What makes her so qualified to present a series on the British family? As it turns out, plenty.

On a darkening winter’s afternoon, in a gently lit studio apartment in west London,KirstyYoung sits forward on a sofa looking composed and groomed.The presenter of Desert Island Discs is 41, and today, dressed as she is in black trousers and top, with black varnish on her nails and ash blonde highlights in her shoulderlength hair, she looks like a deftly poured glass of Guinness. In her low and rolling Scottish voice, she is talking about sexual intercourse, for reasons I will explain in a minute.

‘My first boyfriend’s parents had a copy of The Joy of Sex on their shelves,’ she says.’I did look at it, but not properly. I was probably too young to deal with it, even though I thought I was pretty sophisticated. My parents certainly didn’t have a copy.’ By parents she means her mother and the stepfather she has always thought of as her father.They married when she was three. Her biological father, a policeman, walked out on the family when Kirsty was three weeks old. She was born in East Kilbride, near Glasgow, and raised from the age of eight in Stirling, where she attended a coeducational state school.When I ask if she was precocious there, she says:’Yes.Yes I was.’And how old was she when she first had a boyfriend? ‘I suppose my first boyfriend was the one who took me skating, and who walked me home from school. I was 12. I had my first kiss when I was 13. On my parents’ driveway. It was a moment of great magic,actually.’And when she first had sex? How old then? ‘Oh much older. I was a good Protestant girl. I was living in Scotland.Too cold there.You don’t take your vest off until you are 21.’

So she was 21? She laughs.’I’m not telling you how old I was when I lost my virginity!’ So, why are we talking about sex? Well, it is one of the central themes of KirstyYoung’s thought-provoking new four-part documentary series, about to be screened on BBC Two. Called The British Family, it explores the changing nature of the family from the Second World War to the present day, taking in the institution of marriage, the Women’s Liberation Front, contraception, money, divorce, modern parenting and sex.

‘Every generation thinks they invented sex,’ she says.’Yet during the war people were even more promiscuous than they are today. War is very reductive.The prospect of death brings out the most primitive instincts.We look quite puritanical today by comparison.You only need look at the Tiger Woods story to see how puritanical we are.’

The British family is a good subject forYoung because she speaks as a mother (to an eight year-old and a three year-old), a stepmother (to teenage children, 14 and 16) and a daughter of divorce. Did she talk to her mother about what went wrong in her parents’ marriage? ‘When I was very young, my mother told me she had been married before and she must have also told me I was the daughter of that marriage, and so was my sister. She told me again when I was five or six and she said:”Do you remember I told you?” but I didn’t. So she talked about it in a glancing way.We didn’t really talk about it properly until I was in my mid to late teens, but at that age you are only focused on yourself.To her credit, my mother wore her divorce very lightly. It was not her identity. It is not a painful subject for her.’

Even so, there was still a stigma attached to divorce by society at the time. Her mother remembers someone saying ‘and you with those two young girls as well’, as if it was a stain on her character.And if her mother wore her divorce lightly, it may have been for her daughter’s benefit, because, for all her precociousness, the teenage Kirsty did have, as they say nowadays,’issues’.

She suffered from bulimia for a while.Also,you suspect she doesn’t have as much closure on the subject of her parents’ divorce as she claims. ‘Without wishing to sound glib about it, it did happen at a good time for me because I had no memory of it. I never called my dad my stepdad. He feels like my dad. He’s been married to my mother for 37 years. This is the man who walked me up the aisle.The time when it did strike me forcibly was when…’ For a moment she loses her composure. There is a catch in her voice and a wet film appears on her eyes.’When my first daughter was born and she was three weeks old. It seemed a very significant moment, because that was the age I was when my parents split up. I was sitting in the bath wondering how I would feel if my marriage was imploding, when I had this tiny baby in the cot. I felt immensely vulnerable. I thought: “Good God.”‘ She swallows.’The emotional force of it hit me like a ton of bricks.’

