Clarissa Dickson Wright, one half of the Two Fat Ladies and a former alcoholic, is more likely to carry a shotgun than a handbag. But, as Nigel Farndale discovers, she still cries easily

There is a bluntness to Clarissa Dickson Wright, which disarms as much as it disconcerts. She never “dislikes” things, she “hates” them: her father, oil seed rape, the welfare state. Gordon Brown is “that foul man”. And if you compliment her on the cheerfulness of her shirt, she will say dismissively: “It makes me look like a sofa.” Hesitate when trying to think of a polite way to refer to her weight, and she will finish your sentence for you: “You mean fat?”

It seems to be a form of defence, this confrontational style. But also perhaps a sign of her impatience with those she considers foolish, which is just about everybody. She has an alpha brain and a low and steady voice, with a delivery that is clipped and typical of her class. Her father was the Queen Mother’s surgeon, and she moved in aristocratic circles as a child. She still does, actually. As one of the most high-profile champions of field sports in the country, she is the darling of the landed gentry.

Her lack of compromise on this subject is reflected in the photograph on the jacket of her new book, Rifling Through My Drawers. She is carrying a shotgun and wearing plus fours. The book is a collection of anecdotes and political opinions, rather than a sequel to her best-selling memoir Spilling the Beans.

The beans she spilled in that book included an account of how her alcoholic father beat her as a child and how she, as a result, became such an alcoholic herself that she squandered her inheritance – the equivalent of around £15 million today – and would pretty much sleep with any man who would buy her a drink. She has been sober for 22 years now (she is 62), but seems to wear her past on her face: the broken veins, the unplucked hairs, the pale blue eyes that have out-stared the world. Complex and as tough as old boots, yes; one of life’s victims, no.

We are reminiscing about Jennifer Paterson, the other half of the BBC’s former Two Fat Ladies cookery show, whom I knew a little. “Jennifer was deeply eccentric,” she says. “Always positive. Spent a lot of time singing, which would drive me nuts. Her great joy was to try and stick in my brain some Noël Coward tune or other, and the minute it became unstuck she would sense it and start singing it again.”

They had a devoted following. Any groupies? “I don’t have the figure for it, but I remember when Jennifer and I were in Australia, I used to get left notes with people’s room numbers saying, ‘Come and see me.’ Jennifer thought this terribly funny. No one left them for her. Perhaps they thought I was more racy. I never took them up on it, but I did used to look through the crowd and think ‘Oooh, which one?'”

When Paterson died in 1999, anti-hunt protesters shouted at Dickson Wright: “One dead Fat Lady, one to go.” “It was the most awful thing because it wasn’t long after Jennifer died. I usually pay no attention to the bloody antis because they are so awful, but I thought that was plain vicious. Clearly they are sick people.”

She has received numerous death threats since. “They only stopped sending the written ones when I said on television that I was going to have an exhibition of them to raise money for the campaign for hunting. Special Branch have taken away the most unpleasant ones for their files. I remember at a book-signing the antis came and sprayed us with red paint and the queue was fantastic about it. They asked if they could have the books with the red paint on. And in Norwich, they mobbed us because the police cordon hadn’t worked. I just put my head down and went for the taxi. The antis were bouncing on the roof when we got in.”

Does she ever feel like retaliating? I mean, what if she was down a dark ally with one of them and she had a baseball bat in her hand? “Oh, I wouldn’t need a baseball bat. I once had two people attempt to mug me and they both ended up in intensive care. I can handle myself. The reason one doesn’t retaliate is that one doesn’t want to stoop to their level.”

You wonder if that story can be true, as you wonder about some of the more picaresque moments in her memoir. Her sister, with whom she has fallen out, has accused her of exaggerating her accounts of being beaten by her father. Still, her image of herself as a scrapper is revealing. Did she inherit her temper from her father? “Since I stopped drinking, it is a different sort of temper to his, but they don’t call me Krakatoa for nothing. I have an explosive temper which goes up and down. Everyone is left shuddering in the wake of it, and a minute later, when I’m calm again, I’m wondering why everyone is looking at me nervously. I suppose that’s why I never get depressed. Depression is the reverse side of anger. Anger internalised.” She cries easily though, she adds, “but not deeply. Trooping the Colour or Remembrance Sunday will make me cry, or a soppy film. I cry from sentiment and anger, that is all.”

And she is not afraid of dying. “I would be quite happy to go to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland come the time. The thing is, if you are the sort of alcoholic that I was, death becomes an old friend. You never know which bottle is going to kill you and you stop being afraid of it.”

She felt no guilt about betraying her father in her memoirs. “I realised during recovery that if I could not forgive my father then I could never forgive myself, because I had become so like him in my drinking. Thank God I never had children to terrorise. I told the counsellor this and they did the gestalt [a therapy that uses role-play to resolve past conflicts]. I was so angry that they took all the furniture out of the room, apart from the chair I was sitting on.

“With the gestalt you try and summon up the image of the person you want to talk to. I could see my father there quite clearly, as if a photograph of him was projected on the back wall. To my amazement I said: ‘You poor, silly idiot, all we really wanted was to love you and have you love us.’ Where the f— did that come from? Excuse my French. After that, I burst into tears. I didn’t love him because there was nothing there to love.”

She became a barrister to spite her father – he hated lawyers – and at 21, having already graduated from UCL, she became the youngest woman ever to be called to the bar. A few years later she was disbarred because of her drinking. Earlier this month, Dickson Wright drew upon her legal background when she pleaded guilty to hare-coursing. Had she wanted to play the martyr?

“I don’t think an absolute discharge counts as martyrdom, my dear. But I would gladly go to prison for my convictions. It would be nice and peaceful and I could write a prison cookbook.”

I tell her that while I am in favour of a repeal of the ban on fox-hunting, I feel less comfortable about hare-coursing, in part because the pest-control argument doesn’t hold. It seems to be just about pleasure.

“Oh dearie me, what a puritan you must be. But they do need controlling, actually. Bear in mind that a hare eats 40lbs of vegetation a week. Death in the countryside is different to death in the town; it is part of the way of life. Farmers love and care for their livestock, then send them off for slaughter. All field-sports people are doing is turning an inevitable necessity into a pleasure. If the animal is going to be killed anyway, why not take pleasure in it? But I can see that is a matter of personal choice. Have you ever been hare-coursing?” I shake my head. “Then you can’t pass judgment on it.”

That can’t be right, surely. You can disapprove of homicide without having witnessed a murder. “Some murders are justified. If I had killed my father I would have been justified because of the way he behaved. But I don’t anthropomorphise. I don’t equate human life to animal life.”

It strikes me that the difference between Dickson Wright’s public and private personas is her serious-mindedness. Does she regret the way she deliberately made herself a figure of fun by agreeing to the title Two Fat Ladies? “No, because if you can make people laugh you can win arguments. I discovered that when I was a barrister. On the last big countryside march there was such good humour. A very British trait. There was also a sense of passion and resolve. As Chesterton said: ‘We are the people of England and we haven’t spoken yet.e_SSRq” She dabs her eyes. “Sorry, that poem always makes me cry …”

Her face clears. “That was an enjoyable chat,” she says. “I dare say when I read the article I shall hate you forever.”

He’s well-educated, handsome and impeccably connected. Then why is Dominic West so good at playing deeply flawed losers?

Before meeting Dominic West in a pub near his house in Shepherd’s Bush, I’m told by a publicist that the actor is tired of people only ever asking him about The Wire, the gritty, understated, critically acclaimed police drama set in Baltimore. Although “cult” must be one of the most overused and misused words in the arts world, it can be applied with some justification to this series, which ran from 2002-2008.

Its devotees are fanatical and there aren’t that many of them, considering the canonical status the series enjoys – it was aired on an obscure digital channel in this country and so, when word of mouth spread, most people watched the box set on DVD instead. West was its unlikely star – unlikely because his background is so very different from that of McNulty, the hard-drinking, womanising blue-collar American detective he played.

He is, after all, an Old Etonian, as well as a friend of Samantha Cameron.

He’s also married to an aristocrat, Catherine Fitzgerald. They met at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was reading English, but went their separate ways – she married Viscount Lambton, and he had a child with Polly Astor (granddaughter of Lady Astor). They met up again and had three children, all of whom came along to their wedding last year at Glin Castle, her family seat.

Given the baggage that must come with the OE label, you would think that if any subject were off limits, it would be that one. We will, of course, talk about The Wire, because it would be perverse not to – like interviewing Paul McCartney and avoiding The White Album. But for now, let us describe our man as he arrives on a bike wearing a baggy flat cap and an orange patterned scarf. He has just turned 42, and presumably the first thing casting directors notice about him is that he is tall, dark and handsome, though not in a conventional way – indeed, the words that keep cropping up whenever he is profiled are “simian” and “carnivorous grin”. He has teeth like “nutcrackers”, according to one critic. And to this descriptive mix are usually added “oaky voice”, “booming laugh” and “cut-glass vowels”.

But the first thing I notice about him is his beard. He grew it for his much-lauded role as Iago in Othello at the Sheffield Crucible, which has just finished its run. This followed another 1,000-line role in Simon Gray’s Butley in the West End. In that West played a lazy, drunken, extroverted don. He said at the time that he liked that role because it meant he got to be “monstrously camp” and “bitchy”. He has also been all over our television screens this year, having starred in the BBC series The Hour (a second series of which will start filming soon), as well as his chilling and utterly compelling portrayal of Fred West in ITV’s Appropriate Adult. On the big screen he is currently playing the baddy in Johnny English Reborn (a rare taste of critical disapproval for him this, but the critics didn’t stop it becoming number one at the box office) and he is about to appear opposite Rebecca Hall in The Awakening, an atmospheric story set in a Twenties country boarding school, loosely based on The Turn of the Screw.

West plays a wounded veteran of the First World War who is now working as a teacher. “There is an elegiac sadness to the film,” he says. “It plays with this idea that ghosts come out of grief. That they represent a human need to see people because so many had died in the war. The Twenties were a time of grief. People were living in the past because so many of their loved ones had recently died.” West’s grandfather fought at the Somme. “He got injured. Lived a long and happy life in Sheffield. He was an industrialist. We’ve got his medals and his hat. But the best research I found for understanding that period was the poetry. That was the medium of the First World War.” We talk about ghosts and I say that, annoyingly, the film gave me goose bumps – annoying because I don’t believe in ghosts. Does he? “I’m not a rationalist like you. I like to believe there are ghosts all over the place! The country house we filmed in had a lot of history. Several members of the same family had killed themselves there. The son shot himself and I was constantly trying to find that room.”

So he enjoys scaring the bejesus out of himself? “We’re drawn to that which frightens us,” he says. “Morbid curiosity. It’s the reason I like playing evil people like Iago or Fred West. We are fascinated by them.” But at least Iago is fictional. What was most disturbing about his Fred West was his normality. He seemed so matter of fact in the way he talked about his deeds. Worse, he seemed quite vulnerable and almost sympathetic. “My words were almost entirely taken from the transcripts, apart from some of his worst excesses. Everything I did was what I heard on those tapes. There was no acting involved, really. I suppose the psychopath in him meant that he looked to the appropriate adult for cues, because he had no idea what the social convention was on this. He had no understanding of what was thought to be shocking. For him, sweeping up leaves and leaving them in the garden was no different to chopping up his daughter and leaving her there.” In an interview at the time it was screened, he admitted he understood the dark sexual fantasies of West. “This is very, very dangerous territory,” he said. “But necessarily, one has something in common.”

“It got pretty dark,” he now says. “I was having bad dreams about it. It was filmed quite quickly, though, so I could come home and be with my kids and take my mind off it. I realised researching him that anyone who goes near that man, be they a biographer or actor or a relation of the victims, becomes tainted – you’re changed by him in a malign way. It’s extraordinary the power of people like that, they go on after their death. I don’t know whether you would call it charisma, exactly, but he was a lovable rogue, like Iago. Not very intelligent, but likeable and quite charming in his jack-the-laddish way.”

What was really freaky about that performance was that he looked and sounded just like Fred West, even down to the Gloucester accent. “Actually, I thought no one would buy it. But I am hyper self-critical.” I liked the way he kept chewing on his cheek. “Did I? I think that was the fake teeth which gave me even more of a monkey mouth, like his. It helped having a mouthful of too many teeth.” Meeting him in person, I realise that the cheek chewing wasn’t acting. He does it in real life, too.

Dominic West was born in Sheffield, one of seven children. His father made his fortune by manufacturing vandal-proof bus shelters. He played Iago with a Yorkshire accent. How did that go down in Sheffield? “They liked it, but I dare say there were some asking why I was doing it in a Yorkshire accent, asking if I thought Yorkshire sounded evil. But it was the opposite. Yorkshire sounds honest. Everyone calls him honest Iago. He couldn’t do what he did if people didn’t find him honest.” Of all the accents West has nailed, Yorkshire must have been the easiest.

“Yes, because that was the accent with which I used to speak. It also has its dangers, because it comes too easily to me.” What was extraordinary about the pitch-perfect Baltimore accent he adopted for The Wire was that people there had no idea he was an Englishman, though West says he found it a very hard accent to pull off. As part of his research for that role, he spent weeks shadowing real Baltimore cops as they patrolled the ghettos. Must have been an eye opener, that. “I remember my first day standing next to this guy who had been shot eight times and was still alive and his family were standing around him and I was hoping to God they wouldn’t ask me a question. I felt quite uncomfortable, because I was an actor from London. An impostor. Generally when things got exciting, I was excluded – I couldn’t go on drugs raids, for example – but I think it was just as important to learn about the boring stuff, because that is the main part of a cop’s working life.”

Can his friend David Cameron learn any lessons from The Wire about tackling the drug problem here? “Legalise it, you mean? Legalising it was one of the radical ideas we explored in The Wire, as a way of dealing with all the health issues. If you want a radical solution, that’s the way to do it, but it hasn’t been tried yet in real-life Baltimore. I think the writers thought the drug war was a waste of money and lives and that the drug dealers should be run out of town.”

Here’s a name drop, I say. I was round at Ian McEwan’s house not long ago, and I noticed there was no television. Did our Greatest Living Novelist disapprove, I asked? He did have one, he said, but he only used it like a cinema, for watching DVDs. And what was he watching at the moment? The Wire. “Was he?” says West. “That’s great. I think a lot of people did that because when they watched the box set it was quite novelistic, each episode like a chapter. Had it not been for the box set, I don’t think it would have been watched much at all.” What does he make of the fanaticism of the fans? “I do get the feeling from the people who come up to me that they feel like they are members of a secret club. The initiation to this club was sitting through 17 hours of quite impenetrable material. The harder they had to work, the bigger the pay off.”

West was most adept at acting drunk in Butley. And in The Wire too, possibly because he sometimes enjoyed the odd Scotch during filming. And, such is his conscientiousness, his “research” seems to have carried over into Iago – offstage, at least. “With Iago, I would come offstage and go on drinking,” he tells me. What, even when he had a performance the next night? “Yes. Of course. We’d go crazy. You don’t get hangovers because you’re running around so much and sweating so much. Physically, it was demanding for a 42-year-old git like me.” He’s known to like a drink, but now his run has finished I guess it doesn’t matter if he lets his hair down. “I’m in the first week of my holiday and adoring it,” he says. “But by the third week, I’ll be getting a bit antsy. We’re going to Spain tomorrow, then I’m going paragliding with my friends, and then I’m hoping to see the Dalai Lama, because I’ve been doing some work with Free Tibet. We’re flying into Dharamsala from Bir.”

I tell him my pet theory about 42 being the age at which people are reaching their creative peak at the moment: the scriptwriter Abi Morgan? 42. Professor Brian Cox? 42. Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters? 42. “I’m part of this group, you mean? Well, it would be nice to think so. If you spoke to my wife, she would say the success can be dated to me going out with her! But yes, certainly over the past five years. I suppose you get to a time in life where your peers are the people in charge, they are the people about whom books are written and TV documentaries made. They are ‘your time’.” Especially in his case, having been at school with Boris Johnson and David Cameron. “Well, yes, they were older than me, but not by much, so we were near contemporaries. I knew Boris’s brothers well.”

Any memories of Dave he’d like to share? “I wasn’t aware of him at school much, would see him around a bit, but it was Sam I knew better. My good friend Nick was deeply in love with her and resented her going out with this guy Dave. That was really how I got to know him.” Is it true she’s a secret Labour voter? “Really? Why do you say that?” Ed Vaizey MP said she voted Labour in 1997. “That’s hilarious. I can imagine she might because she doesn’t want her husband to be prime minister, though I’m sure she’s delighted he became it. I imagine she would rather have her life back. But I don’t know if she’s a Labour supporter. I doubt it, somehow. He’s very convincing in his arguments.” He chews his cheek. “I think this coalition suits Cameron well because he doesn’t have to pander to his right wing, the Lib Dems keep that in check. He can occupy the middle ground.” West has two sons. Would he consider sending them to Eton, given that in the past he has said he was miserable there? “Yes, I would. It’s an extraordinary place. When I first went there I was desperate not to become what I thought an Etonian was: a soft southerner. It was very much a north-south thing. But it did very quickly nurture my acting. It has the facilities and the excellence of teaching and it will find what you’re good at and nurture it.”

I imagine he, like David Cameron, would rather not carry the label around with him. “I don’t think it will have won Dave any votes. It certainly hasn’t won me any parts. The other day, Newsnight Review was talking about Othello and it came up in five seconds. I thought, ‘Eton is more than half my lifetime ago’. So yes, there is a stigma, and not a benign one. But I do think everyone has to overcome other people’s perceptions of them. Clarke [Peters, who played Othello and was West’s co-star in The Wire] says he gets it with ‘black actor’ but I think there is a political will not to do that now. Old Etonian is attached to my name at every opportunity to explain what? I don’t know. Why I am such an a——-?” The booming laugh again. He doesn’t really think he is one, and I’m inclined to agree.

She may be Boris’s sister, but Rachel Johnson is about to hit the hustings in her own right, on the opposite side of the Brexit divide. Nigel Farndale meets her at the home of the most famous family in British politics

When I meet Rachel Johnson at her cottage on Exmoor I get the impression I’m being shown that she is not, in fact, “superposh”, contrary to what the Morning Star claimed recently under the front-page headline: “Two-Agas Johnson to stand for Change UK”. The socialist newspaper suggested that the recruitment of Boris’s sister showed the new party to be a “flimsy Establishment rebranding exercise”.

This perceived poshness may have been something she played on in the past – her mischievous, three-year editorship of The Lady comes to mind, as documented by a Channel 4 film crew that followed her during her first few months – but it is less useful when you have six million voters to win over to the Remain cause in the EU elections, especially in the South West, which predominantly voted Leave in the referendum.

Her second home – she and her husband, Ivo Dawnay, a director of the National Trust, also have a place in Notting Hill – is down a dirt track somewhere “simply miles from the nearest lemon”, as the cleric and wit Sydney Smith would have said. While it is true that the place was built in the 17th century and has big, sooty inglenook fireplaces, old books in glass-fronted cabinets, meat hooks on the ceiling upon which flat caps are arrayed, an old tapestry and, hang on, is that a Lowry? – “Turned out to be a copy,” Johnson says as we walk past the painting. “Long story” – it very much has the feel of a lived-in country cottage, one where it is OK to wear wellies indoors, as she is doing today.

Her (country) Aga is playing up, so she pops a couple of teacakes in the toaster and puts the kettle on. She then stokes the fire in a sitting room with family portraits and terracotta-red washed walls and says, “Apart from writing occasional pieces about my hair or how I exercise to keep my bum in shape, I don’t have any paid work at the moment because I’ve had to resign from Sky News [where she presented a panel discussion programme] now that I’m an MEP candidate. Nothing seems remotely normal.”

Indeed. Like Jacob Rees-Mogg’s sister Annunziata, who quit the Tories to stand as a candidate for the Brexit Party, Johnson’s standing as a Remainer while her brother is the face of Leave adds to the feeling that we are all onlookers in a Shakespearean psychodrama.

She sighs. “Yes, I completely acknowledge that 85 per cent of all interest in whatever I do is because of who my brother is, and while it grates for both of us, I suspect it’s more annoying for him. In your paper the other day Quentin Letts described me as ‘sister of Boris’ rather than ‘the author of seven books’ or ‘former editor of The Lady’ or ‘presenter and broadcaster’. I suppose we all have to accept sometimes the labels that life hands out.”

Though she clearly finds questions about her brother tiresome, she is polite and friendly and so humours me when I ask about their relationship. What did he say when she told him she was standing for Change UK? “He wished me good luck.” Another sigh. “I think in a way it is bizarrely good for the brand, if you think of the Johnsons as a brand, which I don’t, because I think there isn’t a one-size-fits-all way of thinking. I think we are a microcosm of every family and party in the country, deeply divided by Brexit.”

Johnson family debates haven’t turned nasty, however. “Not at all. I have two brothers who voted Leave, the other being Max, who is a half-brother. But Jo and I are very aligned on the subject, though we differ on Theresa May’s deal [which she thinks is essentially fine but over which Jo resigned as transport minister last November]. I look at the backstop as an insurance policy that may not be needed, therefore we can crack on. Jo is more concerned with the sovereignty issue. For some reason I am not motivated by macho notions of sovereignty. Couldn’t interest me less. For me it’s all about the economy.”

She adds that she doesn’t disrespect or resent anyone who voted Brexit. “But I think it is possibly not the right thing for the country, which is why, when they announced the European elections were going to be fought, I thought it was time I stopped sniping from the sidelines and did something.”

She throws another log on the fire and prods at it thoughtfully as she talks. “We are a generally nice, moderate, conservative with a small ‘c’ country, and what is happening is out of character. I was horrified by the scenes from that recent Brexit rally at Newport. I think we’ve gone back to the “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” mood of the Thirties, chanting and being angry. What are they angry about? That is the thing that has brought me out of my feather-bedded, Notting Hill, tennis-playing life. I don’t want to be mooching around in my seventies and think I did f*** all to make a stand about what I considered a terrible wrong direction.”

The fire isn’t responding to her prodding so she reaches for a set of bellows with a rip in its side. Huff, huff, huff. “Bloody useless,” she says. “Do you think I should just throw them on the fire?”

You suspect she might prove something of challenge to her Change UK handlers, given what she now goes on to say. “Change UK is a terrible name. They want to focus-group everything and they have a leadership team of about 11 people. If I were running it we would have one leader and a different name and we would have done a deal with all the other Remain parties, then we would be able to give the Brexit Party a fight.”

When I ask if she has any experience of political campaigning, her face assumes an expression of faux indignation. “Only from my brothers and father! I’ve done lots with them, leafleting and knocking up. I mean, I’m only the fourth most famous politician in the Johnson family. Probably fifth. When Cameron got his coalition in 2010, at 4am I was sitting at the count with Jo. It was his entry into parliament and we were all glued to our phones, and I tweeted, ‘It’s all gone tits up, call for Boris!’ He is the great pied piper for the Tories. They don’t deploy him at their peril. I reminded Cameron of that last week.”
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How did he take it? “He looked wistful and said, ‘Looking back, the days of coalition seem halcyon, because they were days of stability and strength.’”

Has she given much thought to what the job of an MEP will entail if she gets it? “I genuinely don’t think I will be elected. The South West is not Remain heartland. But, yes, I know what it involves. I’m the daughter of an MEP and I once worked in the European parliament. Very good canteen.”

Pay good? “Haven’t checked.”

Johnson is not camera shy, having done Have I Got News for You and Question Time and, last year, Celebrity Big Brother. She was on with Ann Widdecombe, who is standing as the Brexit Party candidate in the South West. “I lost to her then,” Johnson jokes, “so I’m bound to lose to her again.”

But this job will put her in a different kind of spotlight, one where she is scrutinised as never before. Her Twitter account – she has 50,000 followers – might be pored over for past indiscretions, for example, not to mention trolled. How thick is her skin?

“Oh, I don’t mind all that. There are people who sit on Twitter waiting to say, ‘Oh she didn’t get the brains of the family,’ or, ‘She’s got a jaw like …’” She trails off. “Very sexist, trolling stuff.”

She has, I say, a reputation for being … “Oh God!” she interrupts, pulling a mock nervous face. I was going to say for being an extrovert.
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“Oh, that. Yes, I am bouncy. I have a terrible fear of having one of those timid, girlie lives that women used to have before they were liberated and I almost feel it my duty to take every opportunity there is and – God this sounds so po – but it’s only in the last 60 years or so that women have had the opportunities I’ve had and I think there is almost a need to be seen to do things badly. It’s OK to fail. There is so much pressure on women to be perfect. Perfect house, perfect children, clean and Marie Kondo tidy. ‘Oh, Rachel, she’s always getting sacked. What a flake.’ Really important message, actually, rather than, ‘She does everything brilliantly, I couldn’t possibly try.’ So I feel [my failures] are almost a public service.”

Perhaps her reputation for being posh has something to do with this slightly clipped way she has of speaking, her words enunciated crisply yet warmly in a low register punctuated by a breathy laugh. It’s endearing, but I’m slightly taken aback by the way she seems determined to list all her past failures to me. It seems to be taking middle-class self-deprecation into the realm of masochism.

“‘Over the years I’ve been sacked from The Sunday Telegraph, sacked from The Sunday Times, kicked upstairs at The Lady and sacked by the Mail on Sunday, even before the new editor met me. In 2017 I joined the Lib Dems just in time for them to flatline in the polls and I even managed to finish Big Brother off. I’m the format finisher. The rat that jumps on the sinking ship.” She laughs. “And now I’m jumping on another sinking ship with Change UK. We hope it’s not sinking but it’s not riding the ocean waves in the way Chuka [Umunna], Heidi [Allen] and Anna [Soubry] thought it would. They thought there would be millions of voters in the centre ground who were politically homeless and the new party would take the best of left and right. I think it will be a slow build. A reverse Macron.”

Not only was her decision to enter politics not to do with her being sacked as a columnist on the Mail on Sunday last autumn, but it also, she insists, had nothing to do with her having more time on her hands now that her three children are post-university age.

When I ask if she is not only afraid of being bored but afraid of being boring, she says, “Not fear, terror.” As well as being larky and energetic, she seems an open and impulsive person, but also insecure about her intellect, even though she got a 2:1 in classics from Oxford. Comparisons are often made between her and Boris – as well as sharing the same hair colouring they have a similarly lively sense of humour (and he also got a 2:1 in classics from Oxford). Their defining characteristics, it has often been noted, are that they are competitive and crave attention, perhaps as a consequence of feeling its lack during their childhoods in Brussels, when, aged 11 and 12, they would have to make their own way back to boarding school in England via train and ferry.

But contrasts with her younger brother, Jo, are also illuminating. He got a first at Oxford and claims to have no sense of humour whatsoever. Can we read into her proposed change of career direction that, at 53, Rachel Johnson wants to be taken more seriously, become more like Jo than Boris?

She frowns. What do I mean? I mean, she has done some pretty frivolous things in the past. “Go on, tell me what they are.”

Appearing on Celebrity Big Brother. “Oh, I thought that was very serious.” Taking her top off on Sky to illustrate an item about Dr Victoria Bateman, who appears naked in interviews as a protest? “But I didn’t.” (She had a skin-coloured “bralet thing” underneath.) “Like a lot of people, I want to be taken more seriously, but I guess that will mean having to take myself more seriously. Less of the eye-catching manoeuvres.”

She’s written comic novels in the past, one of which won the Bad Sex award, but what about a serious literary one? “I just don’t think I’m good enough. I probably will try eventually, but you really have to have something to say. Maybe I do need to do more serious things so that I have something serious to write. In a way, life has been too easy.”

It’s a telling comment, one that may explain her constant need to self-deprecate. At one point, I press the wrong button on my tape recorder and get playback and she says she doesn’t like the sound of her own voice. It makes me think of something else she told me, that before she goes on Question Time or Have I Got News for You she sleeps badly for a week. Egotism is, of course, not incompatible with self-doubt and vulnerability, for as she also tells me, she cries fairly easily. When was the last time? “I cried when Notre Dame was burning. I think I would have laid down my life to save it. I think it would have been a noble sacrifice.”

Although she seems able and willing to shrug off misfortune in her public life, she does make a distinction with things going wrong in her private life. “Nothing in work can hurt me compared with …” She trails off again. “There is no comparison between work pain and private pain. You might feel humiliated for a couple of days when you are sacked, but … Well, I’ve had in my life family health problems and things going wrong.”

She is referring to a time when one of her children was critically ill, but also to her husband, who had a liver transplant, and her mother, Charlotte, an artist, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease aged 40. In the past Rachel, as her only daughter, looked after her mother the most out of her siblings, but now Charlotte has a full-time carer.

“I’m very enmeshed with my mother emotionally,” she says, “because she had been dealt such a bad hand. She also had serious mental health problems from the age of 16 and I don’t think you are ever cured of these. She sees her ex-husband, Stanley, climbing Kilimanjaro twice in his seventies, whereas she is reduced in oldish age to …” She glances out of the window. “She is not getting any better and it hurts to see her.”

I ask if Parkinson’s can be genetic. “We were offered the chance to find out and I might at some point. Two of her siblings have Parkinson’s as well.”

Looking death in the face with her husband changed her attitude to life, too. “He hates it when I say it was strain for me when he was on the transplant register, because it was far worse for him. But I felt I had to protect very small children and I had a very ill husband and I don’t think he has been in my shoes there, and I haven’t been in his shoes, but we got through it.”

No material for a serious novel? Really?

Photographs of the Johnsons as blond-haired children in Brussels show they looked like Midwich cuckoos. At the time she was one of only two girls in an all-boy’s prep school (she was later expelled from another boarding school for drinking and smoking and generally being ill-behaved), and some of the other parents considered the Johnson clan too eccentric to allow their children to play with.

A breathy laugh. “You don’t know 1 per cent of how eccentric. I think it is hard for people to marry into this family. Ivo calls this farm Jonnybunkport [after Kennebunkport, a summer haven for the Bush family in Maine], because at one point my aunt lived in the cottage, I lived here and my father’s place is nearby. And Boris, Jo, Leo, Max and Julia [her half-sister] have got the converted barns.” She stands up. “I’m going to show you. Come on.”

The farm cottages, stables and barns, which have only had electricity since 1993, are indeed like a Johnson commune. She stops off to check whether a washing machine in one of the outbuildings has finished its cycle and curses when she sees it hasn’t washed some sheets properly. Her battered old Land Rover, meanwhile, which she needs for campaigning at the weekend, isn’t co-operating either; its battery is wired up to a charger.

Her grandfather was a hill farmer here on 500 acres, and her grandmother made butter and cream in the dairy. She shows me around the dairy, converted to a house that her father and her stepmother live in when they are here.

“We used to have our meals in here as children,” she says. “I cannot tell you how primitive my childhood was. People think I’m this rich, posh person and, as you can see, I’m just not.”

Hers was certainly a peripatetic childhood, in Washington, New York and Brussels, the family moving some 32 times. “But this farm was the centre of it. We’ve always had it to come back to.”

We walk down to the River Exe and she shows me where she and her brothers used to swim as children. “We dammed it up there. I’m looking forward to being a grandmother. It will be lovely when my kids bring their children here. I wish they’d bloody hurry up. That would be the fifth generation.”

She laughs and points at a bend in the river. “This is where my father suggested to the au pair girls in the hot summer of 1976 that they could take their clothes off and wash them, to save them having to wash them in the house.”

House guests at the time recalled that there seemed to be a high turnover of au pairs and that they would walk around the house in the buff. One friend who stayed, Oliver Walston, dropped Stanley a thank-you note afterwards saying, “Thanks for the mammaries.”

Stanley seems to have been untroubled by bourgeois convention. He wrote racy novels and was a philanderer, like his oldest son, which, along with his divisive, prince-across-the-water role in the Brexit crisis, seems to be one of the reasons Boris gets flak in the press these days.

When I ask Rachel if she feels protective towards her brother, she says, “Very. It hurts. It’s horrible. I don’t like it at all. I feel it terribly unfair, these ad hominem attacks by grown men who should know better. His personal life is irrelevant. The way they are so angry with him.” But I suspect she hopes that, despite their differences over Brexit, her brother’s time is yet to come. “He plots things so much better than other politicians,” she says. “He is so many chess moves ahead.”

We have strayed back on to the subject of Boris, but it occurs to me that while we may not be able to understand her without acknowledging her relationship with him, that may work the other way around, too. When I suggest that she and her family are “cursed with being fascinating”, she exclaims, “That’s it! You’ve explained it. I cannot understand why whatever I do [she whispers] seems to make headlines. It must be something a tiny bit other than Boris.” She laughs and ruffles that distinctive blond fringe of hers that often seems to stray into her sightline. “Maybe it’s the hair. It’s become my look. I’d appear sad without it.”

There is something about Vicky McClure’s personality – she is chatty, confident and as eye-contacty as an owl – that makes you think she is taller than she is. In fact, she is 5ft 4in. She is also quite bendy, as becomes apparent when she sits down to talk in a comfy booth and folds her legs into what looks like the lotus position. No, she doesn’t do yoga, the 35-year-old actress says, but in her teens, she did want to be a dancer. She had her heart set on it and even had an audition for the Royal Ballet School. “Didn’t get in,” she says, a trace of Nottingham in her vowels. “Wasn’t much good at school either. My concentration was very low. I was bored. Left at 16 without any GCSEs.”

She did, however, win a place at the prestigious Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts in London, only to have to turn it down because there were no grants available and her parents – her father, Mick, is a joiner, her mother, Carol, a hairdresser who now works in an office – couldn’t afford the fees. She remained at the (free) Central Junior Television Workshop in Nottingham instead, where she had been going for five years and where she was coached by fellow Nottingham-born film and TV actress Samantha Morton.

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If my success all ends tomorrow, I’d go out and get an office job

Then, aged 21, she landed a part in Shane Meadows’ acclaimed film This Is England. She played Lol, a single mother from a broken home, a role for which she won a Bafta when the film was turned into a TV miniseries. During the years she worked on it, off and on, she kept up her day job. “I didn’t have any private wealth to buy me time to move to London and hang around with the right people until some doors opened. I always had a job that wasn’t in acting, in Boots, Dorothy Perkins or whatever, to help me through the times when I didn’t have acting work.” One of her jobs was working in a surveyor’s office looking after the vending machines.

Nowadays TV viewers will know her best from Line of Duty, the BBC crime drama that has, like Bodyguard (also written and created by Jed Mercurio), become one of the BBC’s biggest ratings hits in years. The “overnight” figures for the first episode of the new series revealed a peak audience of eight million, the highest ratings this year.

McClure plays the unflappable DI Kate Fleming, who works for a police anti-corruption unit. The storylines, she says, are guarded closely. She won’t even tell her family. “But actually, a lot of people come up to me and say, ‘Oh please don’t tell me, it will ruin it. I want to enjoy it in real time.’” So all that she will say to me is, “Do I make it to season six? Who knows.”

I ask her what she thinks is behind this national obsession with police dramas. “With Line of Duty I think it’s that viewers enjoy having to do some of the detective work. In an interrogation scene, say, they are looking at the body language for clues. ‘Why did the suspect just scratch her ear?’ We’re all detectives now.”

Despite her success with the show, McClure is whatever the opposite of starry is. Her favourite thing, she says, is being lazy at the weekends. “On Line of Duty you have to be disciplined, no late nights, learn your lines. But at the weekend I can sit around doing bugger all. Lie in bed all morning, then a fry-up and telly. I love television.”

This summer she takes the lead role in I Am Nicola, a portrayal of a woman mentally abused by her controlling partner. It is one of three dramas for Channel 4 written and directed by Dominic Savage (the others have Samantha Morton in I Am Kirsty and Gemma Chan in I Am Hanna) centring on the actress in the lead I Am … role.

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Working-class parents can’t say, ‘Here’s 60 quid,’ if their kid needs to go to an audition

McClure prefers not to embrace metropolitan showbiz life in London, living in her home town of Nottingham instead with her fiancé, Jonny Owen, a director and actor 12 years her senior. She grew up on an estate there, went to Fernwood School in the city and now, such is her celebrity, she has a tram named after her. “People know I live in Nottingham, so if they see me down the shops they are not surprised. But yes, I do get recognised.”

The place has also left her with a keen sense of what she calls her working-class identity. She thinks that actors from privileged backgrounds have an unfair advantage. When, in a bid to wind her up a bit, I suggest that Eddie Redmayne, Damian Lewis, Dominic West, Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch can’t help their backgrounds, that their privilege is not their fault and does not make them any less good as actors, it prompts the following passionate outpouring.

“Of course it’s not their fault, but I’m always going to be championing people who haven’t had that easier start, because I didn’t. I probably see the reality of life in this country differently to them. If you’re struggling, if you don’t have any money, it’s much harder than people think. I have friends who are millionaires. I have friends who are piss-poor. I know that at the end of the day you can’t help what you are born into, that it doesn’t make you less talented. Eddie Redmayne is an incredible actor and a lovely guy. But I just find it frustrating that if you haven’t got funds, you haven’t got the same opportunities. That’s what it comes down to.”

She draws breath and glances to the side before locking eyes once more. “If you are really talented, but don’t have the money, you won’t find your way through, whereas this other person who can act, who has money galore, can pay their way through it. All actors are fighting the same battles, but if you are born into money it is easier.”

Does she have any particular examples in mind? “I know too many talented people who have missed out on opportunities because train fares aren’t cheap. If you live in Manchester it could cost you 300 quid to get down to London for an audition. A casting can come up at very short notice. The next day. You don’t have months to save up your money or get a cheaper advanced ticket. Working-class parents can’t say, ‘Here is 60 quid,’ every time their kid needs to go up to London. Those are things you don’t have to think about if you come from a privileged background.”

All this makes her feel not so much politicised as disenfranchised. “The language of politics is predominantly posh and rich,” she says, “and I can’t see my people in it.”

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Marriage? ‘No date yet, but we’re aiming for next year’

Not even when it is Comrade Corbyn doing the talking? “I don’t want to be drawn on my politics,” she says, with a firm nod and a brief pursing of her lips. “But I’m extremely passionate about the NHS. What are those who can’t afford private healthcare supposed to do? Just die? It makes me explode.”

Her equanimity soon returns when she talks about how, for some reason, she rarely if ever feels self-conscious in front of a camera. It probably helps that with her prominent cheekbones and expressive blue eyes, the camera seems to be her friend. “But I’m not a model; I’ll never be a model. It’s not something I would want to do, either. They ask you to get into these unnatural positions. Photographers will say things like, ‘Make your arms look soft.’” She demonstrates floppy arms, then shrugs and laughs.

She has just come from the photoshoot for this article. “I turned up this morning without a scrap of make-up on and the glam team came in and did my hair and make-up and dressed me in clothes I wouldn’t normally wear. But I suppose it is still me. Me with the help of a team of people.” She laughs again, a short bark. “Lighting is important. But to be honest, I’m just not bothered if people aren’t happy with the way I look. In This Is England I didn’t wear full-face make-up. Bit of eyeliner, that was all. Mother’s Day, I didn’t fill my eyebrows in. I plucked them to smithereens when I was a kid and they never grew back.”

It seems safe to conclude from this that she is comfortable in her skin. And she doesn’t seem to suffer, as some actors do, from the problems associated with not being able to switch a character off at the end of the acting day. But if, say, she has to tell someone on screen that she loves them, does that devalue the currency of saying it genuinely in her private life? “No, they don’t feel at all the same. On screen, I’m not thinking of Jonny, my fella, so that it comes out naturally. You pretend.”

There is a diamond engagement ring on her finger. “We haven’t set a date but we are aiming for next year. This year has been too chocka.”

Had she been in love before? “Yes, but it wasn’t the same – definitely not. Had a few relationships before I met Jonny, but there wasn’t that same Cupid’s-arrow moment as there was when I met him [on the set of the film Svengali, which he wrote]. He keeps me grounded. I feel like I have to set an example to his [grown-up] daughter. I don’t want to become known as being a bit of a dick.”

How has her success affected her other relationships, with her old school contemporaries, for example? “My old friends from Nottingham don’t treat me differently. Not a chance. Because I don’t live and breathe the industry. My best mate, Michelle, has just set up a business with my older sister, Jenny, making wax models. Another friend is working in energy and another one has become a nutritionist. None of my oldest and closest friends work in my business and they don’t want to hear about my work.”

I bet they do. “OK, yes,” she concedes with a laugh. “When I first started appearing in the papers or on chat shows it was a big deal, but now everyone is relaxed about it.”

What about when Madonna cast her in her directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom, in 2008? The laugh again. “Yes, they wanted to know about that. I went to Madonna’s house and saw her with her children. And she flew me out on a private jet for a screening. To me it felt like a normal relationship between a director and an actor. I wasn’t watching out for, ‘Ooh, what’s Madonna doing now?’ I don’t remember feeling uneasy. Everyone is going to have good days and bad days, even Madonna.”

McClure admits to a lack of patience and a tendency to grind her teeth, but otherwise gives the impression of having a sunny disposition, so much so that it seems hard to imagine her having bad days. “Of course I have them. We all get down and have days when we feel like shit and just want to pull the duvet over our head and sign off for the day. I do sometimes suffer from anxiety – I’m a bit of a worrier, mainly about my friends, the people I love – but I’ve never had therapy.”

When I ask how she would describe herself, she says she thinks she has a pretty high level of emotional intelligence. “I can read people well. And I like to be in control. Like to be organised. I’m quite nosy.”

As anyone who saw her appearance on Top Gear will know, she also swears a lot. “Yes, I’ve got a right potty mouth, but I wouldn’t dream of swearing in front of my grandparents, even now.”

She’s also a bit of a cyberchondriac. “I’m always googling illnesses. Guilty of it.” I ask if, odd moments of health-related paranoia apart, she is, at this stage of her career, allowing herself to enjoy her success. “I think so. I’m not worried about it suddenly stopping because I don’t think that would bother me, because I’ve had so much rejection in the past and that’s the nature of the acting beast. As much as I love my job, if it all ends tomorrow, that’s not my life over. It’s not. It’s really not. I’d go out and get an office job.”

She hopes that if she has children in due course she can be the same way with them as her parents were with her. “Mine weren’t ‘you must live your dream’ parents, but they did think that if you find something you enjoy, you should keep going with it. I remember when I came back from school with the form for the Television Workshop, aged 11, my mum said, ‘Yeah, if you want to do it, Vicky, do it.’ I was dancing every night at the time – tap, modern, ballet – a gruelling schedule for my parents, making sure I had my ballet shoes and my hair in a bun. My sister and I were different. She never wanted to get into showbiz.” She does jazz hands as she adds, “I was the ‘watch me’ daughter.”

She says she and her sister, who is two years older than her, have never talked about how she seemed to need (and get) more of their parents’ attention. But they are close and have always been supportive of one another.

When I ask if she ever considered auditioning for one of those ubiquitous talent shows, she shakes her head. “Talent shows give people false hope and don’t prepare them for the rejection that is part of an actor’s life,” she says. “Contestants always say, ‘It’s my dream. It means the world to me and my life will be meaningless if I don’t win.’ I get that passion, but it’s not true that if you follow your dream you will get there, because there is not enough room on the telly, on stage and in film for everyone, and it’s not fair to let people think there is.”

This said, she is always willing to offer advice when aspiring actors ask her for it. One question that crops up is how an actor manages to cry on cue. She finds it helps to listen to music beforehand, the Carpenters being a sentimental favourite. “I play certain trigger music. Something powerful. An instant hit of emotion. If the director tries to rush the scene or they want take after take I sometimes say, ‘I’m not a robot.’ I’m not going to use a tear stick. It needs to be real and everyone needs to give me the time to get there. I’m not going to do it ten times in a row because then it gets away from the reality of whatever that scene is. For the rape scene in This Is England it was a closed set. It was sensitively handled.”

Her understanding of the power of music was heightened by her experience of watching her grandmother’s decline from dementia. “She wasn’t herself and she lost her ability to communicate, but if we sang songs there would be a smile.”

Her grandmother’s death had a big impact on her and was the reason she became involved with a choir made up of patients with dementia in Nottingham. She has made a documentary about it which is due to be screened next month.

“You just see these 20 people all singing in harmony, different ages and sexes,” she says. “At times, I couldn’t keep a lid on my emotions when I was with them. Dementia affects the protein in a certain part of your brain. And as your brain shuts down, this affects your body, your balance and so on. I’ve learned so much about it. There are different types, with vascular and Alzheimer’s being the most common. It is an epidemic and people assume it is always old people who are affected by it, but that’s not true. The youngest member of my dementia choir is Daniel, who is 31. His was genetic. He had a faulty gene.”

Since making the documentary a few months ago she has kept in touch with the choir. “I saw them all last week. They live locally in Nottingham. I went to one of their weddings. Dementia is tough. There is no cure. And it’s a difficult show to promote, if you know what I mean. Our Dementia Choir with Vicky McClure is not a glamorous title.” She laughs again, an explosive “ha!” “Still, hopefully we will get Bodyguard figures.”

We have been talking for more than an hour, long enough for me to have forgotten about our respective heights (I’m 6ft 2in). When we get to our feet she registers my expression of surprise about this and says with a laugh, “People always think I’m taller than I am. Ha!”

His last series woke up the world to the millions of tonnes of plastic in our oceans – at 92, Sir David Attenborough has a greater influence than ever. So what’s his take on the BBC pay controversy, antisemitism, voluntary euthanasia and Trump? Nigel Farndale asks the questions

An interview with Sir David Attenborough is like a game of chess. There are stand-offs and exchanges, lures and skewers, but today he is not trying to intimidate his opponent psychologically, as some interviewers have accused him of doing in the past. Instead of being “prickly”, he is being strategic in the way he deflects and self-deprecates.

And he is a deft user of body language to convey meaning he would rather not commit to speech. When, for example, I ask him if, having had a heart-to-heart about climate change with President Obama in 2015, he would now like to do the same with President Trump, a global warming denier, he slowly closes his eyes, gives a deep sigh and opens them again before saying in that well-modulated, much impersonated breathy voice of his: “I don’t think so, because I don’t think Trump is susceptible to logical argument. I fear it would be him saying black is white and we would bandy our prejudices with one another.”

And when I ask how much of the fan mail he gets – around 30 letters a day – comes from female admirers declaring their undying love for him, he pulls a face and gives a broad, off-the-shoulder shrug that says, I know what’s behind the question and I’m not going to play that game. “Most of the fan mail I get is from people thanking me for making them more aware of the natural world,” he says with wilful neutrality.

I’m meeting him in his elegant, rectory-style house in Richmond, which has been extended since the last time I interviewed him here, almost 20 years ago. He has knocked through into a neighbouring pub to make a modernist library, complete with gallery, and this airy space is populated with fossils and phallic-looking tribal pottery on tables, as well as thousands of books and classical music CDs on shelves. There is also a grand piano, which he plays every day, and open on its music stand there is a score for a Schumann waltz. Today’s piece.

When we last met it wasn’t that long after Jane, his beloved wife of 47 years, had died suddenly from a brain haemorrhage, and he told me he was using work as a way of trying to stay ahead of his grief. This may still be partly the case, because at 92 he is showing no signs of slowing down. He is about to go to Chernobyl for the World Wildlife Fund and has just returned from a trip down the Zambezi, which I probably should have guessed he had done before – “My dear chap, I went down it from source to mouth in 1964, just me and a cameraman for three months.” And the number of one-hour programmes he has in the pipeline is in double figures – “I did the commentary for one last week which used drones to picture blue whales out in the ocean – breathtaking shots, the angle just right for the light, these immense leviathans seen as through glass.”

He is also about to publish a revised and updated edition of Life on Earth, to mark the 40th anniversary of his landmark series. It was an exercise he found nostalgic. “I can either say I was amazed at its eloquence or I thought it was a fairly stodgy read, but it wasn’t as bad as I feared. I hadn’t read it for 40 years and was relieved to find the basic structure was correct. The big revelation since then was the discovery of feathered dinosaurs, which has resolved a venomous debate among the scientists.”

He is not lonely because his daughter, Susan, a retired primary-school headmistress, keeps him company here, as well as looking after his business affairs. (He also has a son, who is an anthropologist in Australia.) To relax he reads, writes letters and contemplates the flora and fauna in his walled garden. And he watches TV. “I usually just watch natural history. Programmes made by my mates.” His smooth, pink features crease into a smile. “I like to keep up with what the bastards are doing!”

He must have more eclectic taste than that, I suggest, given that as controller of BBC2 in the late Sixties, and director of programmes in the early Seventies, he not only commissioned Sir Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, but also Pete and Dud and Monty Python. Does he keep an eye on current trends in comedy?

“When you are in your nineties, the sort of jokes you laugh at are the same ones you laughed at when you were 50. Modern comedies you look at with a stony face and ask, ‘Is that funny?’ I put on Morecambe and Wise the other night and Susie said, ‘Do we have to? They’re not funny any more,’ but even she found herself laughing.” He says I probably shouldn’t repeat that because, “I’ll get a rocket from her,” but I can tell he won’t mind if I do.

It amuses him that children often ask him if he always wanted to be on television. “And I say, my dear child, there was no television when I was your age.”

Although his TV persona is one of avuncular warmth and wisdom, Attenborough is notoriously impersonal off screen, avoiding small talk, resenting having his photograph taken, referring to himself in the second person and closing down questions about his private life. His older brother, the late, great Hollywood actor and director Lord (Dickie) Attenborough, got one line in his memoirs.

“My brother Dick and I had a great time together. We laughed at the same things

When I mention that I once interviewed his brother and that my impression was that the two of them seemed very different – Lord Attenborough being jolly, tactile and lachrymose, Attenborough more reserved, unsentimental and taciturn – he says, “Actually we had a great time together. We laughed at the same things. He was very funny.”

I quote something his brother told me about their childhood – that, “We were apprehensive of our father’s displeasure and always desperate for his approval.” I ask Attenborough if that was his experience, too. “Well, my father [who was an academic] was a hard man to win approval from. He was a stern person on a lot of issues. Dick – I never called him Dickie, by the way, as everyone else did, always Dick – was expert at averting disaster by making my father laugh to defuse a moment. The thing about Dick was that he wanted to go on the stage from the age of five. He failed his school certificate and my father, who was the son of a small shopkeeper who got himself to university on a scholarship, could not believe that a son of his could not answer these fatuous questions. Because I was more academic [Attenborough read natural sciences at Cambridge], I was more his cup of tea, but my father would have died rather than say one child was favoured over another.”

Did he feel in competition with his brother when they both became successful and famous? “Nowhere near. From the outside it may have looked as if our careers had some similarity, but there was very little. Dick’s life was huge salaries and red carpets; my life was public service broadcasting, with my salary governed like the civil service.”

He thinks his BBC background may be the reason for his reticence. “When I was a younger producer working for the BBC, the thing that was drilled into me was that I must not be controversial. It didn’t matter how passionate your convictions in your private life, you mustn’t air them in public.”

As he is no longer on the staff of the BBC, I ask him what he feels strongly about at the moment. He purses his mouth as he thinks. Well, OK, he finds the ongoing row about BBC salaries misguided. “If you declare exactly how much a performer is being paid, you invite your competition to offer him or her more. The commercial channels know exactly how much they have to pay to outbid you.”

He is aware that, such is his stature in public life, when he weighs in on a subject it can have a huge impact, as it did when his last series, Blue Planet II – which was watched by a staggering 17 million viewers in this country and was so popular in China it slowed down the internet – raised awareness about the eight million tonnes of plastic being dumped each year into the oceans. “That was a funny thing. I’ve been talking about plastics in the sea for a decade, but this time the moment was right and it had an extraordinary effect.” It certainly did: it not only changed government policy, it left multinational companies falling over themselves to prove to their customers that they were changing their ways, too.

But he is apprehensive about being seen as an authority on conservation issues. “I constantly feel an impostor,” he says, “because people think I am a qualified scientist when I am not. The other imposture is people think I took every frame of film I narrate, when I did not. People ask, ‘What was it like when you came face to face with a lion?’ and I have to say, ‘I wasn’t there, old boy. I just put the words to it.’ ”

“This business of being considered a guru I find alarming. People expect you to be an authority

For many years, he felt under pressure from environmentalists to become more vocal and politicised regarding climate change. But he had to do a lot of soul-searching before he would commit himself and come off the fence. “This business of being considered a guru I find alarming. What I am not is a scientist who understands the chemistry of the upper atmosphere. If you are not careful, you are put in a bogus situation where they expect you to be an authority, when I am not. Although I had been personally convinced for several years of the truth of global warming, I didn’t feel I could say so in public until I could be sure of the facts. If you are in a prominent position, you’d better be bloody sure that your views are right, and what convinced me was a lecture I heard by a scientist called Ralph Cicerone. He produced facts and figures and I was left with no doubt. From that moment, I felt I could say it.”

Around that time, 18 years ago, Attenborough told me that if the North Pole continued melting at the rate it was, then it would be gone in 20 years. I remind him of this now. “Did I say that? It’s dangerous to put time frames on things. The other danger is if, when people ask you if you can give an example of global warming, you give into temptation and say, ‘Yes, I went to South Georgia and the glacier was there and I went back 20 years later and it had gone.’ And they will come back with an example from somewhere else in the Antarctic that I haven’t heard of where the reverse has apparently happened. So it isn’t always a good idea to give exact figures when what you should be talking about is long-term trends. But you do get to a point where the balance of the evidence is incontrovertible.”

And yet there are sceptics, highly intelligent people such as the former chancellor of the exchequer Lord Lawson, who say that global warming is a myth. “Yes. I find it frustrating when people fight the evidence, especially people who are used to dealing with statistics and mathematics, like Lawson is. He’s an obvious example.” He shrugs. “Well, he keeps us on our toes.”

Such is Attenborough’s longevity, he has had dealings with just about every prime minster in the postwar era, including Anthony Eden, who sought his advice on the broadcast he made about the Suez Crisis in 1956. “I am so politically naive, but even I could see that this was a turning point in British history and it was being conducted by a man who wasn’t capable of ordering his own breakfast. I dealt with Eden as I dealt with [Harold] Wilson, who was also a handful, ringing up and threatening me. My job was to stand up to him. But politics is not my bag at all. I keep my political views to myself. If anyone asks me how I vote I tell them to mind their own business. I have strong ethical opinions, but not political opinions. In fact, I’m baffled by politics. I don’t understand what is going on half the time.”

I’ve heard that he was a Remainer. Is he in favour of a second referendum? “Well, there you are, you see,” he says with an answer-avoiding laugh. “We still don’t know what the deal is. My dear brother Dick was very clear about his support for the Labour Party and he supported them through thick and thin. I used to argue with him: ‘But how do you know, Dick, that this policy is right?’ ”

On the subject of the Labour Party, during the war years Attenborough grew up with two sisters taken in by his parents, Irene and Helga, who were Jewish “Kindertransport” refugees. In light of that, it seems pertinent to ask for his take on the antisemitism row.

“I don’t understand these complex refinements of the internationally accepted definition,” he says. “Whether someone has decided this is a stick to hit Corbyn with, I don’t know, but I do know what I think about antisemitism. I keep seeing Corbyn on the news protesting that he is against antisemitism, but really …” He trails off. His old BBC diplomatic habits kicking in. “During the war, antisemitism did feel personal for us because of these two girls living in the house, who were our age, and who had lost their parents. When they arrived we hadn’t heard of concentration camps, but of course we did as the war went on.”

Both the sisters are dead now, as are both his brothers (there was a younger one, Johnny, who was a motor-trade executive). It is the curse of living to extreme old age. If Attenborough looks and acts younger than his years, he says, it is down to good luck more than good management. He doesn’t exercise or watch his diet – he’s all about the chocolates and red wine, rather than the vitamin supplements – and apart from his “new knees” following an operation a couple of years ago, he has always enjoyed rude health. He thinks it probably helps that he keeps his mind active with his piano playing and so on, although he tells me his memory has become less reliable lately. “When you are making a speech, you sometimes realise there is a word coming up at the end of the sentence and you know you won’t be able to think of it in time. You have to think of a simile or phrase to get around it.”

Does he sometimes feel like the last man standing? “I recognise that some of my peers, good friends whom I go and see, have not been so fortunate. Some can’t walk and I’m not even sure they know who I am any more. It’s certainly not virtue, coming from laying off smoking or whatever. It’s luck. I did smoke; when I was controller of BBC2 we would have on our desk a leather box with cigarettes, and if you had an awkward interview to conduct – firing someone – you would say, ‘Have a cigarette, old boy.’ But I stopped when one of my children said, ‘Dad, you smell awful.’ ”

“One BBC head of department said, ‘Don’t use Attenborough again. His teeth are too big’

He talks about his friends not recognising him; if he realised he had Alzheimer’s, say, would he consider visiting the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland? “Dignitas? Wait and see when the time comes. You have to think what effect you are having on your nearest and dearest.”

As for what happens after you die, he is an agnostic. The last time we met, he said he didn’t care what happened to his mortal remains; they could be dumped in a dustbin for all he cared. That view hasn’t changed, although he jokes that if he were reincarnated he would come back as a sloth, the subject of one of his best-known clips. (He went up to one hanging from a branch and said, “Boo!”)

Actually, he has already been immortalised, not only in that clip and the endlessly shown one of him with the mountain gorillas, but also as a hologram that guides visitors around the Natural History Museum. And he’s had not only a spider and a Madagascan shrimp named after him, but also a ship, the new £200 million polar research vessel. A national poll may have voted for Boaty McBoatface, but it was decided that this was too frivolous and that it should be the RRS Sir David Attenborough (the other name being given to the ship’s submersible). He tells me he found the launch this summer “a humbling and emotional experience”, and he is hoping to get on board for one of the sea trials. Having done his national service in the Royal Navy he knows the importance of a serious name, he adds. “You can’t expect crew members to go on shore with Boaty McBoatface written on their caps.”

Our game of chess is coming to an end. He has conducted the odd interview himself, and recently came closer than anyone has ever come to doing one with the Queen (which wasn’t all that close). The two, who go way back, are the same grand age, and they looked comfortable in each other’s company.

But a career as a chat-show host was never on the cards. “When I joined the BBC as a trainee,” he tells me, “I was asked to stand in for an interviewer one day. The head of department wrote to the producer afterwards and said, ‘Don’t use Attenborough again. His teeth are too big.’ I only found this out years later when I was leaving and they presented me with my HR file.”

That head of department could not have been more wrong, I say, as Attenborough proved to be one of the most telegenic presenters the BBC has ever had. He wafts the flattery away as if it were a jungle insect and says, “Ah well, perhaps fashions in teeth change.”

BOOK EXTRACT Life on Earth
A natural history lesson with David Attenborough

Can sharks really smell blood?
About 450 million years ago, a split appeared in the fish dynasty. A set of genes in one group of fish for some reason became duplicated and this resulted in them producing bone in their skeletons. Their descendants became the ancestors of all backboned animals alive today – including ourselves. The other group used a softer, lighter and more elastic material to support their skeletons – cartilage. The descendants of this group are the sharks and rays. This ancient split in the ancestry of fish means that you and I are more closely related to a cod than the cod is to a shark.

The reduction of bone in the bodies of the early sharks doubtless made them considerably lighter, size for size, than their ancestors. Even so, muscle and cartilage are heavier than water, and to remain above the seafloor, sharks have to keep swimming. They drive themselves through the water in the same way as their ancestors, by the sinuous motion of the rear half of their bodies and the powerful thrash of their tails. But with the thrust coming from the back, the body is nose-heavy and liable to dive downwards. To correct this, a shark has two pectoral fins spread horizontally like the vanes of a submarine or the wings of a rear-engined aircraft. These fins are, however, relatively inflexible. The shark cannot suddenly twist them to a vertical position to act as brakes. Indeed, a charging shark cannot stop, it can only swerve away to one side. Nor can it swim in reverse. Furthermore, if it stops beating its tail, it sinks. Some species, indeed, take rests at night and slumber settled on the seafloor.

The fish’s sense of smell is acute. The nostrils open into cups that can detect the most minute changes in the chemical composition of water. Sharks can detect the taste of 1 part in 25 million so that, when the current is in their favour, they can smell blood from a body nearly a third of a mile away. They rely greatly on smell to guide them to food, and this might provide an explanation for the shape of that most grotesque of sharks, the hammerhead. Its nostrils are placed at the ends of two extremities that grow out from the side of its head. If it scents its prey, it swings its head from side to side to determine the direction from which the smell is coming. When it is equally strong in both nostrils, then the hammerhead swims straight ahead – and is often one of the first predators to reach the scene.

What links crocodiles to the dinosaurs?
The crocodiles are the largest of all living reptiles. The Nile crocodile spends most of its days basking on sandbanks, maintaining an even body temperature. Although crocodiles are inactive for long periods, on occasion they can run very fast indeed. Their social lives are quite complex. The males establish a breeding territory, patrolling a patch of water not far from a beach. They bellow and fight any other males that come to dispute with them. Courtship takes place in the water. Actual mating lasts only a couple of minutes or so. The male clasps the female with his jaws and their tails intertwine.

It is in the care it gives its offspring that the crocodile’s behaviour is most surprising. When the eggs of the Nile crocodile are close to hatching, the young within begin to make piping calls. In response, the female begins to scrape away the sand covering the eggs. As the young struggle up through the sand, she picks them up with her jaws, using her huge teeth as gently as forceps. A special pouch has developed in the bottom of her mouth and in it she can accommodate half a dozen babies. She carries them down to the water and swims away, with her jaws half closed, her young passengers piping and peering through her teeth. The male helps, and within a short time the young have been ferried to a special nursery area in the swamp. Here they remain for a couple of months, hiding in the bank and hunting for frogs and fish while their parents keep guard in the water close by. Watching them, one can well believe that the dinosaurs themselves had similarly complicated forms of courtship and parental behaviour.

Why do sloths sleep so much?
Today, there are two main kinds of sloth, the two-toed and the three-toed. Of these, the three-toed is considerably the more slothful. It hangs upside down from a branch suspended by hook-like claws at the ends of its long bony arms. It feeds on only one kind of leaf, Cecropia, which happily for the sloth grows in quantity and is easily found. Lulled by this security, it has sunk into an existence that is only just short of complete torpor. It spends 18 out of 24 hours soundly asleep. It pays such little attention to its personal hygiene that green algae grow on its coarse hair and communities of a parasitic moth live in the depths of its coat, producing caterpillars which graze on its mouldy hair. Its muscles are such that it is quite incapable of moving at a speed of more than two thirds of a mile an hour. It is virtually dumb and its hearing is so poor that you can let off a gun within just a few centimetres of it and its only response will be to turn slowly and blink. Even its sense of smell, though it is better than ours, is very much less acute than that of most mammals.

With such blurred and blunted senses, how does one sloth find another in order to breed? There is one clue. The sloth’s digestion works just about as slowly as the rest of its bodily processes and it only defecates and urinates once a week. But most surprisingly, to do so it descends to the ground and it habitually uses the same place. This is the one moment in its life when it is exposed to real danger.

Which big cat can run at 56mph?
At full stretch, travelling at high speed, the big cats’ hind and front legs overlap one another beneath the body just like those of a galloping antelope. The cheetah has a thin elongated body and is said to be the fastest runner on earth, capable of reaching speeds, in bursts, of more than 56mph. But this method is very energy-consuming. Great muscular effort is needed to keep the spine springing back and forth and the cheetah cannot maintain such speeds for more than a minute or so. Either it succeeds in outrunning its prey within a few hundred metres and makes a kill or it has to retire exhausted while the antelope, with their more rigid backs and long-lever legs, continue to gallop off to a safer part of the plains.

Lions are nowhere near as fast as the cheetah. Their top speed is about 50mph. A wildebeest can do about the same and maintain it for much longer. So lions have had to develop more complicated tactics. Sometimes they rely on stealth, creeping towards their victims, utilising every bit of cover. On occasion, members of a pride will hunt as a team – and they are the only cats that do so. They set off in line abreast. As they approach a group of their prey – antelope, zebra or wildebeest – those lions at the ends of the line move a little quicker so that they encircle the herd. Finally, these break cover, driving the prey towards the lions in the centre. Such tactics often result in several kills, and a hunt has been watched in which seven wildebeest were brought down.

Hyenas are even slower than lions. The best they can manage is about 18mph and in consequence their hunting methods have to be even more subtle and dependent on teamwork. The females have separate dens where they rear their pups, but the pack as a whole works together. They have a rich vocabulary of sound and gesture with which they communicate. They growl and whoop, grunt, yelp and whine and at times produce a most terrifying chorus of orgiastic laughs. In gesture, their tails are particularly eloquent. Normally they are carried pointing down. An erect tail indicates aggression; pointed forward over the back, social excitement; held between the legs tight under the belly, fear. By hunting in well-coordinated teams, they have become so successful that in parts of the African plains, they make the majority of kills and the lions merely use their bigger size to bully their way on to a carcass, the reverse of the popular conception of the relationship between these two species.

Ja! Ja! Ja! She’s back! As Sofia Helin plays detective Saga Norén in The Bridge for the final time, Nigel Farndale meets her in Stockholm. Where else?

As viewers of the Scandi noir series The Bridge will know, Sweden is a land without sunshine or green shoots. They film it that way, in the winter months. Its star, meanwhile, the detective Saga Norén, played by 46-year-old Sofia Helin, is a woman who rarely if ever smiles.

My sense of disconcertion is acute, then, when Helin arrives on a cloudless morning in Stockholm and won’t stop smiling. She turns out to be one of those people who can smile and talk at the same time.

In her hand is a cycle helmet. Although she is (probably) Sweden’s best-known actress, people never point or stare as she cycles past. “It’s considered uncool to do that here,” she says in a crisp yet breathy voice, one that emphasises the plosive musicality of her Swedish-accented English.

Or it could be that people don’t recognise her, with her long, blonde hair tucked into a helmet, because her look as Saga – the combat boots, the greatcoat, the leather trousers – is so distinctive. These trousers have become associated with her to such an extent, they are now on display in a museum in Malmö, where the drama is set. The only Saga-ish things about Helin today are her quizzically arched eyebrows and the scars above her mouth, which we will come to.

For now we discuss a scene in the fourth and final season of The Bridge on BBC Two. In it Saga is released from prison, having been acquitted following a false allegation, and steps back into her old investigator role in a way that is almost fetishistic. “Yes,” Helin says. “When Saga is putting on the leather trousers and the boots and the coat, that’s what we wanted to tell the audience. She’s back. It’s a bit like stepping into the character, the boots especially for me. But it wasn’t hard to be her in prison either, without these clothes. The secret I found to playing her is that she doesn’t move her hips. It helps to straighten all my body up.”

In that scene, it was almost as if the producers had come to recognise Saga’s true potency as a sex symbol, for men and women alike. “I never thought about it like that,” she says. “Saga is vulnerable and yet hard. I never thought about her as a sexy person. I try not to look at my characters from the outside, like objects, but from the inside.”

Actually, Helin doesn’t like looking at herself on screen at all. “It makes me feel overwhelmed and sick. I don’t have the kind of ego needed to look at myself on a big screen and enjoy it. Instead I will watch myself on an iPhone, so it is smaller.”

The complex, chilly, socially awkward Saga has Asperger’s, and when Helin is playing her she says she feels like she is in a cement costume, behind a glass wall. It is a remarkable performance, deserving of the acclaim it has garnered from critics. One of the ways in which Saga’s condition manifests itself is in her unromantic attitude to sex. When, for example, a man she likes the look of smiles at her in a bar she says, “Vill du har sex?” (You want to have sex?) In another scene, she intimidates a would-be lover by giving him graphic instructions, dialogue Helin wrote herself.

“Do you find that scary?” she asks when I mention this. Yes I do, I say, but then I’m British and repressed.

“Well, in Sweden people are very matter-of-fact about sex. Like the way they use Tinder to meet and have sex.”

More liberated and honest? She nods. “Saga is very frank about what she wants in bed. She wants to fulfil her needs. Because she has Asperger’s she can’t hide what she is thinking. If I wanted to hit on a man I would do it subtly, with little signals, saying, ‘Yes, yes,’ without words, but she can’t do that. In real life, people with Asperger’s can’t measure whether a situation is dangerous or not.”

She thinks young people in Sweden especially are becoming more “Saga-like” in their sexual tastes. “It may be to do with the availability of pornography on the internet,” she says. “I feel uncomfortable with the way teenagers have such easy access to it. And it’s every kind. What is considered normal sexual activity has changed. They have intimacy without intimacy. I have a teenager and I find it worrying that he will see these things.”

Me, too, I say, but what can parents do, beyond using filters? “You can’t really stop pornography, but you can do it in a better way, not always from a man’s perspective. I have heard of a Swedish company doing female-friendly porn. That is a good idea.”

She is married to a Lutheran priest, Daniel Götschenhjelm. They have two children, a boy, 14, and a girl, 8, who attend a progressive, “gender neutral” school. Her experiences of being that age have made her wary. “I was rebellious as a teenager,” she says. “Didn’t want to go to school. I drank quite early.”

“Is it possible to have an orgasm if you are scared? I don’t think so”

How early? “Twelve. And I smoked. I developed early too, physically, so I was mature before my brain was mature. When I was 12 I looked like a 16-year-old. One time I met an older boy and said, ‘I’m 16,’ and he said, ‘Well, I’m 18. Let’s hang out,’ and he wanted to do more than hang out. Just at the right moment my mother appeared and said, ‘Sofia, what are you doing?’ and I pretended to be angry with her, but I was relieved.”

As a teenager, was there a moment when she realised her looks gave her a certain power over boys, and made other girls jealous? “I do remember going into a school canteen one day and I felt everyone was looking at me. I was 13. I thought, why is this? I didn’t understand.”

Her first steady boyfriend was when she was 17, she says. “So I did things at the right age. But the way I grew up too quickly was that I took care of my father too much. He had difficulties. My parents divorced. I lived with my mother, but my father lived close.”

Their divorce didn’t put her off marriage? “No, I married at 31, so I had my years of wild life. I fell in love constantly. I find it easy to fall in love.” A smile. Pause. “I met my husband in acting school [before he became a priest], when I was 25. We were together for a long time before we got married.”

Helin’s fame, as well as Saga’s status as a symbol of female sexual emancipation, hasn’t changed their relationship, she reckons. “Put it like this, he doesn’t think of me as a sex symbol. I don’t think in Sweden that’s my profile at all. That’s not how people see me.”

How do they see her, then? “I think they see me as being quite political and angry with things. And my husband, he sees me as I am, messy and vulnerable.”

She’s difficult to live with? “I have my dark moments, but we know how to cope with it after so many years.”

We discuss the Scandinavian reputation for melancholy and introversion, associated with the long dark winters. She seems the opposite of this today, but she says she has suffered from it in the past and still sees a therapist. “It is useful for an actor to stay open and I think all actors should have therapy. I am a curious person, so it suits me very good.” She corrects herself. “Very well. What I have to work with is my body and my mind. Therapy is like going to the gym for my mind. What I’m not comfortable with is an environment where you cannot talk. I cannot stand it when everyone is too polite.”

Don’t move to Britain then, I say. “But I love Britain!” she counters with a laugh. “No, what I mean is when people aren’t open, as if we are around a table and one of us is naked and the others are pretending that the person isn’t naked. That is what I don’t like.”

A curious mixture of confidence and low-level neurosis – she tells me she suffers from claustrophobia – Sofia Helin can seem as inscrutable as her best-known character. Her manner is direct, but she has a habit of answering a question with a question. Shortly after she was born, one of her brothers died in a car accident, aged six. And then her parents divorced when she was four. I ask if she thinks these events partly explain her rebelliousness as a teenager. “Yes, there was a strange atmosphere at home because we had lived through difficulties. I grew up with a feeling of something bad having happened in my family.”

Her childhood experiences also left her with a keen interest in philosophy, a subject she read for a degree at Lund University. “But I tend to read more politics than philosophy nowadays.”

She certainly is political: she campaigns for WaterAid, and was deeply upset about Brexit. “I couldn’t sleep the night of the Brexit vote. I woke at 5am to watch the news. To go apart is never a good solution.”

Although she also supports Sweden’s version of #MeToo – she even persuaded the Queen of Sweden to get on board with it – she is more forgiving than her Hollywood counterparts. “I think we’ve had enough [accusations] now. Men and women have got to get along to change things together. The trouble is, if someone is accused that person is out for ever. There is no room for change. If you do that, people get scared and deny the problem. It becomes like a war. That’s the sad thing. Men tend to think it is something against all men, but it is not.”

She had an encounter with a predatory man herself, at the start of her career. “One of the first castings I went to, there was this middle-aged man who said, ‘Can we take some photos together? Is that OK? I’m not so ugly, am I?’ So that was my first experience. I just said, ‘I don’t think so,’ and ran off.”

“I grew up with a feeling of something bad having happened in my family

We discuss a comment that the veteran feminist thinker Germaine Greer made the other day, citing The Bridge as an example of how depictions of sexual violence against women are driven by women, who are the main audience for crime drama. More than 30 per cent of women, she went on, have fantasies about being violated, according to recent research. “Yes, but don’t we all have fantasies that we don’t really want realised?” Helin asks. “Sex is so much about our instincts. So much. It can be natural for some women to have these fantasies, but I don’t think that is the same in real sex. Something that has just occurred to me: is it possible to have an orgasm if you are scared? I don’t think so.”

I ask her to what extent the cycling accident that left her with a scarred face at the age of 24 changed her self-identity. “When you are young you think you have all the time in the world. You are not so careful about your life. I got more careful after that. I was lucky not to die. The bike broke; I went over the handlebars and blacked out and woke up in hospital. So I lost my innocence after that. I had to have my teeth put back in and surgery on my face. I thought it would be the end of my acting career, but the scar turned out to be my trademark. It makes me distinctive. Directors usually want to use it rather than hide it.”

But not everyone takes that view. “I recently got a message on Instagram. An Australian guy saying, ‘You could have your scar fixed and it would completely change your life.’ So rude. I replied, ‘I love my scars; do you love yours?’”

After that accident her views on what makes a person attractive changed. “It’s like there is a mass psychosis in society that says youth and beauty are everything. I think it’s tied to our fear of dying. Everyone tries to avoid getting older.”

That must be harder for actresses who have to watch themselves on a big screen, I suggest. “Only because there is an idea that the actress has to be young and beautiful. I can’t stand watching movies where the women are there just to be pretty, usually dating an older guy. That’s something that should be buried and forgotten. I’ve started to produce and do my own stories. I was in Berlin talking about a new project and met a producer who said to me, ‘I know this photographer who thinks that the only thing that counts for female film stars is to be beautiful.’ That is so stupid. No wonder there is pressure on older women in this business. Beauty is not something you should suppress of course, but you should never forget there is a whole person there. I mean, what is beauty?”

Well, Keats said it was truth.

“Yes, truth. That’s a good answer. I think if I were to sit here today completely without make-up for this shoot, messy in my bra and jeans, that wouldn’t be so bad, would it? With Saga, I asked for as little make-up as possible because in season one I had a young child and didn’t have time to sit in make-up every day. I think imperfection is going to be the new style.”

On the subject of films in which a younger actress plays opposite an older actor, she is in That Good Night, which has just been released. It turned out to be the last film Sir John Hurt made. He plays a writer who has found out he is dying. She plays his wife. “We knew John was dying during filming, so he was trying all these diets with healthy things, but he was fragile. He was lovely. I had my kids with me and he was so sweet with them. Even though he was quite weak physically, when the camera was on, it was like a lamp came on in his eyes.”

Hurt became something of a father figure to her, not least because during filming her own father, a retired office equipment salesman, was also dying. Did it force her to contemplate her own mortality? “I think about those questions constantly. It was painful but also beautiful to be able to follow my dad to his last breath. I stayed with him for four days in his room when he was dying and really saw the whole process. It was overwhelming. One of the most significant events in my life. It was like giving birth – in that same existential area.”

We have been sitting on sofas in a quiet corner of a cavernous photographic studio in Stockholm and now the photographer is ready to do the shoot. In her uninhibited Swedish way, Helin strips down to her black bra and knickers and tries on various outfits, settling on some trousers that are beige and, yes, leather. Then she plonks herself on the floor, assumes an almost manly pose, legs apart, and the smile that has been prevalent for the past hour melts from her face like snow in springtime.

It’s six months since his car came off the road at 120mph and burst into flames during the filming of The Grand Tour. Now Richard Hammond is haunted by the knowledge that his daughters might have grown up without him. By Nigel Farndale

You would imagine that “having an excessive fondness for your wife” is a condition so obscure it would not have a name, yet it does. Uxoriousness. I mention it because I don’t think I’ve ever met a man quite as uxorious as Richard Hammond.

