s nerdy of me to keep a diary, I know. I do it to remind myself not to waste time. You hear of people giving up weeks where not very much happened. But I don’t want to be oppressed by time either. I want to spend time with my family and friends. What I don’t want to be is public property.’

He says he hates the invasion of privacy that comes with fame. Wants to watch the world. Doesn’t want the world to be watching him. Occasionally, though, when he says this, his wife gets exasperated and says, ‘Well, don’t sign up for a 10-part series when the camera is following you around the world if you don’t want to be recognised!’ ‘

Clearly Palin has paradise syndrome, the name given to a psychological condition which gives the sufferer a sense of dissatisfaction, even though he may have achieved his ambitions. The question is why. Why does he feel hollow and unfulfilled? I think it is partly our fault, the fault of his adoring public. We project a lot onto Michael Palin, turn him into a loveable national institution he doesn’t feel he is or deserves to be. He cannot understand why he is so popular because, paradoxically, while we all like him, he doesn’t seem to like himself all that much. Indeed he finds himself dull company — this business of ‘me being me’ — and says he has a low boredom threshold. His tragedy, then, is that while much of his high-achieving life has been lived in compensation for the life of his low-achieving father, he seems to have ended up just as frustrated. Well, perhaps not a tragedy. A pity.

Although Rush Limbaugh doesn’t actually work from a bunker, he does have a bunker mentality. His studio is on the third floor of a (purposefully) anonymous building 100 yards off the white sands of Palm Beach, Florida, and about a mile from his gated mansion (the one next to Chuck Norris’s). Along with the Gulfstream jet (cost: $54 million), fleet of sports cars and eight-year contract, worth $400 million, this mansion is his reward for being the most listened-to talk-radio host in America, a title he has held for 20 years.

But it is also his compensation. Professional Right-wing controversialists do tend to upset people, and Limbaugh has had his share of death threats. He has also had his quota of criticism from the media, or the liberal media, as he tends to call it. He hates interviews and has rarely given any, though he does have a soft spot for this newspaper, because it was once owned by his sometime friend and neighbour Conrad Black (currently serving a 6½-year jail sentence for fraud; Limbaugh wrote a letter to the judge attesting to Lord Black’s good character).

The ‘drive-by media’, as Limbaugh also calls it, came down to Florida looking for him when he insulted Michael J. Fox a couple of years ago – by saying the actor was hamming up his Parkinson’s disease for political gain after he appeared in an appeal for embryonic stem-cell research. They came back a few months later when Limbaugh was arrested for ‘doctor shopping’ painkiller prescriptions; that is, persuading several doctors to give him overlapping ones. He pleaded not guilty and cut a deal; the charges were dismissed after 18 months on condition that he continue rehabilitation and treatment with a therapist. The press staked out his mansion on both occasions, but never found his studio on this palm-fringed boulevard. You wouldn’t know it was here.

He calls it his ‘Southern Command’, having spent most of his career broadcasting from New York, and describes it on air as ‘heavily fortified’, yet when you travel up in a lift and step into a glass and leather reception area, there isn’t even a receptionist, let alone a security guard, just several white locked doors and a CCTV camera that follows you. One of the doors buzzes. I am expected.

On the walls of the corridor there is evidence of Limbaugh’s considerable power and influence, and his friends in high places. Here a framed picture of him with George Bush. Here one of him with Donald Rumsfeld. Here he is with Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan.

There is a humidor – Limbaugh is a connoisseur of cigars – and a bust of Churchill. There is also a bust of Beethoven, which has a plaque reading: ‘A genius who produced masterpieces without hearing.’

Limbaugh became almost completely deaf at the age of 50, but is able to hear callers now thanks to a cochlear implant – an electronic device which stimulates nerves in the inner ear. It explains his way with a monologue, which actually is a dialogue with himself. But even if he could hear, he probably wouldn’t listen. Rush Limbaugh is a talker, not a listener. He keeps it up for three hours at a stretch, five days a week from noon until three. There are commercial breaks and phone-ins, but mostly it is him delivering homilies on politics and current affairs, extemporaneously. His fluency is breathtaking.