One consequence of those formative years is thatYoung now feels she is not judgmental about other people’s circumstances.’People’s lives are full of grey areas. My mother never demonised my biological father, but divorce is full of pain and hurt. It’s traumatic.’ For a father to leave a baby that is just three weeks old, I press, something pretty dramatic must have happened.’I know. My husband was divorced and I am stepmother to his kids and the idea that he would have a life without his older two children is inconceivable.To watch him as a father…’ She trails off. She has said that she has not had ‘a relationship’ with her biological father since he walked out, but inevitably she must have been curious to know what sort of a person he was. Out of loyalty to her stepfather, did she block that curiosity out? ‘Well I did feel that as a teenager. I felt it would be disloyal. But I wasn’t quelling some well of hurt, because I had two parents who loved me.They were very present. I didn’t feel a gaping emotional hole. There were curiosities of course, there reasonably still are. But there weren’t dark moments when I thought I wanted to follow it. I think it is not in my nature to be nostalgic.’ In the documentary,Young has another interesting perspective, that of the self-assured career woman. She explores what she calls ‘the cult of the housewife’ in the Fifties when women were encouraged to think that their main function in life was to do the housework, prepare meals and make babies.As one of her contributors recalled, it left her feeling ‘bored, bored, bored’.

For her own part,Young abandoned her Highers and left school because she felt restless:’As if life was happening elsewhere.’ She sidestepped university and decided to work as an au pair in Spain and Switzerland, before joining STV as a presenter on Scotland Today in 1992.

Five years later she moved south to join the news team on Channel Five, becoming the first British newsreader to perch on her desk. She soon proved herself cool under pressure; reporting the death of Diana, Princess of Wales at 5am, and later, in an epic five-hour live broadcast, covering the events of September 11 for ITV News. She became the first woman to anchor on her own, rather than being alongside a man.

When researching her new documentary, she was intrigued by the advice given by the Marriage Guidance Council in the Fifties.They wanted to promote the idea of a ‘companionable marriage’ and it gave her a new perspective on her own marriage.’Around that time your wife became someone you socialised with.Went for walks in the park with. Before that, men would just go off to the boozer with their mates. It had a big impact. Some 10,000 pubs shut down in the Fifties when men started to stay at home with their wives. My grandparents were married for 60 years and their marriage only ended when my grandfather died. He didn’t drink the money away. He didn’t beat her up. In working-class Glasgow that made him a good husband. Such low expectations.A matter of two generations later what I expect from this same institution – marriage – is almost entirely unrecognisable.’ Her husband is Nick Jones, the multimillionaire businessman who founded Soho House, the private club in London favoured by media types, and Babington House, its country equivalent in Somerset. He went to a boys’ boarding school.’As a consequence,’Young says,’he was about 18 before he worked up the confidence to have a conversation with a girl, which I find charming.’

The world in which they grew up was pretty sexist by today’s standards. One of the most popular programmes on television in the early Seventies was MissWorld.’Can you believe the way they got the contestants to turn around so as they could see their backsides?’Young says. ‘So excruciating. But it was a big event in our house. In fact, we would go next door to watch it because they had a colour television. It was family viewing. I suppose you could say that at least the objectification of woman was all out in the open then. We are not as explicit about it these days.’We are in sensitive territory here, I suspect.Young is a skilful interviewer, but in the past her critics have suggested that, well, her being easy on the eye has not exactly hurt her career.’That’s a hard one for me to judge,’ she says when I ask about this.’I’m perfectly reasonable looking, but I don’t think I am arm candy. It’s certainly not the case that I was such a stratospherically good-looking person that I think they could only have chosen me for my looks. I think I look presentable. But whatever I say on this subject I am only going to end up sounding stupid.’ I ask if she has encountered sexism in her career. ‘Yes, but not badly enough to make me want to throw in the towel. I don’t think it hindered my progress. There were one or two glancing blows perhaps.And there was one occasion when it did bother me and I didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t deal with it particularly well, but I was very young.The flip side is I also gained from being a woman and Scottish. Because I came along at a time when networks were wanting to diversify.Thirty-five years ago, there wouldn’t have been Scottish newsreaders.And you certainly wouldn’t have had a young, female Scottish newsreader. So I think probably I would be kidding myself if I thought my being Scottish and my being a woman hasn’t helped me, if I’m being honest.’ She tells me a story about Michael Heseltine at the 1996 Tory party conference. She was trying to persuade him to appear on Channel Five.’He said:”I’m not going to have some little smartarse in a short skirt get the better of me.” And I thought, how interesting.That made quite an impression on me.

‘So after that I decided to wear trouser suits and speak their language. I made sure I wasn’t projecting a leggy lovely image. I became more conscious of what the clothes I was wearing communicated.’ She reckons that what people remember from the news is the weather, the sport and what she was wearing.’You are lucky if they can tell you the top three stories. It’s what you expect. It’s a visual medium. I’m working in radio now where none of that matters. As long as the voice doesn’t go. I was thrown out of the choir at school for having too deep a voice.They called me old man river.’

As well as Desert Island Discs and her documentaries, Young also has a nice little sideline as one of the regular hosts on Have I Got News ForYou. She comes across as sardonic and knowing, delivering her scripted lines with a poker face and great comic timing.’I get a real buzz from doing that. I realised early on that it is Ian and Paul’s job to be funny and anything else the host does, any ad libs, are a bonus.’ In person she has a dry sense of humour and a gift for impersonation. Her Celia Johnson is spot on and when we talk about the film Anchorman she even captures Will Ferrell as Ron Burgundy:'”Go f—yourself, San Diego [pause] One of the best yet.”When I was watching it with my brother and my husband I had tears rolling down my cheeks.They were looking at me and saying,”It’s quite funny, but not that funny.”‘ She could also relate to Broadcast News, even the moment where the anchor gets the sweats. ‘Yes. It’s a fish in water thing; there are people in a studio who just belong there.They are made better by a studio and I think I’m one of them. And there are people who just shouldn’t be there, who get the sweats and, for different reasons, it is a pleasure to watch both. I was nervous the first time I read the news in Scotland. So nervous I got big spots in front of my eyes and I thought I was going to pass out. But I learnt to love it and I don’t understand why people who are perpetually nervous continue to do it.

‘You have to ride the wave of live television and be enough of a perverse creature to enjoy it, because the opportunity to come a cropper is there.The great thing about news is that you never have to watch yourself.You do it and it’s gone. Watching yourself is rarely a pleasure.’

Is there anything about her own appearance she dislikes? ‘Yes, but women look at themselves so much they no longer see themselves. Most women spend time every day doing their hair and make-up and they just don’t see themselves any more. I can only see the faults when I look at my face. I think I look like I’ve got capped teeth and I don’t. I hate that. Don’t like that.’They are certainly very white.’I know.And I’ve never had them bleached.Yet when I see pictures of myself I think:”Ah, the woman with the fake teeth.” I don’t think it’s why I’m employed. People do refer to you as “blonde”, but all I ever tried to do in my job was look polished and presentable. I don’t think my editors chose me for the job because I was blonde.They chose me because I was a good live performer. I could keep my cool.’ She thinks part of the reason she has composure is that she has perspective.

‘All that can go wrong in a studio is that you make a prize a—of yourself. It’s not like you are doing surgery where other people’s lives are affected.As I get older I’m more happy to admit to gaps in my knowledge, because I regard myself as a reasonably well-informed individual. I think when you are 22 and you are trying to prove yourself, it’s different. I’m more relaxed now. A prime example was Morrissey the other day.On Desert Island Discs he read something out in German, Der Nussbaum, and I translated it asThe Walnut Tree and he said:”You read that!”And I said I didn’t. I happened to know it.Twenty years ago I would have been wrong footed.’

There is no denyingYoung’s powers of empathy as an interviewer, or her ability to inspire candour.The comedian DavidWalliams admitted to her that he had questioned his sexuality and battled with depression. Yoko Ono revealed that she had allowed John Lennon to decide whether or not to abort their son Sean.And David Cameron spoke movingly about his severely disabled son, Ivan.

She is into her fourth season of the show now, having been given a rough ride by the critics in the first few months.’I took it quite personally,’ she says.’But now I feel I can do Desert Island Discs without worrying about what people think. I feel I’m doing it justice.And broadcasting on the radio means you don’t have to watch yourself.You are judged only on the strength of your words, the tone of your voice, the sharpness of your mind.’There was another film we could have discussed, To Die For. In that, the ambitious weathergirl played by Nicole Kidman says:’You aren’t really anyone unless you are on TV.’ KirstyYoung became someone by being ‘on TV’, but she now seems to prefer being ‘on radio’. