Billy Graham put him off religion. Laurence Olivier taught him etiquette. And as for Princess Margaret? Don’t ask. Sir Derek Jacobi tells all

It would take a will stronger than mine to resist comparing Sir Derek Jacobi to the Staffordshire porcelain figurines which dominate the drawing room of his Victorian house in Primrose Hill, north London.
There are dozens of them, arranged on individually-lit shelves, as if displayed in a museum.
For he, too, seems to be on display in this room as he sits on a silk sofa, his legs crossed at the ankles, his hands cupped in his lap, his posture erect. The 73-year-old actor is wearing plum-coloured velvet trousers, a checked shirt and a gold ring on his wedding finger. He not only looks ornamental, he looks gathered, like a graduate from a finishing school. There is a lacquered Chinese screen to his right, a window looking out over a sunlit garden to his left. His hair and beard are white, his moon face pink, his eyebrow arched quizzically. All set.
“Well, we’ve done it before,” he says when I ask how he is finding the experience of being directed by his partner Richard Clifford in Shaw’s Heartbreak House, the highlight of this summer’s 50th anniversary of the Chichester Festival Theatre. “We did it at Chichester in fact. About 16 years ago. A play about Strindberg. We got on very well. There is great trust there. It’s like when I work with Michael Grandage; it’s that essential trust and belief and security. It’s the same with Richard. Their eyes are very keen. They don’t miss a thing. You don’t get away with anything unless they let you. It’s a benign dictatorship.”
Sir Derek is measured and deliberate in the way he talks, rarely expanding on a theme, unless pushed. When I ask him about gay marriage, for example, he says: “The word doesn’t mean anything to me. It’s a squabble over nothing.” Until recently he has avoided talking about his private life, declining even to acknowledge that he is in a relationship. But he always knew, pretty much, that he was gay, and he came out to his mother soon after graduating. And five years ago, when civil partnerships came into law, he entered into one. Is his a marriage to all intents and purposes, I ask?
“Richard and I have been together for 35 years,” he says. “We’ve been in a civil partnership for five years. It doesn’t matter what you call it. We don’t think of it as marriage, it’s a partnership. People are getting hot under the collar at the moment because of this word.” Liberal Tories are committed to pushing through gay marriage, but does he have any sympathy with Christians who object to it? “Well, I suppose their argument is that marriage is equated with having children, but what about couples who meet in their fifties? They can’t have children. Or what if you are biologically unable to have children? The word becomes meaningless.”
His view seems to be that, because there is little difference in law between a gay marriage and civil partnership, the latest controversies are a fuss about nothing. Is that about the strength of it? “Exactly, it’s just this word. The Church is the problem.” I take it he’s not religious then. “As a teenager I was taken to a Billy Graham rally at Haringey. At the end of it I went down to the arena to give myself to Jesus. But as soon as Graham stopped talking it was like the choir stopped singing and,” he snaps his fingers, “I felt totally conned and embarrassed. I don’t mind people having faith and finding strength in that. But it ain’t for me.”
I ask his opinion about another topical debate of which he has experience, the call by Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, for positive discrimination by Oxbridge colleges in favour of state-school children from underprivileged backgrounds. Jacobi came from a working-class background: his father was an East End tobacconist, his mother worked in a drapery, yet he didn’t need preferential treatment in order to win a scholarship to read history at Cambridge. He’s not sure that any conclusions can be drawn from his own circumstances, but he does think he benefited from having a lucky break.
“Well, I was lucky because I had been at a grammar school,” he says. “I wasn’t gifted academically but I was a swot and I adored school. I was an only child and my parents were very supportive.” His grammar school gave him a taste for acting. “I had an English master, Mr Brown, who encouraged me and put me in a production of Hamlet which was taken to Edinburgh. It got national recognition and, on the back of that, I won a scholarship to Cambridge. In my first week I got a knock on the door from John Bird, who was one of the big directors at Cambridge. He put me in a play in which I was miscast badly. I was so awful in it, everyone said I was overblown. It took me a year to get my reputation back.”
Trevor Nunn was another of the budding directors there. His peer group at Cambridge was impressive, to say the least. “My parents gave me a 21st party and there were Leyton friends at one end of the room and my Cambridge friends at the other. The cabaret was Eleanor Bron, David Frost, Ian McKellen.”
That must have been quite a clash of cultures, I say. Did his parents have cockney accents? “Yes, strong ones. Dad more than Mum. She was slightly better educated than Dad, who left school at 14.” Did they feel awkward about meeting all his well-spoken, theatrical Cambridge friends? “No, not at all. My mother was very demonstrative and loved everyone. No matter who they were, they got a hug and a kiss. They didn’t feel out of their depth at all.”
Did they worry about him becoming an actor? I mean, it’s not the most secure of professions, is it? “They did worry that I wouldn’t be able to earn a living, but they were reassured when I read history at university because they thought that I could become a history teacher if acting didn’t work out. I took the same view. I gave myself five years to try and make it.”
I suppose, unlike a lot of actors, he has never really had occasion to feel insecure about his career. “No. Mine is not a typical actor’s career. I’m very aware of that. I went straight from Cambridge to the Birmingham Rep then, after three years there, I spent eight years at the National. It was continuous employment.”
In 1963 he was talent spotted by Sir Laurence Olivier himself, who was forming the National Theatre, then based at the Old Vic. “He managed to persuade actors who were at the top of their profession to come and work for him on three-year contracts: Maggie Smith, Albert Finney, Robert Stephens – all of them had West End and film careers, and all were willing to give them up to be in an ensemble because it was Olivier asking them. They put their stardom to one side. I didn’t have anything to lose. I was only 24.”
As a young man, he was considered the greatest Hamlet of his generation but he has never been especially precious about his reputation. His attitude is that an actor has to work, and you never know when your agent might stop ringing. He gardens, reads and looks at the wall a lot, he says. And he worries about where his next job is coming from.
And it should be remembered that it was television that gave him his big break. Indeed, the role with which he is probably still most associated – the one that made him a household-name in 1976 – was the poignant, painfully stuttering emperor he played in the BBC series I, Claudius. It would be very hard for another actor to take on that role, I say, given the extent to which he made it his own.
“Well, they say there is going to be a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio so we shall see, and I’d better be in it somewhere! A walk on.” He describes the drawing room with a sweep of his arm. “Claudius was written in this very room. I bought the house 30 years ago from the widow of Jack Pulman, who wrote the screenplay, and this was his study.”
His best screen performance, for my money, was as Francis Bacon in Love is the Devil. “He lived around here, but I don’t think we would have got on. I didn’t go to the Colony Club where Bacon hung out because I wasn’t a great drinker.”
He portrayed Bacon as a tortured genius, but also a cold and callous gay predator. It was convincing, but not exactly sympathetic. “Yes, physically, Bacon was a masochist who liked being hurt, but spiritually he was a sadist. When John Maybury offered the role to me I said: ‘But I don’t look like him. He’s got such a distinct look.’ Then, after 10 minutes in the make up chair, I was looking like him.”
They weren’t allowed to use any of Bacon’s paintings in the film. “The family thought it was going to be a gay exposé, so they wouldn’t give us permission. We used paintings done in his style instead. The DVD still sells well, but I think that’s because there are some scenes in which Daniel Craig is stark-b—— naked.”
Another of his great roles was that of Alan Turing, the Bletchley Park codebreaker who was prosecuted for his homosexuality in 1952. Is it harder portraying a real person than a fictional one? “It was less so with Turing than Bacon, but there were still people around who knew him, and I’m not an impressionist. I try to get close to the emotional side of the person. You have to sound approximately right, but that is less important than getting the motivation right. That film was about breaking the moral code as well as    the Enigma code.
“Turing was charged with ‘gross indecency’ and given the choice of two years in prison or chemical castration, and he chose the latter. They inserted a capsule in his thigh which was supposed to lower oestrogen. He became depressed after that and may or may not have killed himself by eating an apple laced with cyanide. It could have been murder, because he knew too much.”
The attitude of the time was partly a reaction to the revelations then emerging about the Cambridge spies, a number of whom were gay. Being gay became associated with being unpatriotic. Well, society has come a long way since then, and there is no questioning Sir Derek’s patriotism. The night before we meet he was at a reception for the Queen. “When her face is relaxed she looks quite grumpy,” he says. “But the moment she smiles she is radiant. Beautiful skin.” He’s less flattering about her sister. “I once had dinner at Joe Allen’s with Princess Margaret. There were eight of us and I sat next to her. She smoked continuously, not even putting out her cigarette when soup arrived, but instead leaning it up against the ashtray. We got on terribly well, very chummy, talking about her mum and her sister, and she really made me feel like I was a friend, until,” he leans forward, “she got a cigarette out and I picked up a lighter and she snatched it out of my hand and gave it to a ballet dancer called David Wall.” Why? “Because I wasn’t a close friend, I hadn’t been let in yet and my goodness she let me know it.”
Well, Del-Boy’s pretty grand himself now, but I wouldn’t say he has airs and graces. There’s something surprisingly low key about him. He’s a little self-conscious, if anything. Describes himself as placid and non-confrontational. Suffers stage fright. Doesn’t like being photographed. “Yes, posing in front of a camera is a bit dental for me. Always has been. I’m fine when I’m working because then I’m in a world of pretend and imagination so I can be anything. But when I’m being myself in everyday life, that is different.”
He can’t stand seeing himself on the big screen. “I have seen myself in films but I don’t enjoy it because there is nothing you can do about it. In the theatre you can have another go. You can get it better the next night. You also have the excitement of doing three hours on stage when there are no safety nets. If they can’t hear you in a studio they move the microphone closer. If you forget your lines you can do a retake.”
I ask if there is a snobbery in the profession about stage acting being the real deal and film acting being a lesser form. “The two are different, totally different. From my point of view, the job satisfaction is greater with stage acting. It’s more exciting, more terrifying, more creative. In a film, someone else decides how much of you is shown. In the theatre all of you is being shown all of the time.”
Does that make reviews of theatrical productions seem more personal? “Reviews can be hurtful if you read them, but I haven’t read them for years. If they are good there is a danger of henceforth acting that review, if they are bad or indifferent you want to kill yourself.”
Most men retire at 65, why does he still want to do it? Is it the applause? “Not at all. If anything the applause breaks the spell and brings you back down to earth with a bump. For me it’s the journey you’ve been on, and the experience you tried to give the audience. I’m bad on curtain calls. Not comfortable with them. The evening belongs to everybody, especially if you are in a Hamlet, a King Lear, or a Macbeth, because you can’t play any of those parts on your own.”
But he has learnt to fight his self-effacing nature and accept applause. “I was told by Olivier himself that not to do a proper curtain call is disrespectful to the audience. You must be there to thank them. He said it because he’d seen me do a curtain call which was just a nod. He hauled me over the coals for it.”
Actually, that wasn’t the first time he was told off for it. He tells me that his mother also had a go at him, after the first time she saw him in a Shakespeare play. “She came back stage and said, ‘Oh it was lovely, but I’ve got one criticism. You should smile more in the curtain call, because you’ve got a lovely smile.’” And so he has, just like the Queen’s.

He doesn’t drink, rarely eats after 6pm and approaches every joke as if he were solving a puzzle. But for all his discipline, does Jimmy Carr sometimes go too far?

Sitting opposite me in a dimly lit bar in north London is a 39-year-old comedian whose appearance – black hair, black eyes, black top – seems to reflect his humour. Combined with his baby face, he reckons, this impression of blackness makes him look like a “Lego Hitler”. And it amuses him to tell people that when his girlfriend Karoline Copping, a television producer, first met him 10 years ago, she thought he had “the eyes of a rapist”.

The eyes may be one reason why passers-by give Jimmy Carr a double take, but more likely it is to do with his ubiquity – from guest appearances on BBC shows such as QI and Have I Got News For You to the shows he hosts on Channel 4: 8 Out of 10 Cats and 10 O’Clock Live. That and the constant touring he does of his live show. He tells me he has developed a comedy wiggle of his black eyebrows as a way of acknowledging fans who stare at him, without having to actually stop for a chat when he is trying to catch a train or get to a meeting.

“You never want to be the grumpy guy, although I do have quite a grumpy face,” he says. “So I raise my eyebrows like this.” He demonstrates. “I learned it from Jim Carrey 20 years ago when I was working as an intern in LA. I found myself in a lift with him and said: ‘You’re…’ and he did a perfect Mexican wave with his eyebrows.” Pause. “Then the lift door opened.” Carr tells anecdotes almost as succinctly as he tells jokes, talking quickly and using the f-word in the casual way that others use dashes and semi colons. “I like to write a joke without any fat on it,” he says. “The shorter the better. I cater for people with ADD, basically.”

He certainly employs a lot of these short jokes in his live shows. There are always 300 in a set. One from his new DVD gives a flavour of his comic voice. “The first few weeks of joining Weight Watchers, you’re just finding your feet.” As well as speaking quickly, Carr does something else which I didn’t notice him doing when I last interviewed him six years ago. He laughs easily, a double beat that fades away into an upper register: Ha-haaah! “Yes, I have this crazy honk of a laugh,” he says. “I started out deliberately deadpan, but now I do laugh more. When I look back at my old DVDs, I seem quite uptight.”

Certainly he seems happier; more comfortable in his own skin. Not worried about turning 40 next year, then? “No, I’m fine with it. I think I had my midlife crisis when I was 26. People are having them earlier. It’s to do with life speeding up. Now, I’m paid to have funny thoughts, which was all I ever wanted.” His meltdown came after he graduated from Cambridge and drifted into a job in marketing that he loathed. He gave up work, had therapy, renounced his Catholicism, lost his virginity and decided to become a comedian. “I was very secretive. I didn’t let anyone know I was doing it for the first six months. No friends and family coming along.’’ Can he remember any of his early jokes? “Um, yeah, there was this one where I said: You hear about boxers saying ‘I’m from the ghetto and there was only one way out’. Well, I was from the middle class. I lived in a cul-de-sac. There was only one way out.”

His background was indeed middle class. His father, from whom he is now estranged, was an accountant in Slough. His parents separated in 1994 and his mother died in 2001 from pancreatitis, a loss which affected him deeply.

Has he no need for therapy now? “This is my free therapy, talking about myself to you. I’m in a pretty good mood most of the time. Get a bit grumpy sometimes. But you can’t stay grumpy when you have to think of jokes each day. Joke mining.” It occurs to me that this “mining for jokes” may still be a form of therapy. At 26, he found something that chased away his black dogs. Since then, not a day has gone by that he hasn’t thought up a joke with which to do some more chasing. Indeed, he comes up with so many, usually as he is reading the papers, that he cannot help feeding them to his million-and-a-half followers on Twitter.

Doesn’t he worry that he’s squandering material? “It’s more I worry that someone will read my throwaway jokes on Twitter and think this guy isn’t as good as he used to be. If that’s the case, I want to tell them: ‘No. This is the stuff I’m throwing away. This isn’t my A material.’”

Although he has a reputation for performing jokes that can cause offence, Carr doesn’t regard his material as being gratuitously offensive. They may ostensibly be “about” rape, or paedophilia, or incest, or obesity, but, to him, the jokes are simply “about” jokes, to the point where the subject is almost abstract in his imagination.

A good example of the dangers of this approach came when he was branded “sick” by Twitter users, after tweeting a joke about a car crash just 48 hours after last month’s M5 pile up in which seven people were killed. The comic had tweeted: “A couple married for 66 years died within 3 days of each other. That’s nothing. My grandparents died on exactly the same day… car crash.” Perhaps more worryingly, he doesn’t seem to believe that people might be genuinely affronted. “I always wonder, were you really offended by that? Really? People tend to be offended on behalf of other people. I think generally people are pretty bright and they get that something is a joke and that is all it is.”

But what about the people who aren’t offended? Does he ever worry that they ought to be, just a little, if their moral compass is functioning properly? “No. Gallows humour has always been around because it’s the way that we deal with difficult taboo situations, with death and sex and things you don’t want to have to talk about head on.

“So the dark side seems like a very natural place for comedy to live. It’s difficult to come up with funny jokes about taking the dog for a walk on a sunny day… you don’t need to lighten that load. But if someone’s dying, that’s where comedy tends to occur.”

It’s an unexpectedly thoughtful answer given how cavalier Carr can seem on this topic. Black comedy saved him from his own darkest thoughts, he seems to be saying, so it might help others. In his live shows he plays to huge audiences. Presumably, though, they’re not all middle class graduates with a keen sense of postmodern irony.

Indeed, he tells me there is often a distinctive “Saturday night crowd”, which can be “quite in your face”, and which is different from the more “theatrical” Sunday night crowd. Is he ever concerned that some of the Saturday nighters might not appreciate that he is being ironic? That they are supposed to be laughing with him about the nature of prejudice, not at the victims of rape, or racism? “It will sound like I’m being overly protective of my audience, but I meet people after the show, signing autographs for them, and they’re all different ages, creeds, colours and backgrounds. The thing they have in common is a sense of humour.”

Isn’t that wishful thinking? “No. If there’s a woman in her seventies in my audience I know that there’s no point worrying that this material might be a bit rude for her. She’s fine.” Nevertheless, Carr has aroused anger in the past, in response to jokes he told about British army amputees and another (which occasioned the BBC to offer an apology) about gipsies. Over the last couple of years, however, it is Carr’s fellow comedian, Frankie Boyle, who has provoked thousands of complaints, over jokes he has told about Down’s syndrome, the Queen’s sex life and Rebecca Adlington’s nose, the last of which led to another BBC apology.

Is Carr slightly relieved that Boyle now appears to be taking all the heat previously directed at him? “Saw Frankie on Saturday for lunch when I was in Glasgow. He’s doing his thing…”

I suppose the context for this change of public mood was “Sachsgate”, the incident involving Jonathan Ross, Russell Brand and a notorious phone call. Have comedians had to become more circumspect? “Well, I’m very lucky working with Channel 4, but even when I’ve been working for the BBC they’ve been supportive and have said ‘Say what you want, we aren’t going to try and stop you.’” His defence seems to be that he and Boyle never offer an opinion one way or the other when they’re telling their controversial jokes. But did he offer Boyle any advice on how to deal with the fallout? “I don’t think he’s looking for solace, but I said to him, ‘OK, it was a joke, wasn’t it?’ There was no agenda. The media is partly to blame because they over-analyse and ask what point the comedian is making with that joke.”

That’s hardly fair. There are lots of comedians with political agendas, from Ben Elton onwards. “Yes, he did do some Labour rallies and was a brilliant and influential stand-up. But the idea that people might ask this Frankie Boyle, or this Jimmy Carr, who they should vote for.” He holds up his hands in exasperation. “No! We just want you to laugh and if you don’t find it funny, please leave, because it’s not for you.” Just out of curiosity, why is it, does he suppose, that all comedians on Channel 4 and Radio 4 are left wing? Take his co-hosts on the 10 O’Clock Show, David Mitchell and Charlie Brooker. Left of Lenin, the pair of them.

“Yes, on that show we are left-leaning and liberal but we do try and get beyond the paradigm of a two party system.” He shakes his head. “Even talking to you I’m embarrassed because why am I talking to the Telegraph about politics? There are a million more interesting people you could talk to about politics than me.” He read politics at university, though. Did he ever consider becoming a politician himself? “Not really. I was chatting to Eddie Izzard about this recently. He’s talking about running for mayor and I said I don’t understand it. Why would you go from having the best job in the world to the worst? Do you really want to spend your time organising barricades that will prevent Christmas shoppers from slipping on the pavement?”

I ask what gives him pleasure, apart from thinking of jokes. “Play a bit of tennis.” Who does he play with? He hesitates and grins. “Ah no, that would be a bit name-droppy…” (I Google “Jimmy Carr” and “tennis” later and see that his partner is Jonathan Ross.)

Another difference between Carr now and when we last met is that there’s less of him. “I know, I’m thinking of writing a diet book. Its title will be ‘Put That Down, Fatty’.” (His secret, he says, is hardly ever eating after 6pm). Carr doesn’t drink, either, but he is, he says, a caffeine fiend. “I’m a devotee of Starbucks. I’ve had three ventis today. People knock global brands but when you pull into Kings Lynn and see a Starbucks, you feel so relieved.” Doesn’t he get sick of spending so much time on tour, living in hotels? “On the contrary, they’re a home from home. Last month I spent more nights in the Manchester Malmaison than I did at home.” And his girlfriend is happy about this? “I think she’s been very patient, but I do think my work-life balance has been crap. But when you’re self-employed, you take the work when it’s there.”

I wonder if, after 10 years on the road, he couldn’t now afford to slow it down a bit? “Actually, I only work two hours a day. People give themselves years off in showbusiness, that doesn’t happen in any other job. You never meet a plumber who says I’ve been plumbing for five years and thought I’d have a year off.” When pressed he eventually reveals what really drives him: a desperate need to be loved by his audience. “A great comic is loved and I’m not a great comic. But I aim to be. I’ll work on it. I’ll put the hours in. God knows, if it can be done through sweat, I’ll do it.”

Before I meet Gerald Ratner I meet his wife Moira. She is in their kitchen, wearing sportsgear, on her way to pilates. The couple live in an Edwardian house with electric gates on the outskirts of Bray, Berkshire. It’s not the sort of grand house they once lived in — ‘The house that crap built’ as the Sun rather cruelly called it — but it is comfortable, and big enough to have a tennis court. That is where he is now, with our photographer. Just wrapping up.
I tell her that a friend of mine heard her husband give a speech recently on the rise and fall and rise again of Gerald Ratner, and thought him not only funny but engaging. ‘Oh,’ she says, in a deadpan voice. ‘I think you’ll find he’s pretty unengaging in person.’
I like him already, and her.
The ‘rise again’, it should be explained, relates to his on-line jewellery business geraldonline.com. We shall come to that. For now it is worth noting that, at its peak in 1991, the Ratners jewellery chain had a turnover of £1.5bn, with profits of £125m, from 2,500 shops in Britain and America. He had taken over the company from his father seven years earlier — when there had been 100 shops, most of which were making a loss — and had expanded rapidly, swallowing up the opposition, including H Samuel and Ernest Jones, to become the most successful jewellery business in the world.
Then came his infamous — and much misquoted — speech to the Institute of Directors at the Royal Albert Hall, the one in which he joked that the reason his cheapest sherry decanter was so cheap — £4.95 — was that it was ‘crap’. He had told the joke in public several times before — it had even been reported in the Financial Times several months earlier — and, because it always got a laugh, he thought that the line would be the perfect way to lighten what was to be a heavy speech about the business and the economy. But by the time it was reported in the tabloids the next day the quote had turned into him saying that all his jewellery was crap. Overnight, Ratners had become, to quote another Sun headline, ‘Crapners’. The Mirror’s front page informed its readers that they had been taken for “22 carat gold mugs”.
The company unravelled with astonishing speed. Women no longer wanted to wear jewellery that came in a Ratners’ box, however cheap it was. Shares plummeted. Within 18 months, Gerald Ratner was not only out of a job but broke, and broken. Gone was the yacht, the helicopter, and the chauffer-driven company cars, including a Rolls Royce and a Bentley. Both his town and country house had to be sold. He even lost his family name — the people who took over his company wouldn’t allow him to trade under the name Ratner in future business projects.
When Gerald Ratner saunters into his kitchen now, the photographs done, he does indeed seem a little disengaged, with a resigned, Eeyore-ish manner and a delivery even more deadpan than that of his wife. But there is a friendly openness about him that is disarming, and a certain vulnerability, too. Like Uncle Tom in PG Wodehouse, he has the look of a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow. But not that secret…
He takes off his tie, opens the collar of his lilac shirt, and leads the way into his sitting room. ‘My eldest daughter Suzy,’ he says, when he notices me noticing a framed photograph of an attractive young woman. ‘She works on The X-Factor. A producer. I never watch the show on principle, because I’m a music snob.’ It seems the habit of saying what he thinks, however tactless, dies hard. ‘I tend to listen to new Indie bands, which I download from iTunes. I keep telling my wife the stuff she has on her iPod is abject. There is no excuse for Westlife.’
If there was vanity once, it seems to have gone now. ‘Back in the old days someone took my photograph from below and it made my already big nose look twice as big, which I wasn’t keen on, but now I don’t care how I’m photographed. Your photographer asked me to lie down on a bench, which I would never have agreed to back then.’
Yet he did pose for that ironic — and now iconic — photograph in which he held a toy gun to his head, shortly after he became the author of his own downfall in 1991. ‘Yes, I felt cursed by that because it kept being used whenever there was a story about me in the papers. I only agreed to it because Kelvin MacKenzie, who was then editor of the Sun, said they would be more positive and lay off me if I apologised to my customers. So I played the game, and it didn’t work.’
Did he feel he was going mad? ‘It was like being in a Greek tragedy. I remember walking in Hyde Park with the dog, and there had been stories about the collapse of the company in the Sunday papers that day, and I was thinking: “This is horrendous. How could it go from the crest of wave to this in such a short space of time? How did I ever let this happen?” I was cursing myself. That was when it hit me. Up until then I thought I would get through it.’
He went to see the banks to try and find a way of rescuing the company, but he soon realised that there was an elephant in the room. ‘And the elephant was me! No one would mention the fact that I was the problem. Eventually someone did and said that I was the one who had brought all this bad publicity on the company. What could be done about it? I said there was nothing that could be done because, for the press, this story ticked all the boxes and wouldn’t go away. I mean, they only stopped picking on Jade Goody when she got cancer. Then she was popular again.’
Actually, Ratner was told he might have cancer around that time. He had an emergency operation to remove a suspected tumour from the roof of his mouth and, at that point, felt so low he considered killing himself. ‘Jewellery was all I knew. The only thing I was in interested in. Losing my family company was like loosing a child, God forbid. I suppose I become inward looking and self-absorbed but I was also as miserable as hell and there was one day when I was walking around a shopping mall that I thought, well, if it had been on the second floor, who knows? I thought of my father and grandfather building up the business only for me to destroy it. I thought of my kids growing up being called Crapner for the rest of their lives, and I just thought: “It can’t get any worse than this.” It was probably the lowest point in my life. But as Joan Rivers said, suicide is so Eighties.’
It is an odd subject for him to make light about, given that when he was 19 his sister Juliet killed herself. A defence mechanism, perhaps. ‘Religion has a lot to answer for,’ he explains. ‘I still have an affection for it and I have started going to synagogue again because it’s my roots, but Jews don’t welcome non-Jews into their family. They have this ghetto mentality. My parents certainly did. They disapproved of my sister’s boyfriend because he wasn’t Jewish and when they drove him away she became depressed and eventually took a fatal overdose.’
His parents were certainly domineering to their children. He had what amounted to an arranged first marriage the following year, with his parents buying the engagement ring and giving it to his first wife before he had a chance to propose himself. The marriage didn’t last. They had two children then got divorced. ‘I think because of what happened with Juliet, my parents were going to the other extreme of not standing in the way with me.’
His father died of the hospital superbug MRSA shortly after Gerald Ratner had re-made some of his fortune in 2001, so that was a blessing of sorts. But his mother died right at the height of the ‘Crapner’ episode, just as he was having his cancer scare.
A dark period followed in which he sank further into depression. Saw therapists. Stayed in bed all day. ‘I felt everything was against me. I did take some pills. A type of Prozac. And that was a terrible mistake because I needed to get back on my feet and you can’t do that if you are feeling half asleep. I did a lot of damage in that state because I was meeting people and not making a good impression.’
Did he confide in his wife, as well as his therapists? ‘Well I was in a bit of denial for a while, so I probably didn’t talk to my wife as much as I should of done. I was hoping it would go away and everything would be back to normal. I suppose there was an element of pride in it too.’
He found therapy, meanwhile, a fairly pointless exercise. ‘I went to see one shrink and I was the only one in the clinic apart from the actress Charlotte Rampling, so that was a nice experience, even though I was quite drugged up. She said it was all-wrong that the press had driven me to that clinic.’ The shrink didn’t cheer him up particularly. ‘One I saw just kept saying ‘OK’ and left me to do all the talking. Another one did give me one good tip. He said the man who has 2000 shops is no happier than a man who has one shop, and that helped because I realised that material things were not that important, that it was all about self-gratification.’
Talking of materialism, why did he buy a Bentley when he made some money again? ‘I thought if I got a Bentley again it would be a way of proving to myself that I had made a come back. But I’m over that now. I sold it last month because I realised how ridiculous I was being. That’s the old Gerald. It’s not me anymore. I guess I wanted to prove to everyone that I could still have it.’
The removal of his chauffer when his own company fired him in 1992 was, he felt, a particularly gratuitous insult. ‘And I wasn’t equipped to deal with it. I drove myself home that day through pouring rain and nearly ran out of petrol. I found a garage just in time, and as I pulled up to the pump I realised I didn’t know what side the petrol cap was on: the chauffeur had always filled up. After a bit of fiddling around, I eventually got the petrol cap off, but it had been years since I’d used a pump and I only succeeded in covering myself in petrol. I must confess, I actually found myself in tears at that point.’
This black dog lasted for about seven years. ‘In all that time I didn’t have a sense of humour about what had happened at all, because it was quite serious and meant all my staff — we had 27,000 — might lose their jobs. I resented what had happened because I had become known for one thing only, and that thing was stupid and negative.’
He became obsessed with fitness, especially cycling, and he still clocks up 28 miles a day. ‘Cycling beats the depression and makes your mind much more alert. I get my best ideas cycling. I’m totally addicted to it now. When I’m not cycling I go mad. Whatever the weather I have to cycle.’
He also started doing public speaking and found that when he made jokes at his own expense, the audience really warmed to him. ‘My delivery is quite deadpan, I suppose. Moira is right; I come across as quite dour and hang dog, so no one expects jokes. I think they laugh because they have such low expectations of me.’ People often come up to him after his speeches and say how much they enjoyed them. ‘They also admit that when they heard it would be me they thought it would be a miserable person feeling sorry for himself. Some people say: “You really cheered me because your situation was worse than mine.” I suppose there is an element of schadenfreude to it.’
But if his audiences come away feeling better about themselves, that is as nothing to how his after dinner speeches make him feel. ‘I do find them quite cathartic. I should point out though that if I’m self-deprecating in these speeches, it’s only because I’ve got a lot to be self-deprecating about.’
Boom, boom. Does he ever think his ordeal by tabloid might have been a positive experience, in that it has given him a form of immortality? After all, ‘doing a Ratner’, has entered the language as a synonym for being the author of your own downfall. ‘I know what you mean. In those lists of History’s Worst Decisions, I always come top, ahead of Nero allowing Rome to burn and the guy who failed to install a Tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean.’ He rubs the back of his neck. ‘I was doing a speech at a university in the Midlands and a professor came up and said: “Do you realise you will be remembered 500 years after you die for this?” And I said: “I knew it would be with me till I die but I was hoping that would be an end of it.” It is a fact that people know me for that. I was in the Isle of Man not long ago and a taxi driver just said out of the blue: “Why did you say it?” It is extraordinary. I don’t know why it stuck, yet here we are talking about it 19 years later.’
Actually, he is being self-effacing again, because the story of his come-back will also surely feature in the obituaries. After seven years of feeling sorry for himself and, as he puts it, ‘watching too much Countdown’, he decided that the best therapy would be to start again. Realising how therapeutic he had found his cycling, in 1997 he decided to open an upmarket gym, converting a warehouse in Henley. Because no investors would go near him, he hit upon the idea of selling membership for the gym before it was even built. By 2001 it was making £75,000 a year and he was able to sell it for £3.9 million. With the money he bought himself this house, and that Bentley. He also set up his on-line jewellery business, which now has annual sales of around £25 million. Ratner says his best days are Mondays when customers have been round the shops, seen what they want, and then go online to buy it cheaper.
‘The gym was the stepping-stone and I did it with no money, selling membership in advance for a non-existent club. It was a great way of market testing something without any risk. Now with Geraldonline I am trying to manufacture products after we have sold them, because they are so quick making them for us in India.’
Has this enterprise given him almost more pleasure than Ratners, given that this has been his baby from the start, rather than something passed down to him? ‘I was happier sitting in the portacabin in the site for that gym than I was in Ratners’ huge, lavish office on Stratton Street. I felt I was really achieving something. I’d had my success taken away from me and so to get it back I really appreciated it. As Joni Mitchell sang, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.’
Now that he can run his business ‘from a deckchair in Southend’, he finds it a bit soulless though. ‘I’m stuck in front of a computer all day. That’s why I love doing the speeches because it means I meet people. I miss that from Ratners. My trouble is, I spend too much on the Internet when I’m bored. Buying cycling stuff. And one-clicking on ITunes. Looking out for new bands.’
He may get bored and restless from time to time but he does seem comfortable in his skin these days and reconciled to his peculiar fate. A couple of years ago he even published a memoir,  The Rise and Fall… and Rise Again, which he found a therapeutic exercise.  ‘Because I’ve made some sort of a come back I can put my head above the parapet now.  I didn’t want to write that book before because my story didn’t have a happy ending.’
It is time to wind up, so before I go I feel I ought to ask my Mrs Merton style question: So, Gerald Ratner, any regrets? He has the good grace to laugh. ‘What do you think!’
OK, here’s another one, why was his jewellery so cheap? ‘Actually that is a good question. I only achieved the success I had back then because the jewellery business was so conservative and traditional. Like they wouldn’t have prices in the window, which was crazy. I came up with the idea of having one price for everything on a display. But the reason we could be so cheap was that we cut the margin, bought in bulk and used gold that wasn’t of the highest carat. It was a simple formula and other jewellers hadn’t thought to do it because they considered it beneath them.’
Gerald Ratner has acquired a degree of composure these days, it seems. The only thing that annoys him now is if the press call him hapless, as one tabloid did a few week ago, when making an analogy. ‘Such lazy journalism,’ he says with a shake of the head. A final question then. What has he learned from his extraordinary experience? ‘That there is a certain kind of peace that comes with accepting bad luck.’ Pause. ‘It was Noel Coward who said that the secret of success is the capacity to manage failure, and I have managed to be successful two or three times now, despite making that dreadful mistake.’
There is something else he has learned of course, that the only way to stop it hurting when people laugh at you is to laugh at yourself. They are making Gerald Ratner the Musical, he tells me with a grin. ‘Simon Nye is writing the music and the BBC have put money into it. I’m told the first line is “I had it all in my lap, until I said the word crap”.’ He gives an Eeyore-ish shrug and adds: ‘And I don’t even like musicals.’
It is time for us to part company — he has two children from his second marriage, as well as his first, and it is time to do the school run. Parked outside, I notice, is a smart Volvo 4×4. It’s not a Bentley, but it is new.

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.

The qualities that made Bill Wyman ‘the boring one’ in the Rolling Stones have served him well in his other role – as the group’s archivist. But his new scrapbook is far from dull, finds Nigel Farndale.

It is midmorning and Bill Wyman’s Sticky Fingers burger restaurant in Kensington is empty. Almost. Then a tourist walks in and takes a photograph of a photograph that is hanging on the wall. It is of the Rolling Stones, circa 1968. The man hasn’t realised that one of the rock stars in the picture is sitting a few feet away, watching him. It’s a scene that can only be described as postmodern.

Apart from the black-rimmed glasses he is wearing today, Wyman doesn’t look that different from how he did back then. He was never a tall man (5ft 7in) and his hair is still collar length, if greying now. But he is older: 76.

Indeed, when he orders a vodka and tonic which seems quite rock and roll, given the time of day, he explains that it is, in fact, because he has backache.

The photograph is one of hundreds of items of memorabilia exhibited here in the restaurant, including gold discs, Brian Jones’s guitar and Wyman’s bass (the two instruments together are worth about half a million pounds).

“The stuff here is only a fraction of my collection,” Wyman says. “I’ve got trunks of it at home.” Indeed he is about to publish Scrapbook, a limited-edition volume presented in a clamshell box. It features tickets, posters, programmes, letters, photographs, and much more besides. There’s Wyman’s birth certificate, letters to – and from – fans, a list of expenses for the Stones’ accountant, and even his Japanese work visa application form. In another life he would have loved to have been a librarian, he says, what with all that indexing and cross-referencing. The next best thing was to become the band’s archivist.

Did the other Stones think he was eccentric for collecting all the time?

“Oh yeah, they thought I was mad, they’d say, ‘Why are you bothering to – excuse my language – collect that crap?’ It was quite hard to collect anything because you had to leave a venue so quickly, what with the kids attacking you and jumping over police vans.”

Wyman’s letter to a UK fan. 17th January 1965

Wyman’s letter to a UK fan. 17th January 1965

He says the Stones always went out of their way to be nice to their fans – which must be difficult when, as regularly happened, they attack your car and force you to be helicoptered away under police escort. “There was always stacks of mail waiting for us at venues and we would sit down and start answering it,” says Wyman. “Me, Brian, Charlie and Keith took turns doing the autographs and we learnt to do each others’, because there were so many to do. When the autographs come up at Sotheby’s these days I can often tell they aren’t real.”

But it wasn’t just autographs the female fans were after, was it, Bill?

A grin. “Well, that was Brian and me mostly, the others weren’t that interested, really. But we are digressing.”

Are we? In a way, we are still on the subject of collecting. By Wyman’s own estimates he slept with around 1,000 women. Yes, he says, but it wasn’t how people think. “Before I joined the Stones, a workmate gave me a piece of advice. Always treat a woman like a lady, and I always did that, even when I broke up with one. There are some who I still write to, a friend in Australia who I used to go out with in ’63, ’64. She has grandchildren now. And I’m still in touch with a girl I used to go out with in ’64, ’65. I never treated them like s— and threw their clothes out.”

Presumably he couldn’t remember all their names. “It was a bit of a blur at times. But I can remember a lot of them. I was married so I couldn’t write about them in my diaries. I had to remember when and where. They weren’t one-night stands, though, because I would see the same ones again. Whenever I went to New York there were two black girls I would see. Every tour.” Bill Wyman’s address book: it should be in a glass case in the British Museum. “Yes,” he agrees with a laugh. “But I had it stolen in Spain in 1999. It was in a suitcase they nicked. Never seen again.” What does he make of the current trend for celebrities such as Russell Brand to put their promiscuity down to “sex addiction” and book themselves into clinics for treatment? “Don’t know who that is,” he says.

Michael Douglas, then. “Oh yes, I know Michael. OK, I suppose I didn’t have a sex addiction in that case. I always thought of it as having company when I was lonely and bored on the road. Touring is not a romantic life. It’s exciting for two hours every other night when you’re on stage, the rest is a nightmare of packing and unpacking. So female company helped to pass the time. I didn’t go searching for women, they came to me and were very nice and sweet.

“I was always very careful who I went with. Didn’t go with groupies or anything. Never had any problems with sexually transmitted diseases, as a lot of people did in those days,” He trails off. Looks uncomfortable. “But come on, we shouldn’t be talking about girls all the time.”

Guests Gina Lollobrigida and Suzanne Accosta at the Sticky Fingers Cafe’s 4th Birthday Party. 6th July 1993

Guests Gina Lollobrigida and Suzanne Accosta at the Sticky Fingers Cafe’s 4th Birthday Party. 6th July 1993 Credit: Alan

It’s obvious why not. He says he usually stayed in touch with his old flames, but not with his second wife Mandy Smith, presumably? “Not after we broke up, no. Since the settlement I haven’t spoken to her.” I’m 48 and it is sobering to think that Wyman was my age when he first slept with her. That was in 1985, when she was 14. They married in 1989 when she was 18 and he was 52. With no irony whatsoever, Hello! magazine called it a “fairy-tale” wedding, a headline it would not get away with in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal. In the past year, indeed, Wyman’s name has been cited in several newspaper reports as an example of a celebrity who had sex with a minor.

Brave of him to include a snapshot of Mandy Smith in his Scrapbook, I note. “Yes, that was before we broke up. I have many wonderful pictures of her, but I didn’t want to dwell on it because it’s a sore point in my life. People have always treated it badly, when it wasn’t bad. I don’t want to talk about it because it upsets my [third] wife and my [three] daughters, who are the age she was.” He trails off again.

“We all have a skeleton in the cupboard, it’s just if you’re a taxi driver in Halifax no one ever hears about it. But if you are a celebrity everyone does. In my case it was publicised to the world and that wasn’t really fair, I don’t think. No, it’s a tough one. Thirty years ago.”

Does he still feel nervous about prosecution? “There was never a complaint so…” Again, the trailing off. Then he says, “I went to the police and I went to the public prosecutor and said, ‘Do you want to talk to me? Do you want to meet up with me, or anything like that?’ and I got a message back, ‘No’. I was totally open about it.”