His wife is called Mindy and he refers to her often as we sit in the back of his chauffeur-driven Mercedes on the two-hour drive from Heathrow to what he calls his “stupid pretend castle” in Herefordshire. And later, when we get there, I find myself walking in on them when he is greeting her with a big hug in their low and oak-beamed kitchen, even though he has only been away for one night. He calls her Mindy Moo.

She is 52, has long blonde hair, is 5ft 2in tall and is wearing wellies, having just come in from doing the horses, or perhaps the sheep – something rustic, anyway. He is five years younger, five inches taller, is still going through a leather jacket phase and has a David Brent-style goatee he claims is not dyed. They have been married since 2002 – the year Hammond joined Top Gear – but were going out together for seven years before that. She is, then, long-suffering in the sense of being married to someone who keeps having crashes that ought, by the laws of physics and probability, to be fatal.

The first was in 2006 when his jet-powered dragster left an airstrip at 300mph and he was in a coma for two weeks. The second happened in June this year and will feature in the new series of The Grand Tour, which is released on Amazon’s streaming service this Friday.

He was doing a timed hill climb in Switzerland in a £2 million electric supercar when it came off on a corner at 120mph and rolled several hundred feet back down, an experience he compares to being inside a tumble dryer full of bricks. He remained conscious but thought he was going to die, and then he realised the car was about to burst into flames and managed to scramble out seconds before it did.

As we are driving to his house he makes light of all this, in that “It was only a scratch” way men do when there are other men around. With a tap of his right knee, he says, “Got a metal plate in here. Ten pins holding the tibia and the plateau together and, because it is a weight-bearing part of the knee, that will need replacing. The main downside is I’ve been told I can’t run for a year and, when I do, my knee will go.”

He thinks the ordeal was worse for the director, Phil Churchward. “I thought we had wrapped for the day, and then Phil asked me for one more take and I said, ‘You do realise,if you make me do this again, I’m boundto crash?’ ” says Hammond. “A minute later, the car was upside down at the bottom of a mountain and on fire. Poor Phil was in pieces. He came to see me in hospital that night and was a broken man.”

It might have been bad for his director, but I’m guessing Mindy didn’t exactly shrug off the accident either. Did she give him an ultimatum? “The only ultimatum I have had from her was when she said, ‘You’ve had your two strikes. I don’t want a third.’ ” He looks at me with large, unblinking brown eyes and deploys an expensive white smile. “Will it change me? Probably, yes. I will think, um, things can go wrong. This is a wake-up call for Mindy and me because it is a reminder of how lucky we are and how we don’t want to throw it all away. I need to reassess my view of risk slightly.”

Yet they had a similar talk in 2006 by a fireside in Scotland. “Recovering from a brain injury like that is difficult,” he says. “It’s about mood control and I was going through a phase of obsession, paranoia and compulsion, and I knew I could make myself a victim if I wasn’t careful. But Mindy and I said, ‘Let’s turn this into a good thing in our lives. Let’s take stock and appreciate what we have.’ ”

For all his blasé manner, Hammond admits that following the latest crash he is haunted by the thought that he might have left not only his wife as a widow, but his two teenage daughters without a father. “But I don’t feel like I am reckless,” he adds, “because I’m not. I learnt to fly helicopters and I was bloody cautious. Same with motorcycles, which I have ridden for 32 years. Occasionally, if you do enough of stuff, things will go wrong.”

I ask if it has made him superstitious, but apparently, it hasn’t. “The only superstition I have is that I always have a pee before I do something dangerous, because you don’t want a full bladder if you’re going to have an accident,” he says. “It can rupture and kill you. Plus, you look a bit of a nelly if they pull you out of the car and you’ve wet yourself.”

In their mocking, blokeish way, his co-presenters Jeremy Clarkson and James May have said that the crash happened because Hammond was too short to see over the steering wheel and that the surgery to his knee has left him “even shorter”, which is true, but only by 7mm. But even Clarkson seems to have been rattled by this latest crash, admitting it is the worst he has ever witnessed.

“The crash is a wake-up call for my wife Mindy and me. We don’t want to throw it all away”

Instead of hill running, which Hammond found therapeutic after his 2006 crash, he has taken up cycling to stay fit. That must be awkward, I say, given that Top Gear was always having a go at cyclists. “Well, yes, but only because cyclists are so stroppy,” he says. “Where did all the fury come from? I’m going to be a chilled cyclist.”

If “cyclists” became Top Gear shorthand for the PC brigade (as Hammond calls them) that they liked to wind up, then for the PC brigade, Top Gear became shorthand for bigotry. Hammond was one of the worst offenders when he described Mexicans as being, among other things, “lazy, feckless and flatulent”.

He now tells me this was a consequence of him playing a “sort of character” on the show. “That was really us taking the piss out of ourselves,” he says. “I was portraying a cartoon version of myself, the thick Brummie. The picture I painted of Mexicans belonged in a Road Runner cartoon. The laugh was on me because anyone watching would say, ‘He’s an idiot if he believes that.’ ”

With a sighing outbreath, he gives a shake of his head. “Look, it’s a difficult thing to carry off and sometimes it doesn’t work. I felt queasy about that one afterwards.”

While he accepts that with the “Clarkson, Hammond and May banter” there comes a degree of deliberate provocation and line-crossing to annoy people, he doesn’t always enjoy doing it. “The other two laugh at me for it, but I don’t enjoy being in trouble, I genuinely don’t,” he says. “We were in a ferry terminal once and they said, ‘Let’s jump the queue,’ and I said, ‘Actually, let’s not.’ ”

Clarkson did enjoy getting into trouble, however, and with each new transgression – such as his use of the word “slope”, which is a pejorative term for an Asian – there was an attempt at the BBC to get rid of him. The opportunity was eventually handed to his enemies on a plate of cold food when he punched an assistant producer.

Hammond is all too aware of the incongruity: that a BBC presenter who was hugely popular with the public – one million people signed a petition to have Clarkson reinstated on the show – was pretty much loathed by the bien pensants who actually run the BBC. “Yeah, yeah, I can see that the BBC is very good at twisting itself into knots like that,” he says. “The BBC needs to remember sometimes that it can’t be one view only. It can’t be homogenised. It has a duty to reflect the nation.”

The three amigos went to Amazon with a budget said to be not unadjacent to £160 million, but then, in the first series, came another comment that caused offence, this time to gay people, and this time from the mouth of Hammond. He said he didn’t eat ice cream and that this was “something to do with being straight”. It caused a Twitter storm.

Didn’t the complainants have a point? Don’t mocking comments like that from public figures belittle gay people and make it harder for them to come out? “It was certainly not what I set out to do,” he says carefully. “I wouldn’t want to cause genuine difficulty for anyone. But if it’s mock fury, pantomime fury, from people looking to take offence, then …” He trails off. “Look, anyone who knows me knows I wasn’t being serious, that I’m not homophobic. Love is love, whatever the sex of the two people in love. It may be because I live in a hideously safe and contained middle-class world, where a person’s sexuality is not an issue, but when I hear of people in the media coming out, I think, why do they even feel the need to mention it? It is so old-fashioned to make a big deal of it. That isn’t even an interesting thing to say at a dinner party any more.”

So he was making the comment in a spirit of the ironic, post-prejudice, testing-the-boundaries way that, say, Ricky Gervais might do it? “I don’t think I can claim it was as carefully crafted as that,” he says. “I’m not a comic, and when I try to be funny it bites me on the arse.”

I get the impression that, while Clarkson revels in being a hate figure to the liberal left, Hammond has no stomach for it. I mention another left-wing comedian, Stewart Lee, who based a whole section of one of his live shows on Hammond. It was not only funny, it was brutal. Lee characterised Hammond as a giggling, cowardly sidekick to the bullying Clarkson. Among the more printable comments was a description of Hammond as “a publicly funded cheerleader for mass ignorance”.

I ask if he finds such characterisations hurtful. “I don’t think Stewart Lee likes me very much,” he says with a grimace. “But if noise-makers are just making noise, I’m not interested. I don’t live in north London; I live in the countryside. I don’t join in with that. I don’t have an agenda. Feelings? Not in the sense of getting hurt, because my friends and family know me, and they know I can be an absolute idiot, as thick as a brick, but they also know I’m not necessarily the same as that public persona.”

“He’s more liberal than any caricature allows. He voted Remain and admires Jeremy Corbyn”

It is a disarmingly dignified answer. In person, Hammond comes across as chatty and cheerful, if a little prone to Alan Partridge-like self-aggrandisement. And while his self-deprecation may be a useful conceit – always mentioning his diminutive stature first, as well as his reputation for not being very bright – I do wonder what lies behind his insecurities.

He grew up in suburban Solihull, the eldest of three boys, one of whom became a teacher, the other a fund manager. Their father was a probate solicitor, their mother a charity consultant, and the family moved to Yorkshire when he was 15. But then, or so I have read, he was expelled from Ripon Grammar School. Is that true? “A bit,” he says. “I joined in the sixth form and didn’t bed in well, and after six months it was suggested that I might like to try somewhere else. Anywhere else.”

After that, he went to study audio-visual communication at Harrogate College of Art and Technology. “But I do wish I’d been to university,” he says. “I did get a place to study architecture as a mature student at Canterbury, but by then I was working in local radio and in debt so I couldn’t afford it. It was going to be seven years before I got to design a garage extension. I sometimes wonder where that other path might have led. It certainly wouldn’t have led me to Mindy’s doorstep, so I can’t regret it.”

They met at Renault, where he was working as an assistant press officer and she was in HR. “So it was very much an old-school office romance,” he says.

Nowadays, that would be a political minefield, I note. How did he manage it back then? “Well, I’m not very bold,” he says. “I fancied her tremendously. Everyone did. She was drawn like a cartoon of a ridiculously pretty girl. I got an invitation to the Doghouse Ball [a motor racing event] and I was scared to ask her, so I asked the boss’s chauffeur to ask her for me. She said yes and when I went to pick her up from her flat, her Irish friend Maggie answered the door and said over her shoulder to Mindy, ‘Sure, he’s never five-seven. He’s a diddy fecker.’ At the ball, there were cigarettes on the table and we smoked and drank and talked about blues music.”

A week after the ball, they met up to walk their dogs. “It was a lovely day and I turned around to see her catching up and I just thought, oh, there you go. That was it. I’d fallen in love. When you know, you know. Soulmate is a soppy word. It’s more the intertwining of your life with someone who makes it nicer. Mindy still surprises me.”

And they have been through much together. Mindy was, after all, in his life before Top Gear turned into a global monster with 350 million viewers worldwide. What was the mood like at home when it became apparent that Clarkson was going to be sacked? “It wasn’t a high point,” says Hammond. “There was a sense of ‘So, that’s that, then.’ James came over and we went out with Izzy, our older daughter, for Kentucky Fried Chicken, and James said, ‘I’ll pay,’ and I said, ‘No, I’ll pay,’ and Izzy said, ‘I should pay because neither of you has a job.’ ”

He thinks it was good for his daughters to hear their parents having one of those “What are we going to do now?” conversations. “I did think it could mean us having to move out and me having to go back to local radio,” he says. “We shared everything with the girls. They knew the amount of time we had before the money would run out.” Quite a long time, one imagines, given that Hammond is estimated to be worth £20 million, although he tells me he is not sure of “the numbers” himself.

It is a measure of his niceness that he resists the urge to rubbish his old show, which has struggled. Hammond says he likes it and that he thinks it will find its mark. “There is room in the world for more than one car show,” he says. “Look how many cookery shows there are.”

He thinks the secret of the success of Top Gear in his day and The Grand Tour now is “naughtiness”. He describes the formula as three middle-aged men driving about getting things wrong and sometimes catching fire and falling over. That and it being a family show. “With Top Gear, we were given the Sunday-night slot. It was a 50/50 male and female audience. With The Grand Tour, we have continued some of that sense of it being a family show, the trying not to swear.”

There have been one or two teething problems, but The Grand Tour seems to have lived up to expectations.

And the chemistry between the presenters still seems to work. When I ask what Clarkson’s most annoying habit is, Hammond thinks for a moment, then says, “The way he is.” He laughs at this and adds, “He can be grumpy, but we can all be. You cannot spend as much time together as we do without winding each other up and occasionally feeling homicidal. We don’t socialise together away from the show because we would never be apart if we did.”

He has noticed that when he is with a group of men, in a pub say, they tend to treat him in the same way that Clarkson and May treat him, as the butt of their jokes. “But that’s the great thing,” he says. “You bump into strangers and they engage with you as if they were part of the show. In terms of approachability, I think it helps that I’m small. Although I’m probably not as small as people imagine. I think they are sometimes disappointed when they see I’m not something out of a circus. Unlike Jeremy. He does belong in a circus. He’s ridiculously tall.”