Some 20 million Americans tune in to hear it on 600 stations across what he calls ‘this fruited land’. And he says he’s not retiring until everyone agrees with him.

He is on air now – I can hear him over the speakers – ‘Welcome back, this is Rush Limbaugh, your shining light, the doctor of democracy, the all-knowing, all-sensing, all-caring Maha Rushie…’ I get slightly lost as I’m looking for the control booth and end up in his private washroom. There are several big black polo shirts on hangers and, in his medicine cabinet, cold remedies and bottles of Listerine and Drakkar aftershave, but no painkillers. That ship has sailed, it seems.

For the next two hours I sit behind a glass panel and watch him perform. Though it is radio, his is a physical performance. He raises his arms and shakes them in mock frustration. He takes his glasses off and pinches the bridge of his nose. He drums his fingers, as you can sometimes hear on air. Though he doesn’t use notes he does have some papers on his desk which he taps as a form of punctuation, and sometimes he will crumple them up in disgust, another sound effect.

In the corner of his studio he has a standard bearing a silky Stars and Stripes. Behind his desk, there is a neon replica of his signature. At 57, he is looking fitter than he has done for a long time, having shed a hundredweight (he weighed 23 stone at one point).

His hair is slicked back and he is dressed in a black polo shirt and deck shoes without socks. There is a rolling musicality to his voice.

His tone is warm and confidential. He has the rhetorician’s habit of repeating himself three times in three different ways.

Today, as usual, he is riffing about Barack Obama – ‘the Lord Messiah, the merciful, the acting President…’ – whom he dislikes intensely.

When Former Secretary of State Colin Powell announced a few days ago that he would be breaking with his party to vote for Obama, Limbaugh said it was only because he was black. Groan. He was being insulting, of course, on many levels, to both men, but at least he was being consistent with the Limbaugh world view, the view of the fabled ‘angry white man’. Indeed, it would have seemed hypocritical of him to start making compromises on the grounds of sensitivity at this stage in his career.

Besides, he doesn’t go easier on the McCain camp. He described the Republican candidate as a phony conservative and, when Sarah Palin first appeared, dismissed her as ‘some babe McCain met at a convention’. He has come round to Palin since then, saying that she ‘kicked Biden’s butt’ in that vice-presidential debate. His politics are closer to hers than McCain’s. And ultimately he would rather have McCain for all his faults than Obama. ‘McCain’s right,’ he said on air recently. ‘We do have them right where we want them because they think it’s over.’ Note the ‘We’. Limbaugh does not pretend to be impartial.

Inside the control booth there is a staff of three: Jim, a sound engineer wearing headphones; Dawn, a stenographer with long blonde hair (who sends Limbaugh real-time transcripts of on-air phone-ins), and his long-time producer Bo Snerdly, a tall, well-cushioned Afro-American with an affable manner, a flat cap on backwards and spectacles dangling from a cord around his neck.

Limbaugh does not have sidekicks with him on air, but he does keep up a running conversation with Snerdly, who is almost as Right wing as he is. They banter via an internal talk-back circuit. Snerdly has his own twice-weekly spot on air in which he introduces himself as an ‘African-American-in-good-standing-and-certified-black-enough-to-criticise-Obamaguy.’ It is a deliberately insensate but amusing take on the race issue in this election. What Left-wingers, or ‘Rush-deniers’, as he calls them, don’t get about the self-aggrandising Limbaugh is that he is first and foremost a satirist: funny, self-mocking and entertaining. He couldn’t have held his audience for 20 years if he was only nasty, bigoted and extremely Right wing.

The broadcast over, I join Limbaugh in the studio and ask if he ever has off days when he’s not in the mood. Though he can hear, thanks to the acoustics in here, he stares straight at me, lip-reading. ‘I have days where I feel I’ve left half my brain at home and I’m not functioning 100 per cent, but I don’t think the audience would ever know it, and there’s never a day I don’t want to do it. I prep it, but I don’t think about it until it starts. At noon today I had no idea what the first thing was I was going to say until about 20 seconds into the theme music. It’s improv. Stream of consciousness. That little pressure improves my performance. I do my best, most expansive thinking when I am speaking. I get on a roll.’

He surely does. Limbaugh is always a factor in American elections.

When the Republicans won the House of Representatives in 1994 for only the second time in 50 years, they made Limbaugh an honorary member of Congress. If by some fluke the Republicans win this time, in contradiction of the polls, will that be partly down to Limbaugh?

‘That’s so hard to measure,’ he says.

He’s being falsely modest and possibly disingenuous. One of his biggest successes in this election cycle was Operation Chaos, a radio campaign designed to encourage Republicans to vote for Hillary Clinton and prolong internecine fighting among Democrats. Karl Rove, ‘the President’s brain’, reckons it helped tilt Texas for Clinton. She herself said as much the day after the vote: ‘Be careful what you wish for, Rush.’ Berkeley is doing a course study on it.

‘I came up with Operation Chaos because we were facing a Republican primary that was over, with most of my audience dissatisfied with the choice. My audience wasn’t up. Excited. Jazzed. I figured we had many more months of the liberal media salivating over the Democratic primaries on the cable networks and that that could be divisive. I don’t want Obama to be President, he would be a disaster, but I do want him to be bloodied up politically, be forced to acquit himself to a political audience that isn’t sycophantic. Someone had to do it.’

But Obama is the Democratic presidential candidate now and I wonder whether the race issue makes Limbaugh nervous. After all, at a White House correspondents’ dinner during the Clinton administration, the President joked that Limbaugh had stood up for Attorney-General Janet Reno, but he ‘only did it because she was attacked by a black guy’.

(The ‘black guy’ being Representative John Conyers.) Limbaugh was in the audience, and he was livid. He demanded, and received, a White House apology. ‘There is nothing worse than being branded a racist,’ he said afterwards.

On the race issue now, he reckons he has nothing to feel nervous about. ‘Obama’s people are trying to silence any criticism of him by implying it would be perceived as racist. It’s a form of intimidation but I’m not going to be intimidated by them.’

Until 1988, when Limbaugh more or less invented the talk-radio format as a political tool, the liberal media in America had a monopoly, he reckons. ‘The reason my show was successful was that so many people with a conservative viewpoint did not think it was being reflected in the media. I validate what they already think.’ He reckons he is not always preaching to the choir, though. ‘We get Democrats. Calls from people who disagree with me all the time. Last week I had a call from a woman in Dallas who said I was causing her high blood pressure because she couldn’t stop herself listening to my show. The doctor told her to stop and she wouldn’t.’

His audience is now 12 times the circulation of The New York Times, he tells me. ‘And you can add up CNN, MSNBC and Fox, and my audience is 20 times that. They have no pretence of objectivity. They are activists now and they make no bones about it. CNN, MSNBC and Fox all opinionise. Like I do. They acknowledge this, and so it has become a battle between the two medias. The liberal media see this Obama candidacy as historic because race is a big deal to them. They think this country committed Original Sin. I actually believe that most of their support for Obama is that they are creaming in their jeans about the historical nature of the campaign. They want to be a part of it. They want to make it happen. They want a stake in it. They want to be able to say they did it if Obama wins.’

Well, he is going to win, isn’t he? ‘No. I don’t see it, Nigel. I think he’s been dead in the water since the primaries. He is going to need to be up 10 to 12 points to win by three or four. Don’t forget that Hillary winning was a foregone conclusion, too. If the polls had been right it would have been Giuliani versus Hillary. That’s why polls a year out are worthless. Obama is going around as the acting President. It’s off-putting. Unionised blue-collar Democrats didn’t vote for him, they voted for Hillary.’

Wasn’t that to do with race? ‘No… well it might be to a certain degree, but there was never any substance to his speeches, just soaring rhetoric. That guy can say nothing better than anyone I have ever heard say nothing.’ He drums his fingers. ‘My take on this is that we are all Americans and I am sick and tired of hyphenated Americans. Afro-American, Hispanic-Americans.