His affair with Mandy Smith was “a heart thing”, not “a lust thing”. “It was very emotional and special at the time. It wasn’t how it was reported, and the only time it ever happened in my life. A lot of people understood, but a lot didn’t. The media certainly didn’t. They treated me like crap.”

The heart can make a fool of a middle-aged man, is that how he sees it? “That was why I married her, but it didn’t work out, by then she was changed, but we mustn’t talk about this any more because my wife will get upset.”

OK, let’s talk about the Stones, then. I know he has said he has no regrets about leaving the band in 1993, but when he sees the kind of money they are still making from touring it must give him pause for thought. “When I said I wanted to leave they told me I was probably giving up £20 million for the next two years. But I had three great houses and some nice cars.” He felt he had enough? “Yes, and I got married again and worked on books, and started a band to subsidise my living expenses. And I don’t regret it because I’ve never been happier.” He looks over my shoulder at something.“I’m sure I’m happier than they are in their lives, I really do.”

Wyman seems a likeable man, about as far removed from a one-time rock legend as you can imagine. He was, after all, always characterised as “the boring one” in the Rolling Stones. Indeed, when he left the band Mick Jagger claimed not to have noticed. “How hard can it be to play bass?” he said. “I’ll do it myself.” Certainly Wyman didn’t do drugs; his main requirement on the road was Marmite and Branston pickle. In conversation he uses quaint expressions such as “hark at me”, and when he swears he apologises. His main passion these days is metal detecting.

And his comments can seem quite Eeyorish. It still rankles with him, for example, that his contributions to the Stones were unacknowledged with writing credits. “None of us got them, Brian, Mick Taylor. If you came up with a riff that turned an ordinary song into something special it was never acknowledged.” Would Mick and Keith acknowledge the riffs privately? “No, not really. The riff on Miss You was mine. And the one for Jumping Jack Flash. There was one interview where Keith acknowledged that ‘that was Bill’s song’. Then about 10 years later he denied he’d said it.”

He sighs. “I don’t push it. You have to swallow your pride and let it go, otherwise you get knotted up. I went away and had the biggest solo success of anyone in the band with (Si, si) Je Suis Un Rock Star. A world hit.” You get the feeling there is little love lost between him and Jagger: “He can start a sentence by saying Yes and by the end of it you realise he has said No.”

But they do have a passion for cricket in common, I say, trying to act as go-between. “Except I play it and he only watches it.”

He’s feeling distracted now, he says, because he keeps noticing that a picture of Jagger on the wall behind me is on a skew. “I’m a bit OCD,” he explains. “Have you noticed I’ve been straightening these serviettes and forks as we’ve been talking.” As I get up to straighten the picture for him, he asks the waiter if the music can to be turned down “because it’s a bit ’orrible”. His wife Suzanne arrives.

Time for one last question. He played bass on Satisfaction and Brown Sugar. He was on stage at the legendary Hyde Park concert in 1969. For some fans, the Stones without Bill Wyman are not really the Stones at all. Do people still think he is in the band? “Yes, taxi drivers still say after all these years, ‘When are you touring with the Stones again?’”

Actually, he did rejoin them briefly on stage at the O2 last November for their 50th anniversary. What was it like?

“Bit disappointing, really,” he deadpans. “They only let me do two songs.”

As he unveils his biggest exhibition yet, the ‘transvestite potter’ seems set to join the art world’s big beasts. But will his ladylike alter ego and childhood teddy bear be joining him?

Being an accommodating man, Grayson Perry has asked if we – that is, the photographer and me – would like him as Claire or as himself. Actually, it was someone from his gallery who asked on his behalf, but still, it is an intriguing distinction, one that I will try to unravel here. He is far from consistent on the subject.

For now, though, it would be as well to remind ourselves, as if we could forget, that not only is 51-year-old Perry a “conceptual artist who works as a craftsman” (his definition) but he is also a transvestite, and that when he dresses as a woman it tends to be as one who wouldn’t look out of place in a pantomime. Indeed, when he won the Turner Prize for his ceramics in 2003, he was wearing a Little Bo Peep outfit. “It’s about time a transvestite potter won this prize,” he quipped.

His pointed sense of humour is one of his defining characteristics, and it runs through his work like the seam of gilt he put in one of his vases to make it obvious it had been broken and repaired (because that was what the ancient Orientals used to do, making a feature of the repair).

We have opted for “as himself” today, which means he is wearing red trousers, pumps and a linen jacket, and his unribboned blond curls reach down to his collar. He has poured himself a coffee, peeled a banana and taken a single bite from it, but the rest of it remains in his hand, which is poised on his knee as if he were an Edwardian posing for a tableau vivant.

We are meeting in the director’s dining room at the British Museum where, from this week until mid February, there will be a major exhibition of his work. And when you approach the columned entrance of the museum and see a long banner announcing it, you do realise what a big name, literally and figuratively, Grayson Perry has become.

Must put a spring in his step when he sees that, I say. “First time I have seen it, actually. But yeah, the big banner outside the British Museum feels pretty good. Oooh!” He talks quickly and fluently in a resonant voice, and though you wouldn’t necessarily work out straight away that he was born and raised in Essex, there are still some traces of the county in his accent.

His exhibition is called Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman and it features his own work alongside objects he has selected from the eight million on display here. The “unknown” in the title seems to be, well, rather knowing on his part, because he himself is far from anonymous as an artist and craftsman.

In the past he’s described Claire as an “alter ego”. Is that still the case?

“I might have done in the past, in my naive pre-therapy days, before I became fully merged. There’s no part of my personality I hive off any more. I’m fully integrated. It’s not an alter ego, it’s a fetish. It’s just me in a frock.”

I ask whether, when he first started cross-dressing in public, the thrill was in passing himself off as a woman. “I never got into dressing as a woman to deceive anyone, so I thought why not embrace it openly? I wanted to say ‘I am Grayson in a dress, deal with it’. There are some trannies who are happy to blend in. If you’re a bank manager, you probably won’t be able to express your transvestism in the same way as an artist can.”

His attitude seems to be that he acknowledges there is something inherently funny about wanting to dress up as a member of the opposite sex, so you may as well be in on the joke and take it further, in his case with baby doll dresses and bonnets. Ritualised humiliation seems to be part of the appeal, too. Can he imagine reaching an age when he will no longer feel the inclination to dress up? “I don’t know. I’ve met trannies who were in their nineties and they said their libidos went years ago. There is a psychological element to it as well as a sexual one, you see.”

Although he has said that his love of pottery may be connected to having to wear a tight rubber smock during his first pottery lesson at school – he became excited by the sensation, broadly speaking – he seems to regard his transvestism as coincidental to his art. But has it, in fact, helped his career? “It hasn’t hurt. It’s a part of me; therefore it must have contributed to my success. In the crowded cultural landscape, it doesn’t hurt to be known for something different.”

He may now deny that Claire is an alter ego, but when he puts a dress on, does he find himself stepping into a character, a public persona that is different to his private one? “I never really use the name any more. I kind of regret it because it came out of me being in a transvestite society when I was younger and they insisted on a fem name for anonymity. If I started in my forties, I would have said ‘call me Grayson’.”

If he were dressed as Claire today, would there be no difference? “I might sit nicer!” He gives an unexpectedly raucous laugh that makes me jump. “Wouldn’t be so casual! I do sit and walk a little more ladylike when I’m dressed up. It’s appropriate to the look.” He says he’s learnt to avoid the places where his appearance might lead to trouble. But can he handle himself? “Never had a fight.” I ask this because his stepfather was an amateur wrestler. Was he a violent man? “He could be very frightening. That sort of person would be someone I would avoid. I still have a reaction to machismo.”

His biological father was a “manly man” too, an engineer who rode motorbikes. “Motorbikes aren’t manly,” he says. “Look at mine.” True, his is pink and turquoise. “If a bloke has to prove his machismo with a motorbike, then he isn’t very macho.” The motorbike and his father, with whom he has little contact, are integral to understanding his new work. They are linked by Alan Measles, his childhood teddy bear, who features heavily in the new exhibition. Perry recently toured Bavaria on his motorbike accompanied by Alan Measles, who sat in a specially constructed shrine on the back. It was, the artist said, a mission of reconciliation with their old enemies, the Germans. In his solitary and unhappy childhood, you see, Perry imagined Alan as a heroic member of the French resistance.

He was also an unbeaten racing driver, and a fighter pilot. He has now taken on the role of a “personal God” and “the embodiment of everything that is good about masculinity”. In the exhibition catalogue, Perry describes Alan as “the benign dictator of my fantasy worlds. He was my prime candidate for deification and I set about making works that celebrated his heroism.”

Presumably, by giving a teddy bear all these manly characteristics, his intention was to mock them? “No, in my childhood, Alan was a transference mechanism to help me survive emotionally. I needed a reassuring male figure, so I constructed it.” But why not project on to an Action Man? “Well, I’m sure there are kids who have done it with an Action Man, but for me it happened to be my teddy bear. I never wanted to be in someone else’s imagination. Teddies are universal. They don’t have distinctive characteristics. That’s why he’s like a god.”

People project on to God what they would like Him to be. Alan struggles with the whole business of religion. There is a piece in the show called Hold Your Beliefs Lightly in which Alan says to the world’s religions: “Calm down, dear, it’s only a belief system.’’ What Alan Measles is most, as Perry discovered when he had therapy, is a surrogate father. He is also his male psyche. Indeed, on one of Perry’s vases there is a scene in which Claire is marrying Alan. “Many problems in society come from an imbalance in the way these two sides of our personality are dealt with,” he has written.

Perry’s wife Philippa is a psychotherapist and they have a 19-year-old daughter, Florence. He denies that he gets free sessions, although “We talk about therapy all the time… there are still a lot of people who are suspicious about it because people see it as a fluffy, middle-class indulgence. I think it will become more popular in the future because it is a b——-free zone. Therapists tell it like it is. They peel back layers.” In conversation, he often seems to refer to emotions. And as much as anything, his new exhibition seems to be an exploration of public emotion.

The Unknown Craftsman is, of course, a reference to the Unknown Soldier who became the focus for national grief after the First World War. “I found it very moving reading up about the Unknown Soldier,” he says, “because public displays of emotion intrigue me. I found the Diana funeral moving in a way a lot of middle-class commentators dismissed. Yucky working-class people being vulgar and emotional.” Would he say he’s now part of the art establishment? “No. There is an art elite which meets in Venice and it is partly a class thing because they prefer intellectual difficulty to emotional. They sneer at anything accessible because they think accessibility means dumb.”

Perry has broad appeal and I think it’s because people find him accessible, engaging and witty. “I’m sure there are people in the art world who struggle to like me because they have an academic, insular version of art. Difficult art is collected by galleries rather than individual patrons and it’s a kind of closed system. The public aren’t paying for it and their attention isn’t sought. The elites don’t realise they are a little village.” Is there rivalry between the big beasts, by which I mean him, Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Gilbert & George and the Chapman brothers?

“I’m the littlest of the big beasts. They make miles more money than me. Wish I had their money. I don’t do enough work and don’t have a big team of assistants. This exhibition is two years’ work for me. They make the kind of work that they are happy to see expanded and out of their control.” Me-ow! Is there rivalry, though? “I’m glad to meet any of them. We have things that we like and we don’t like about each other’s work. It would be weird if we didn’t. We’re not treading on each other’s toes.” He adds that his ambition is “to make art that is happy and accessible and decorative. The idea that art has to be difficult and solemn is not very English. And I’m very English.”

It is telling that he refers disparagingly to “the middle classes” as if they are not his tribe, when clearly they now are. He listens to Radio 4 all day when he’s working in his studio, for goodness sake. But, for all this, there is something endearingly, and perhaps surprisingly, unpretentious about Perry. The interview done, and the banana now eaten, we wander over to where the exhibition is being constructed. He hasn’t made an appointment to visit the site and the security guard is not convinced he is who he says he is. How much easier it would have been if he had come as Claire.

Father of a two-year-old, medieval historian, and now champion of church conservation – Terry Jones talks about the unlikely turns his life has taken since the Monty Python years.

Just as an ex-Beatle will always be an ex-Beatle, so an ex-Python will forever be an ex-Python, even one who goes on to have a successful second career as a historian specialising in the Middle Ages, as Terry Jones did. It’s just the way of things.

In his airy study overlooking Hampstead Heath, the shelves of books reflect this duality. The collected Python scripts take up as much space as the volumes of medieval history. And what’s this? Peeping out from behind some taller books is the corner of a blue plaque. It was supposed to go outside the house in Colwyn Bay where Jones grew up, yet here it still is, hidden away.

Such, it seems, is the modesty of the man. As for his famed affability, well, there does seem to be a permanent chuckle just below his surface and, combined with his distracted air, this makes him seem like a don who can’t remember where his next lecture is supposed to be. His croaky voice adds to this impression, and it’s tempting to think this might be caused by years of playing all those screechy Python women, such as the waitress in the Spam sketch.

More prominently displayed is a photograph of Jones with what you might assume is his granddaughter. He is 69, after all. But this is, in fact, his daughter Siri, who has just had her second birthday. Her mother Anna, a 28-year-old Swedish Oxford graduate, greeted me at the door and is now downstairs making an apple crumble. They met six years ago and, when he realised he had fallen in love, Jones confessed all to his wife Alison, a biochemist with whom he has two grown-up children. He clearly still finds the subject of his separation a difficult one. When we discuss it, he becomes even more halting than usual.

Has he always lived round here? “No, 26 years in Camberwell.”

His wife is still there? “Um, yes.”

Must have been hard for both of them, after so many years of marriage. “Yeees, fairly horrible. Harder for her than me, obviously.”

But didn’t they have a fairly “open” marriage anyway? “Um, yeeeah.”

Are they still married? “Yes, but, um, about to get divorced, mainly because it causes tax problems if you don’t.”

And will he re-marry? “Um, yes. Again, there are tax implications if you don’t.”

He is less hesitant on his favourite subject: misconceptions about medieval England. On Thursday, indeed, he will be giving the annual lecture for the Churches Conservation Trust on this subject.

“We think of medieval England as being a place of unbelievable cruelty and darkness and superstition,” he says, pronouncing his r’s as w’s. “We think of it as all being about fair maidens in castles, and witch-burning, and a belief that the world was flat. Yet all these things are wrong.”

What’s behind this negative image, then? “I think it’s because, as a human race, we like to think we’ve progressed. In fact, they were very sophisticated and subtle.”

Isn’t he partly to blame for the misconceptions, though, given the impact of Monty Python and the Holy Grail? “I think we were guilty of perpetuating one myth and that was that everyone had blackened teeth. It was before the opening of the sugar trade with the West Indies, so actually people had very good teeth.”

Has he ever fantasised about going back in time and seeing for himself what life was really like then? “No, it’s more fun speculating. And anyway I don’t think my knowledge of Chaucerian English would be good enough. The funny thing about history is that we imagine that people didn’t laugh in the old days, but of course they did, at stupid things. Henry II’s favourite minstrel was ‘a whistle, a leap and a fart’. And he paid someone a lot of money to fall off his horse.”

His daughter appears at the glass door and he waves at her and says in a high-pitch voice: “Hello, Siri! Hello! What’s that mischievous face?” When he lets her in, she shows him a birthday card and then she heads back downstairs. “She’s such a sweetie. I can’t remember my other two children at this age,” he says, “Because we were in the middle of filming Holy Grail.”

I guess that’s why grandparents often have good if not better relationships with their grandchildren than they did with their children, because they have more time. “It’s the same with Siri and me, actually. Occasionally, I find it hard to get to work. In my old house I had a study at the top, far away from everything. But Siri likes to pop in and see what I’m up to, and with those big eyes it’s hard to say no!”

Does having a child at his age make him feel younger? “I kind of feel about 15 anyway. Probably 20. It takes you a while to catch up with what your real age is, but I’ll be 70 next year. Terry Gilliam [another ex-Python] had his 70th earlier this year at a speedway track.”

And the nights, how does he find them? “When she was younger, we shared the night duties. But now Siri is sleeping through, so it’s not too bad.”

As well as his history books, he’s written some lovely children’s books; he must be great at telling bedtime stories, I say. “Not really. I’ve never been good at improvising. Writing them is a different matter. Anna’s very good with the songs. She knows so many Swedish songs, and she sings them to Siri in the car.”

His relationship with his own father was more distant. “I remember seeing him for the first time when I was four and half. I’d only seen photographs of him before then because he had been based in India during the war, in the postal service. I grew up with women doting on me – my mother and grandmother – and when my father came back he wanted to impose some strict Edwardian values. I suppose I resented the intrusion.”

His mother adored him. “Even more than she did my older brother, I think. She treated me like her little pet. I felt my first duty was to please her, and that could be onerous.”

Was his mother compensating for his father’s absence? “I suppose so, but she was very loving anyway.” He stares out of the window. “My mother always said she had something she wanted to tell me, and she never did. She died suddenly from a heart attack [when he was 30] and didn’t get the chance. It was a mystery.”

Was he conscious of being cleverer at school than his peers? “No, I’m not that clever, actually. This medieval stuff might look academic, but I’m hopeless at academia, really. I could never remember anything. I’d read history books and not remember anything. It was a real strain.”

He and the other gentle ex-Python, Michael Palin, met at Oxford and tended to write together, whereas the other comedy writing team in the group – John Cleese, Eric Idle and Graham Chapman – met at Cambridge and were always considered more dangerous and provocative. “Mike and I just wanted to be loved,” Jones has said in the past.

Yet he must have been made of pretty strong stuff because he was the one who directed their three cinematic triumphs: The Holy Grail, Life of Brian, and The Meaning of Life. Must have been a hard job having to direct all those big personalities. “Well, you didn’t really need to direct them. With John, you might sometimes have to say, ‘That’s over the top’, and he would tone it down. But, as we had all written the scripts between us, it was more like being a Woody Allen-type of director. You didn’t need to direct because it was so perfectly cast.”

He’s being modest again. As to the question of whether the ex-Pythons will ever come together to be Pythons again, he reckons they are all too comfortable these days. The edginess and hunger has gone. But you never know. Most of them have contributed to A Liar’s Autobiography, an animated film based on the memoir of Graham Chapman, the Python who died in 1989. And the success of Spamalot, the Broadway musical, shows Python fans are still desperate for more.

For now, Jones has the unusual distinction of having three of his films banned in Ireland. Life of Brian may always come top of polls of the funniest film ever, but it is still considered blasphemous in religious circles. And now here he is giving a lecture on behalf of the Churches Conversation Trust! “I hadn’t thought of that!” he says with a chuckle. “It was Michael [Palin’s] son who, um, suggested I do it. He’s very involved in the conservation of old buildings. But actually the thing to remember about Life of Brian is that, er, it wasn’t blasphemous, it was heretical. There is, um, a difference.”

TELEGRAPH, 9 DECEMBER 2016

Kirk Douglas celebrates his 100th birthday today. For this interview, originally published in July 2011, Nigel Farndale spoke to the Hollywood star about his remarkable life

No sooner does Kirk Douglas sit down on the silk-covered sofa in his drawing room than he stands up again. He then sits down once more.
“Would you like me to show you again?” he asks with a grin. He stands up again. I’d asked how his knees were, you see, because six years ago he had them both replaced in an operation, against his doctor’s advice. Pretty good seems to be the answer.
In fact he’s in pretty good shape all round, considering his venerable age, 94, and the scrapes he has been in over the years. In 1991 he survived a helicopter crash, a mid-air collision with a light aircraft in which two people were killed. He got off relatively lightly with a compressed spine that left him three inches shorter. (read more)

Has he seen a therapist? Does he have OCD? Or a secret yearning to study French poetry? Lord Sugar tells all<

f Alan Sugar, Lord Sugar, were a dog he would be a short-bodied, wire-haired dog. A terrier of some sort. A snarling, bristling, silver-coated terrier. This thought occurs to me as I watch him stride into the cavernous supply room where our photographer, Dan Burn-Forti, has set up his lights in front of an abandoned red leather chair.

“You’ve got seven minutes,” Sugar barks. He only ever poses for seven minutes; indeed, he once refused to sit for David Bailey because he wanted more than that. Dan knows the seven-minute rule already, having photographed him twice before.

He also knows that he must not ask Lord Sugar to point his finger at the camera, as he does when he says his catchphrase, “You’re fired!”, on The Apprentice, a new series of which is about to start on BBC One. This will only annoy his lordship, and given his reputation for being prickly, Dan knows that you really don’t want to annoy him.

The storeroom is on the third floor of Amshold Ltd, a large corrugated building on an industrial estate just beyond the M25 in Essex, the headquarters for Lord Sugar’s business empire, and it is full of the everyday supplies a company needs, from cleaning fluids and pens, to printer paper and lots of watercoolers.

There’s also a dusty old Amstrad computer from the Eighties, the product on which Sugar built his fortune (he is thought to be worth about £840 million, with most of his money these days coming from property). For my generation, your first computer was nearly always an Amstrad (mine was the 9512). Sugar had the simple, yet inspired, idea that if computers could be made affordable, everyone would want one.

The photographs over – seven minutes exactly – we repair to Sugar’s office. Light slants through a semi-shuttered window. His wooden desk forms the top of a giant T, the bottom being the long, granite desk at which his visitors sit, at an angle to him. Symmetrically arranged on the desk are two phones, two silver-shaded lamps, two glass in-trays, two model aeroplanes and two computers. Behind it, on the wall, are evenly-spaced family photographs. Sugar has been married to Ann for 43 years. One is tempted to describe her as the long-suffering Ann, but she has been quoted as saying that her husband is “softer” in reality than he appears in the media.

For his part, Sugar has said that he doesn’t know what she saw in him at first. He wasn’t exactly romantic, eventually proposing in a minivan on the Stratford flyover. They have three grown-up children. All were privately educated. Two of them work for his company.

The interview begins with a brusque: “Now what can I do for you?” The compulsive watch checking also begins, not a surreptitious, corner-of-the-eye check but a full-on, rude, I’ve-got-more-important-things-to-be-doing-right-now check.

While it’s possible that he only does this with me I suspect he does it with everyone, not least because he often describes himself as an impatient man. Restless. Easily bored.

Yet, in contradiction of this, he can’t bear disorder in his life. Everything has to be aligned, from the clams on his plate to the pictures on his wall. He is fanatical about cycling and perhaps there is something about the constant rhythm of peddling, the order it represents, that he finds therapeutic.

I suggest this because about 20 minutes into our conversation I notice him aligning the pens around his desk with his jotter. When I ask why he does this, whether it is evidence of obsessive compulsive disorder, he says in a deadpan voice: “Yeah, there’s a man with a white coat waiting outside. Partial insanity. I’m just going to move this pen over two millimetres.” He measures with a ruler. Nice self-mockery.

A psychotherapist would read much into this, I suggest. Has he ever been tempted to see one? “No, no, no. As a young man some friends of mine had some kind of visionary round their house to read what was going to happen to them and I happened to turn up and say it was a load of nonsense. And they said I should try it and the man said, ‘I can tell you have had a bad day today. You’ve had a big row with your boss and I can see it’. And I said, ‘I haven’t got a boss, I work for myself.’”

It’s an anecdote that tells us you don’t have to be a particularly talented “psychic” to guess as soon as Sugar walks through the door that he has had an argument with someone that day.

If he were to see a therapist, I suggest, he or she would want to explore why, when most people need to be liked, Alan Sugar doesn’t. In fact he seems to enjoy making enemies. (He joined Twitter last year and soon found himself embroiled in a war of words with Kirstie Allsopp, calling her “a lying cow” for saying he was “uncharitable”.) Why is that? “I don’t make enemies, it’s just I’m not afraid to speak my mind, which can sometimes mean people don’t like what I am saying. They become, in your terms, enemies.

“I tell it like it is, but I’ve got some employees who have worked for me for 25 years. I can’t be that bad if they stick around.The only people whose opinions I worry about are my wife, my children, and my employees. And as long as they still like me the rest of the world can,” he checks himself, “make its own mind up. I don’t go out of my way to schmooze people or make friends.”

So has he deliberately cultivated a television persona which is, well, what is it? “Dare I say it, the reason I think people like watching me is that I speak a lot of common sense. They know I’m not talking rubbish. There’s no complexity in what I’m saying on The Apprentice. It’s not highbrow, intellectual speak. It is obvious.”

The youngest of four children brought up in a council flat in Hackney, Sugar began his career selling lighters and car aerials from the back of a van. Clearly his is a story of determination, guts and a strong work ethic, but it is also one of single-mindedness and self-belief. Where did that come from, does he suppose? His parents?

“I don’t think so, they came from a completely different era. Very cautious and non-adventurous. Had a difficult life. My mother was a housewife. My father was a garment worker. What I did was totally alien to what my father would have done. So no.”

Did he worry about outshining his father? “No, no problem there at all. I’d broken the mould of working in a factory culture. You’re not a psychiatrist are you? Do you want me to get on the couch?”

If that would make him feel more comfortable. “Well can we get back to talking about The Apprentice.” It’s not a question. But I had a good run, and I’m surprised his patience took as long as it did to wear thin.

So. A new series of the Bafta-winning reality show begins next week and this time, instead of winning a £100,000 job in one of Sugar’s businesses, the winner will go into a 50/50 partnership with him. He will invest £250,000 in a start-up company of the winner’s choosing. Sixteen candidates, as usual. Twelve tasks. Cue Prokofiev music.

The firing stage. Does he ever get emotionally engaged? Feel moved?

“Yeah I do, especially on the penultimate programme because you have had people who have been working hard trying to impress you for 11 weeks and it gets difficult when you have to make a decision because they can’t all be winners. The firing tends to be soft landings towards the end because I don’t want to be suppressing someone who has tried their best but just wasn’t quite good enough.”

Before this interview his lordship was being interviewed by Evan Davis for Radio 4. Isn’t the new format a “leetle” bit like Dragon’s Den? “Yeah, well he seemed to think so, but as I told him, we’re the ones who keep winning the awards and he hasn’t won one yet.”

Sugar thinks there is an “expectancy culture” out there. Young people think they can come in at a high level, bypassing all the dirtying hands stage. “They look at the young fellow who invented Facebook and think they are going to find a venture capitalist who’s going to give them 10 million quid. But he was an anonomy. The guy that invented YouTube is an anonomy. The guy who invented Amazon is an anonomy.” I think he means anomaly, except that, having given three examples, they aren’t exactly anomalies.

“What they forget is that all these people were anonomies,” Sugar continues. “But when you look at the Sugars, the Bransons and the Greens, we started with nothing, at the bottom, and we learned from our mistakes and we hustled. We ducked and dived. What we want to demonstrate to the viewers is that you can still start with very little.

“I’ve given this latest mob £250 and they’ve turned it into £1,500. Did they need a bank loan? No. Did they need a big factory? No.”

And it shouldn’t matter in terms of starting up that we are in a recession? “No, that’s all rubbish. I’m sick and tired of hearing about the recession. It’s all c—. I started in 1967, one of the worst recessions in living memory. It’s all about being positive.”

Part of Sugar’s morbid appeal on television is that he is always trying to keep his anger in check, stop himself from swearing. In his autobiography, What You See Is What You Get (2010), he writes: “The niceties weren’t instilled in me by my mother and father. I was never taught any social graces, not even simple things like saying, ‘Hello, how are you?’”

In the book he also admits to feelings of guilt (towards his mother, with whom he didn’t spend enough time when she had depression towards the end of her life), of “gut-wrenching anguish” (during his 10-year period as the owner of Tottenham Hotspur) and to moments of self-doubt: “Am I a one-trick pony?”

Is this evidence of introspection, I wonder. Of an examined life? I try to steer him back to the personal stuff. Does talking about it make him feel uncomfortable? “No, it’s just this isn’t a profile about me.” Yes it is. “Well it’s all in my book. Read that. First two chapters.”

I like to hear things from the horse’s mouth, not that I’m comparing him to a horse. “Well people do say reading that book is like listening to me talking. I dictated it.”

Not only does he not write books, he doesn’t read them either. Or listen to music. The closest he comes to culture is watching a bit of television, Law & Order. And yet clearly, to have done as well in business as he has he must have, as he puts it, genius and brilliance.

Does he regret not having had a formal education, going to Oxbridge, perhaps? “I don’t think the outcome would have been any different. And I would perceive three years at university as a waste of time. I would have already made £200,000 by then. I’m a commercial person, not an academic.”

Those three years may be a waste of time financially but not in terms of his cerebral development, surely. He might have acquired a taste for French poetry, for example, which might have enriched his life in profound ways, giving him intellectual depth.

“Not really. The thing is, I’ve been in the university of life, you see, and you can say to these people who come out with their two-point-ones, or whatever, that’s fine but you know nothing. We’re going to put you into a practicable environment now where you begin to learn.”

Isn’t that rather patronising? I mean, he doesn’t know these people with their two-ones. And all the Nobel Prize winners this country has ever produced went to university.

He raises his voice. “All it is is a badge that shows they have a brain. That’s all it is. You’re not a dummkopf. But you are not an expert in economics. I’m sorry. You are not an expert in business. You are not an expert in electronics. When you become an expert is when you start rolling up your sleeves on the shop floor.”

Clearly he is a good judge of character, a quick judge, too. Is that down to his impatience? “I have instincts but I know better than to react to them straight away because that’s knee jerk. It’s bad, bad, bad practice to form an opinion of someone after only 20 minutes, unless they are being abusive.”

Does he have an instant prejudice against public-school types? He sighs. “Not really, but if you are born with a silver spoon in your mouth, it doesn’t mean that you have a brain in your head.

“If your parents can afford to send you to Eton that’s not your fault, but Eton isn’t going to make you brilliant. It can make you charming and polite, that’s good, but it doesn’t make you better than anyone else.”

What motivates him to carry on with his businesses? How much is enough? “I have got enough yes. Don’t need any more. But I like making it. That’s in my nature. It’s like a footballer likes scoring goals.”

What does he like about it? “It’s the buzz, isn’t it?

Creating something. Making something. Being successful. That is the buzz. Having a deal. It’s a buzz.”

And his motivation for carrying on with The Apprentice? “There is a certain amount of ego involved, to be fair. It is nice to be recognised, nice to be famous. But my main motive for doing it is to instil entrepreneurial skill and enterprise into young people.”

At the beginning of the show he lists what he doesn’t like. “I don’t like cheats. I don’t like schmoozers. I don’t like a— lickers.”

When I ask him now what he does like he says: “The first daffodils of spring, Shakespearean sonnets, walking barefoot in the sand.” No, of course he doesn’t. He’s all about the not liking.

Having talked about the folly of making instant judgments, I will now make some. After an hour or so in his company, I would say Lord Sugar is repetitive in conversation, intellectually complacent, distracted, and, yes, impatient. He is almost certainly an anal retentive and did I mention repetitive?

Like David Brent, he shouts you down, has no social skills or tact, and is boastful, though I do get that he is sending himself up when he says how brilliant he is.

I don’t share these conclusions with him, but I do ask if he ever slips into self-parody. “No, I’m pleased to say I’m not an actor. What you see is what you get. I’ve met you before haven’t I?” Nope. “Yeah, you’ve been here before.” Nope. “Yeah you have. It obviously wasn’t a memorable moment for you.”

And with that slightly bizarre exchange we part company, me blinking into the sunshine feeling slightly punch drunk, him barking like a terrier at some unfortunate on the phone.

Sir Christopher Lee: ‘I’m softer than people think’

Upstairs at the Bafta building on Piccadilly there is a wall lined with black-and-white stills from David Lean films, mostly from the Forties and Fifties. As he walks past them, Sir Christopher Lee, the 88-year-old screen legend, takes them in with knowing nods and says, almost under his breath: “And here’s Charles and Trevor and John.” (Laughton, Howard and Mills, for the record).

He’s worked with them all; in fact the record books show that Lee has worked with more Hollywood greats and been in more films than any other actor alive, some 350. When people come up to him and say they have seen him in all his films, he likes to say: “No you haven’t.” Even he hasn’t seen all his films.

The game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, indeed, would have worked just as well if it had been called Six Degrees of Christopher Lee (if Lee had rhymed with separation). He gets to Bacon in two, by the way, having starred in the 1977 film Starship Invasions, which also starred Sean McCann, who starred with Bacon in The Air Up There (1994). According to the online Oracle of Bacon, Lee is ranked second only to Rod Steiger as the centre of “the Hollywood galaxy”.

Lee is here at Bafta because his contribution to the film industry is about to be honoured with a Bafta Fellowship. “It means a lot to me,” he says, “because it is a pat on the back from the profession. I shall probably have tears on the night of the ceremony. I’m much softer than people think. I don’t present to the world an emotional face. I’m pretty good at self-control, but I am easily moved.”

He adds that when you have been through five years of war you tend to save tears for reality, rather than the make believe of the cinema. “That is real horror and blood. When the Second World War finished I was 23 and already I had seen enough horror to last me a lifetime. I’d seen dreadful, dreadful things, without saying a word. So seeing horror depicted on film doesn’t affect me much.”

Golden Gun 1974

Christopher Lee played Scaramanga opposite Roger Moore’s James Bond in The Man with the Golden Gun REX FEATURES

The only time you see tears from a soldier, he reckons, is at a military funeral. “Very difficult to keep them back. So many of my comrades from the war have died lately. And from the acting profession. Susannah York. John Barry. I turn to the Telegraph’s obituaries page with trepidation.” His best friend was the actor Peter Cushing and when he died in 1994, he felt there was no one left to have “remember when?” conversations with.

On the subject of his war record, Lee is like a man wrestling with a secret he longs to tell, metaphorically wincing in order to draw attention to an old war wound, only to say that he doesn’t want to talk about it. He will allude, for example, to his time with the Special Operations Executive, but when you ask him to expand he will look affronted.

“I was attached to the SAS from time to time but we are forbidden – former, present, or future – to discuss any specific operations.” Later he raises the subject again and says: “Let’s just say I was in Special Forces and leave it at that. People can read in to that what they like.”

When I ask whether his Bafta Fellowship means more to him than his knighthood last year, he raises the cane playfully at me and says that the two honours are very different and that if I say otherwise “I shall unsheathe my sword stick!” Is it really a sword stick? “Wish it was. But I do know how to fight with a sword. I did all my own fight scenes and have the scars to prove it.”

Lee isn’t as tall as he once was, having, he thinks, lost about an inch from his full height of 6ft 5in, but he doesn’t stoop. Today he is wearing cords and a polo neck. He has a long, angular face, still piercing eyes and a white beard. As for his hair, let’s just say it fits.

His voice, meanwhile, is still deep and his recall is excellent. He never hesitates over a name. The keen intellect that enabled him to become multilingual – he is fluent in French, German, Spanish and Italian, and can also get by in Swedish, Greek and Russian – is still, it seems, in evidence.

Even at the grand age of 88 he has no intention of slowing down. He recently had a cameo in a yet-to-be-released sequel to his best film, The Wicker Man. He is also in negotiation to appear in The Hobbit, the prequel to The Lord of the Rings, in which he also starred. That is the thing about Lee: he is the king of the franchise, the only common denominator between the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Star Wars series, the Hammer horrors and the Bond films (he played Scaramanga, Bond’s nemesis in The Man With The Golden Gun).

We shall come to those. For now I ask what he has against retirement. “It’s not for me. I hate being idle. As dear Boris used to say, when I die I want to die with my boots on. Which he did. As did Vincent. And Peter.” (He is referring to Karloff, Price and Cushing, of course.)

As we talk I notice he cannot bring himself to utter the D-word. Although he was very good as Dracula, it did cast a long shadow over his career. And now, for him, mentioning the count is almost a taboo, as mentioning Macbeth is for other actors. The most he will do is allude to him, when pushed. And he recalls with a shudder that when he was knighted last year the tabloids ran punning headlines such as “Fangs for the honour”.

Dracula

Dracula cast a shadow over Christopher Lee’s career

“Pathetic,” he says with a solemn shake of his head. “Pathetic.” He suits his knighthood because he is a man who carries himself with great dignity. And he not only votes Conservative but believes in the sanctity of marriage. He and his wife Gitte, a one-time Chanel model, married in 1961. They have one daughter. “The secret to a long marriage in the film industry? Marry someone wonderful, as I did. And always have her come along on location.”

His knighthood, also suits him and it is in keeping with the gentility of his upbringing. He attended Wellington College, his father was a colonel in the King’s Royal Rifles, his cousin was Ian Fleming, his mother was a Contessa. When he told her he wanted to be an actor she was mortified. “She did a real Bernhardt, saying: ‘The shame of it! Think of the shame you are bringing to the family!’ Then she said something which to this day I cannot argue with. ‘Think of all the frightful people you will meet!’”

The 1958 film Dracula Has Risen From The Grave made him a star. Van Helsing was played by Peter Cushing and it had a huge international impact, in part because colour was still a novelty and there was so much blood in it. It was also partly because Lee brought out the dark, brooding sexuality of Dracula, something that his predecessor Bela Lugosi had never managed.

Three more Dracula films at the end of the Sixties consolidated his success. And all are considered classics of the genre to this day. Was it a problem that he was simply too good as Dracula? “I think there is a lot…” Long pause. “There is a lot of misunderstanding about me in that role. It had never been played properly before that. With me it was all about the power of suggestion to make the unbelievable believable.”

We have come to the other word that makes him shudder, typecasting. “The same happened to Peter and Vincent. They made some wonderful serious movies but are only known for horror. That was why I went to America. I couldn’t see anything happening here except a continuation of what had gone before. A couple of friends, Dick Widmark and Billy Wilder, told me I had to get away from London otherwise I would always be typecast.”

Christopher Lee in The Mummy, 1959 REX FEATURES

His first film upon arriving in Hollywood was Airplane 77 and he came close to actual death in that, having to act dead under water without breathing apparatus. “The stunt men made me an honorary member of their guild after that. I did all sorts of genres in America, some of which I don’t care to remember.”

Is he referring to the soft porn film, or is that an urban myth? “No that was long before, in 1970. But it is true I was in a soft porn film, though I had no idea that was what it was when I agreed to the role. I was told it was about the Marquis de Sade. I flew out to Spain for one day’s work playing the part of a narrator. I had to wear a crimson dinner jacket. There were lots of people behind me. They all had their clothes on. There didn’t seem to be anything peculiar or strange.”

He forgot about the film then one day, well, he tells it better. “A friend said: ‘Do you know you are in a film in Old Compton Street?’ In those days that was where the mackintosh brigade watched their films. ‘Very funny,’ I said. So I crept along there heavily disguised in dark glasses and scarf, and found the cinema and there was my name. I was furious! There was a huge row. When I had left Spain that day everyone behind me had taken their clothes off!”

Lee remained in Hollywood for a decade, playing in many genres including westerns. Anything, in fact, but horror. When he felt it was safe to return to Britain he was invited to appear on Wogan. Much to his chagrin, the producers thought it would be a good idea to open the show with Terry coming out of a coffin wrapped in a cape.

Christopher Lee as Count Dooku in the Star Wars prequel trilogy 2002-2005

Christopher Lee as Count Dooku in the Star Wars prequel trilogy 2002-2005

When I watched that clip on YouTube as part of my research, I did feel sorry for Sir Christopher. The trouble is, combined with the sheer quantity of horror films that Lee made, there is also the inconvenient fact that he is obsessed with the occult in real life. He has a library of 12,000 books on the subject.

“Yes, it’s true,” he says, “ever since I read Aleister Crowley. It was my friend Dennis Wheatley who got me interested in the occult.” Wheatley also wrote the novel upon which one of Christopher Lee’s best films was based, The Devil Rides Out.

But the film of which Lee is most proud is Jinnah, about the founder of Pakistan, where he plays the title role. It was made in 1998 and James Fox plays opposite him as Mountbatten. He also has great affection for the four films he has made with Tim Burton. There is only one great director he would love to work with, and that is Clint Eastwood.

Lee has an old man’s tendency to dismiss whole generations with a sweep. “I’ve never looked on myself as a star,” he says. “Never. To me a star is a giant and where are the giants today? The Tracys, the Coopers, the Flynns?”

Who does he rate today, then? There must be someone. He thinks for a moment. “Leonardo DiCaprio. And my good friend Johnny Depp.”

As we part company, he has only one request. “Please don’t describe me in your article as a ‘horror legend’. I moved on from that.” Fair enough, Sir Christopher. Fair enough.