For all his eagerness to be seen to fight back, I get the sense of there being an element of Stockholm syndrome about Hammond’s relationship with Clarkson and May. I suspect he is much more liberal than any caricature of him allows. He voted Remain and he admires Jeremy Corbyn. “I like that he makes noise and stands for something. We need more Corbyns, on both sides.”

At the faux castle, there is as impressive a collection of cars as you would expect, from an E-type Jag, Lagonda and Bentley to a Mustang, Porsche and Model A Ford. The vehicle he seems most fond of, though, is an old Land Rover Discovery that has 130,000 miles on the clock. “I do the school run in it and it’s full of hairbands and socks and books and notepads and food,” he says. “It’s a health hazard, which I don’t like driving at night because you hear things rustling. When it’s done, we’re going to take it out into a field and bury it.”

There are also 37 motorbikes, a reminder that, as a child, Hammond had motorbike wallpaper. There is also what he calls, in between vaping, “the campest man cave ever”. It’s true. As well as a beer cooler, it has a 19th-century blackamoor candelabra light fixture next to a baby grand piano. There is also an ornate love heart with the words “Richard and Mindy” written above and below it in coloured glass and shells.

As well as looking after all their cats, dogs, horses, donkeys, sheep and hens, Mindy writes a weekly newspaper column. She is also handy with a hairbrush and does Hammond’s hair by the Aga before our photoshoot. And while he is doing the shoot, she collects eggs to make him an omelette for his lunch. She seems to mother him, in other words, and perhaps that, after all his traumatic ordeals, is what he wants – and needs – the most.

He’s the tough guy of English cricket and arguably the best all-rounder since Sir Ian Botham. Ben Stokes on breaking records, locker-room tantrums – and the last time he cried. By Nigel Farndale

As a conversationalist, Ben Stokes likes to play himself in. He takes his guard, levels a pink-lidded gaze at his interlocutor and answers questions defensively, in an earnest, slightly lisping, flat-vowelled monotone that owes more to his teenage years in Cumbria than his early childhood in New Zealand. It is the opposite of his batting style, which is explosive from the start. His bowling style, too, come to that.

As we sit in a dank corner of a disused shipyard in Sunderland – he is making some social-media films here for Red Bull, one of his sponsors – he hesitates only once. It is when I ask him about the last time he cried. I’m hoping he will say it was over a rom-com, which would be amusing given his reputation as the hard man of cricket, but after a long pause he says, “When a close friend from school died a couple of years ago.” He doesn’t want to elaborate. Ah, OK. Moving on.

At 6ft he’s tall, but not fast-bowler tall; not Finn, Broad, Tremlett tall. His features are angular, his skin freckled and his eyebrows so pale they are almost invisible. An array of tattoos covers his gym-hardened arms. When I ask him to talk me through them he obliges, ending with, “… and this one is a symbol of my tribe in New Zealand. My mum has more Maori in the family than my dad’s side.”

It is a war-like tribe, presumably, for the Stokes fuse is famously short. When opposition teams sledge him – that is, try to make him lose concentration at the crease by winding him up – the only worry his England team-mates have is for the wellbeing of the sledger. When the Australian wicketkeeper Brad Haddin once tried this, the England spinner Graeme Swann took him to one side and suggested it might not be a sensible way to proceed, on balance. When Haddin asked why, Swann explained, “Because he’ll f***ing kill you, mate.”

When I ask Stokes how close his altercations on the pitch have come to turning physical he gives a short, ambiguous laugh and answers in a way that sounds as if he means the opposite: “There’s adrenaline there, but I’d never get close to punching someone. It’s the heat of the moment. Trying to be the bloke to get the wicket that will change the game back in our favour.”

Arguably it is this anger – always just below his surface – that has made the 26-year-old cricketer England’s top all-rounder, some might say the greatest, alongside Sir Ian Botham (having overtaken Freddie Flintoff, statistically at least). In the final Test of the West Indies series earlier this month, he got a career-best wicket haul of 6-22, and thus became only the eighth player to have his name on both honours boards at Lord’s (which means he has not only taken five wickets with the ball there, but also scored a century with the bat).

This is in addition to the world records he already holds, notably the fastest 250, which came in a match against South Africa last year and included 11 sixes. When in 2015 he got what everyone assumed was the fastest century in history at Lord’s (until a spoilsport statistician discovered a slightly faster one from 1902), his fiancée, Clare Ratcliffe, who describes herself as a cricket widow, sobbed with joy in the stands.

“I’ll have a few pints the night before a match. I’m 26, not 14″

He tells me they are planning to get married on October 14, shortly before he heads off to Australia for the Ashes series. The shipyard we are sitting in is not far from Chester-le-Street, the home ground of Durham, his county side. The couple recently bought a “footballer’s mansion” near here – it belonged to Adam Johnson, the disgraced footballer now in prison for sex offences, hence the knockdown price of £1.7 million.

This sum, by happy coincidence, is what Stokes was paid by the Indian Premier League for a mere month’s work earlier this year – a record for an international player. Along with his sponsorship deals with Red Bull and New Balance and his £700,000 a year “central contract” with England, it has made Stokes a wealthy man. Is he, I ask, investing his new-found riches shrewdly? “I’ve a brilliant manager in Neil Fairbrother,” he says. “I trust him to point me in the right direction.”

Mr and Mrs Stokes, as they will soon be, have two small children, Layton and Libby. When I ask how he will cope with being separated from them when he is away in Australia until the new year, he shrugs. “I’ve been used to being away from my family for long periods of time, even as a teenager. Summers in Durham playing for the academy, away from the comforts of home. My kids are used to it, too. It has always been the case that, ‘Daddy is home for a week or two and then you are not going to see him again for four or five weeks.’ ” He leans forward in his chair. “It makes seeing them more special and Clare is very understanding of the situation.”

She is less understanding when it comes to his personal habits. Stokes has said that she gets “driven mad” when he is at home, at least for the first week after a tour when he treats the place as if he is still in a hotel, leaving towels on the floor and dishes on the side. Stokes was barely out of his teens when he became a father. Was he hands-on? “I was a nappy changer. Becoming a father was a big difference from how life was before. But the good thing is, it will mean I’m still fit and active when my son gets to the age where he wants to play sport properly with his dad.”

“My kids know they won’t see me for four or five weeks. They are used to it”

Does he make any allowances for his son’s tender age now? “No. If Layton loses his concentration I say, ‘Well, I’m not going to play with you then, if you’re being like that.’ Even though he’s four. I think it comes from being sporty. My dad was the same with me when I was growing up.”

Ben Stokes was born and partly raised in Christchurch, New Zealand, where his father, Ged, was a professional rugby-league player and his mother, Deb, a counsellor. “My mum would go away to Australia all the time for work, so Monday to Friday was spent with dad,” Stokes recalls. “So that meant growing up around rugby training every day. That sense of dedication probably rubbed off.”

It meant Stokes became so obsessive about sport that he couldn’t concentrate on lessons at school. When the family moved to England – after a neck injury forced his father to give up playing and become a coach – Stokes was 12 and his school work suffered even more. “Nothing at school stood out to me as a career path apart from sport,” he says now. “It was all about rugby and cricket for me.

“When I first came here, I had a New Zealand accent and everyone wanted to hear me speak. That was how I got to know people. They would ask me to read signs out loud.”

It was when he was 13 and he broke his hand punching a fire door after getting out in a cricket match that his temper tantrums first exhibited themselves. That red mist episode was repeated more dramatically in the West Indies in 2014, when he fractured his wrist after punching a changing-room locker. After that his England team-mates started calling him Rocky and The Hurt Locker, and he worried that they would think he had a “tapped head”. Do they still tease him about the locker incident? “It comes up every now and again, yeah.”

I ask if they give him space if he hasn’t batted or bowled well, as was the case last year when he was knocked for four consecutive sixes in the last over of the final of the ICC World Twenty20 championship, costing England the title. “If someone gets out or bowls badly, you try not to get in their space. Leave them to it,” he says. “I methodically pack my kit bag now when I get too pissed off, because it takes me five or ten minutes and by then I’m usually done with the frustration and anger.”

Which brings us to the “stump mic” incident at Headingly in the second West Indies Test this summer. Stokes was given another demerit point to add to his collection after he was heard swearing on the pitch. That means he is now one shy of a suspension. “Look, from what I’ve heard [the authorities] are going to sit down and discuss the rulings on that,” he says. “If a batsman gets hit close to the stump mic and swears in pain, is that going to be a penalty? A heap of frustration had built up all that day and then the batsman got a nick and it went for four, and swearing was a release for me.”

“Does he see a shrink about his anger issues? ‘Yeah, I have to make sure I keep a lid on it’

The locker incident and the demerit points have given Stokes a reputation not only for having what psychologists might call “an unfortunate manner”, but also for being easy to goad, something that the West Indies all-rounder Marlon Samuels exploited mercilessly when he gave Stokes a mocking salute after he was bowled out cheaply in 2015. He must be aware that the Australians will be out to target him in the Ashes. “Yeah, I am,” he says in a laughter-edged voice. “Well, if that’s the tactic they want to use then they will be focusing on something that has nothing to do with cricket, so we can take advantage of that. Use it against them. I’ll know that if I’m getting a few words here and there it’s because they are not concentrating on the game.”

I ask him whether he sees a shrink about his anger issues. “We have a team psychologist available on match days,” he says carefully, “but I haven’t spoken to him about it lately. We have normal conversations. He doesn’t force it on you.” He stares at his feet. “But yeah, I have to make sure I keep a lid on it.”

Does he worry, though, that if he keeps too tight a lid on his temper it will take away his edge? “Yeah, I maybe just need to channel it in a different way. Even after I got my demerit point I was still being aggressive towards the batsman, just not in a vocal way. I was asking the umpire all the time, ‘Am I OK here?’ They don’t mind confrontation if it’s not personal or over the top.”

Stokes is the first to admit he’s not a good listener in team talks, and he’s not a great one for analysing his own game either. But he does have the odd superstition. He likes to have an omelette for breakfast on the morning of an important innings, because that was what he had before his glorious 258 against South Africa. “My only real superstition, though,” he says, “is that I always have to put my left pad on first. I wouldn’t feel right if I put my right pad on first. It would feel weird.”

When I ask him to articulate what it felt like when he got his 258, whether he felt invincible that day or found it hard to keep his ego in check afterwards, he says, “I’m not very good at speaking about myself when it comes to doing well. I lose my words … When I got my 258, I didn’t want to sound arrogant, I just wanted to … shove it under … you know.”

This halting answer reminds you that, for all his aggression as a player, Stokes can be a surprisingly modest man; a decent one, too – unlike some players he “walks” when he knows he has nicked a ball that had been caught behind, even before the umpire has made up his mind, or in one case given him “not out”. Away from cricket, he is happiest, he says, playing on his Xbox or having a round of golf “with Stu [Broad] and Rooty [Joe Root]” (he plays off a 12 handicap).

As the former England captain Michael Vaughan puts it, in Stokes, “England have got a freak cricketer; they are very fortunate to have him because he will win games in every format for years to come.”

It’s the reason Stokes’s sponsor, Red Bull, is all over him, too. “It’s the full-on for me,” he says. “I drink it during matches for hydration. I always drank it, even as a kid. And it does mix well with Jägermeister.” Indeed, he’s a legend in that respect, once claiming he lost count after 20 Jägerbombs. When was the last time he had a Jägerbomb night? He purses his lips as he thinks. “Probably after Edgbaston.”

He acquired a bad-boy reputation after he was sent home from a tour in Australia in 2013, after ignoring a curfew and going out drinking. Presumably he no longer drinks alcohol during a five-day Test? “Yeah, why not? We’re grown men, go out for dinner, have a few pints. I’m 26, not 14. I don’t have to drink Diet Cokes with dinner.”

I ask if there is a public school/state school divide in the England team. I’m thinking of an unguarded comment made by Giles Clarke, the former chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, about Alastair Cook coming from “the right sort of family”. “One person we absolutely nail is Sam Billings, because he is so posh,” Stokes says. “He cops it from the lads about being ‘rah’, as we say. But judging someone based on what school they went to is not high on my agenda. I went to a normal school; other guys went to big private schools like …” he frowns again. “Actually, I don’t even know the names of these schools, but if it does get brought up, it gets used in banter.”

After his first game for Cumbria as a teenager, Stokes doubted himself so much he was sick. He has clearly learnt to channel his doubts and nerves since – he tells me he always sleeps soundly before a match – and he is also learning to manage his anger better and understand why, as often as not, it is directed at himself. From the perspective of a spectator, however, I hope he doesn’t learn to manage his emotions too well. The last thing we want is a passionless Ben Stokes on Prozac.

It is time to do the photoshoot and, as he changes into his England kit, I see yet another tattoo on his back, this one of England’s three lions.

I decide I’m not going to let the crying question go. Has he ever blubbed during a film? He grins. “Yeah, once, watching The Lion King. When Mufasa dies. I was six.”