‘I am truly colour blind and I wish everyone else was. We Balkanise when we say only women can represent women in Congress and only Jews can represent Jews and only blacks can represent blacks. It’s bullshit. We all want the same things. Prosperity and a decent education for our kids. Treating this country like it is stuck 50 years ago is bullshit; we have made more progress than anyone over this. Get over it. If Obama says stupid things I’m not going to say they are not stupid because he’s black. He’s running for President, for God’s sake. It’s the Left who has been racist by agonising about whether he is black enough. Is he authentic enough? Does he have a civil rights record? For me he’s a liberal. That is reason enough to oppose him.’

Limbaugh thinks there is a war going on between people like him who want small, efficient government and people who want a powerful state that decides who gets what. ‘And they use hoaxes like global warming to advance their agenda of higher taxation and bigger government.’

Oh dear. You don’t have to agree with his red-meat views to find them insightful. They represent, after all, the authentic voice of conservative, and neo-conservative, America. But there is one issue about which I think he is dangerously wrong. Global warming. After all, I point out, 98 per cent of the world’s leading scientists in this area don’t think global warming is a hoax.

He stares at me. ‘Nigel, man-made global warming is a 100 per cent, full-fledged, undeniable hoax.’

That’s his opinion. ‘No, it’s not even arguable in terms of science.’

Of course it is, I say, and he’s being deliberately provocative to say it isn’t. ‘We don’t have the power to make cold weather warm. We can’t make warm weather cold. We can’t produce rain clouds. We can’t steer hurricanes, we can’t produce diddly squat and the idea that only advanced democracies are doing this with their automobiles is absurd.

Global warming is a religion. It has what all religions have which is faith, because no one can prove their religion. It has a Garden of Eden element, destruction brought by humanity then redemption for our sins by paying higher taxes and getting rid of our cars and planes.’

Does part of him go after a subject like that just to wind people up?

‘No, I believe it. I hate people who feel rather than think. Most people feel they don’t matter. When they are told they can save the planet, well, that gives their lives meaning. These stupid ribbons – breast cancer, Aids awareness, they say – “I care more than you.” ‘ He drums his fingers on the table again.

Limbaugh doesn’t give the impression of having doubts, but does he?

Does he have long nights of the soul? ‘I’d only have those if I had lied, made something up that I don’t really believe, for an illicit motive. I won’t be deliberately provocative just to get people to listen.’

Was there a point at which he decided he would have to thicken his skin if he was going to last in talk radio – not take insults personally, I mean? ‘Insults are badges of honour. There is nothing anyone can say that would offend me. Prior to doing this show no one hated me. No one thought I was a racist, sexist or homophobic bigot.

No one thought I was a hate-monger. I was not raised to be hated. I was raised to be loved. Within six months I was getting death threats.’

For all his claimed equanimity, there is a residual paranoia, vulnerability and vanity that floats around Rush Limbaugh like a toxic cloud. He hates being photographed, for example, because: ‘They are going to try to get the most embarrassing or unflattering shot of you they can.’ They. Always they. These dark forces out to get him. I ask about the insecurities that lay behind his dependency on painkillers.

There was pain to kill, after all, and it wasn’t physical. ‘That’s all in the past,’ he says. ‘Done. The rehab was in Arizona. A spartan place called The Meadows. Not one of these half-assed places for celebrities. It was five weeks and I really got into it. Very educational for me to learn about myself. It was inspiring. I can’t imagine taking a pain pill now. It holds no attraction. I haven’t had a relapse or craving since then. I had to talk to a therapist for 18 months afterwards. Never done that before. Thought it bunk. Actually that helped.’

Born into a family of lawyers, Limbaugh obtained his radio licence at the age of 15 and began Dj-ing on a local radio station. One insecurity that dates back to that time is that he was wounded by his father’s disapproval of his chosen profession. He was also miserable when his father insisted he attend college. Under protest, he enrolled at Southeast Missouri State University, where he lasted a year before dropping out. After that he was fired six times by radio stations and other employers. It was a wobbly start and, as a defence mechanism, he seems to have acquired an ultra-confident alter ego.

Nevertheless, he tells me that when he’s at home, when he can drop his public guard, he can feel flat. ‘Mentally, I’m zapped after this show every day. I don’t do anything for three hours. I go read a novel or play golf. I won’t speak a word because I don’t use the phone. Sure I can get melancholy.’

I never had him figured as an emotional man. Isn’t his whole shtick that you have to think not feel? ‘Don’t cry easily. Get close to crying then I stop it. A movie or a book will get me misty-eyed. It’s always happy ending good stuff that gets me crying, not bad stuff.’

‘Last time?’ Long pause. ‘Last time was when my little cat died. Five years old. Had a stroke. I had two cats and this one had the personality and almost humanlike behaviour. Pets are like sports: you think you can invest a lot in them without consequences.’

And like wives. He has been married three times, though he hasn’t had any children. He met his current girlfriend, a West Palm Beach events planner, last year. When I ask about the ups and downs in his personal relationships he hesitates again. ‘I would find myself very difficult to live with because I am totally self-contained and resent having to do things I don’t want to do. Now I can choose. When I’m put in a position where I don’t want to be there, I make sure everyone else is miserable.’

That’s some confession, even for a thick-skinned man. He seems to know himself well, knows he can be selfish and that he cuts quite a lonely figure – just him and his remaining cat rattling around in that big house. He also knows he is easily bored. ‘I don’t have guests on my show because I don’t care what other people think,’ he tells me. ‘Most guests are boring.’ But it’s not only others he is bored with, it is also, perhaps, himself. This may be what explains his recklessness, his bravado, his determination to say the unsayable. And perhaps it also explains why he never misses a beat, until you draw him out about himself – how he is difficult to live with, how he cried when his cat died, how, to his surprise, he found it helpful talking to a therapist. Only then does he hesitate. As we part he bets me a cigar from Desmond Sautter’s of Mayfair that Obama won’t win. I’d better go and choose one.

When there are no cameras around, Ian Hislop wears black-rimmed glasses rather than contact lenses. And in between series of Have I Got News For You he sometimes grows a full-set beard – Naval in style and grey in colour. There is a difference, then, between his public and private identity.

There is also a connection, symbolised by the poppy he wears in the lapel of his pinstriped suit as he sits behind his cluttered desk at the Private Eye office in Soho. Though he is best known as a satirist, he has a serious side. He makes documentaries about the First World War. When he wears a poppy it is not in a spirit of post-modern irony, it is with pride.

Today, as on most Sundays, you will find Hislop in his local church in Sissinghurst, Kent.

“They do a traditional Remembrance Day service,” he says. “Reading out the names of villagers who were killed in the Great War. Laying wreathes. I find it incredibly moving. You can’t understand Twenties England until you appreciate it was under a cloud of mourning. Nearly everyone was grieving.”

It is history that has become the abiding passion of Hislop’s middle years (he’s 48). Tomorrow the latest episode of Not Forgotten, his poignant and understated series looking at the stories behind the names on First World War memorials, is about the Conscientious Objectors, or “conchies” as they were popularly – but not affectionately – known. Often Methodists or Quakers, they took the commandment Thou Shall Not Kill to mean Thou Shall Not Kill Ever, Under Any Circumstances.

Ninety years on, Hislop asks whether these conchies were “cowards and shirkers” or whether they were courageous in their refusal to fight. “Some 16,000 men applied for exemption when conscription was introduced in 1916,” he says.

“Most of the ones trying it on soon gave it up. They went before a tribunal where they would be asked: ‘What would you do if a German was going to kill your mother?’ Most buckled at that point and enlisted. The ones who held out despite the intimidation were incredibly brave in their way. Their single-mindedness was extraordinary.”

One of the leading conchies was a lay preacher who asked in a sermon “Would Jesus bayonet a German?” The congregation took the view that, on balance, he probably would. The religious aspect intrigued Hislop because his grandfather, who fought at Passchendaele, was a Presbyterian lay preacher who believed in the Augustine idea of justifiable wars.

“The C of E wasn’t the limp and liberal institution it is today,” he says. “It was much more muscular. Some of the sermons by the likes of Bishop Winnington-Ingram were blood-curdling. I found a sermon my grandfather gave after the war and it was clear that he believed it was his Christian duty to fight. It had been a testing moment for him to go over the top. He had been tried and, to his relief, had not been found wanting. I can imagine his attitude to the conchies would have fallen short of admiration.”

We reflect upon Samuel Johnson’s line that every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier. “Men of our generation feel that keenly. We have not had to test our courage and prove ourselves as men.”

He imagines that, as a young man in 1914, he’d have taken the King’s shilling. “I’d have been in the rush of public schoolboys who felt they had to. What I hadn’t appreciated until now is that there are other ways to test your courage. When the conchies were being knocked around in a cell, the easy thing would have been to give in.”

In one case conscientious objection meant two brothers being ostracised by their father, a lieutenant colonel. Father-son relationships are the core of male identity in war, Hislop reckons. Famously, Kipling nearly died from grief after the son he encouraged to join up was killed in action. Hislop took his son and daughter to where their great-grandfather fought in Flanders – something he couldn’t do with his own father, a civil engineer, who died of cancer when Hislop was 12.

I ask who his role models were in his father’s absence. “I had a wonderful English teacher who became a friend. Probably he fulfilled that role. And the old blokes at the Eye are my substitute fathers: Ingrams, Booker, Fantoni. I like making films about old people because they are repositories of amazing stories that they tell well. And they’re incredibly good telly.” Pause. “Which no one else thinks!”

He doesn’t have many memories of his father. What would he ask him if he walked through the door right now? “Oh, everything really. Someone wrote to me who had seen my father open a swimming pool in Saudi. He cut the ribbon and then dived in in his suit and sunglasses. I was also shown a photograph of him leading a conga at the Hilton in Hong Kong. When I saw that I thought: ‘This I didn’t know about you.’ I have my own son now and it makes you realise what you lost and what you can give back.”

What sort of values does he want his son to have? “At the moment there is a Ross and Brand culture of not growing up to be a man, of remaining a lad into your 50s. That would have been alien to our grandfathers’ generation. They wanted to join the world. They weren’t afraid of being judgmental. That’s what I’d like to encourage in my son.”

An editor of Private Eye encouraging his son to be judgmental: who’d have thought it? “I know, can you imagine? You can’t run a paper like this unless you accept that there are moral differences.”

Tellingly, what Hislop admires most about the conchies was their moral certitude, the way they saw the world in black and white terms. He does that, too. And in doing so he sets himself up to be judged by others. “I know. It makes you a prude and a smug moralist. Ghastly.”

It usually falls to Hislop to take to task the rogues they occasionally have on Have I Got News For You. One such was Piers Morgan, then editor of The Mirror. Morgan was so aggrieved he ordered his reporters to dig up dirt on Hislop. They couldn’t find any.

Are we to assume that Hislop is whiter than white, then? “I remember [Richard] Ingrams saying to me when I became editor of the Eye: ‘It is incumbent on you not to shag the secretaries or put your hand in the till’. I took that to heart.”

Hislop is well-placed to comment on the Brand/Ross debacle, being a BBC man involved in what can be an edgy comedy programme. Come on, I say, be judgmental. He rolls his eyes. “This episode has forced everyone to question what being edgy actually means. I think it should mean making points that people don’t necessarily agree with, or want to hear, but doing it in a way that makes them think. What Ross and Brand did does not strike me as edgy. The best comedy is where you attack the strong, not the weak.”

To get the measure of Ian Hislop, you need look no further than the magazine he edits: part funny, part serious, highly judgmental and quite moralistic. For his own part he describes himself as “easily bored”.

And, according to his friend and colleague Francis Wheen, he is more sentimental and tactile than you would imagine. “But the most decadent thing I’ve seen Ian do is fall asleep at the table without taking his contact lenses out.”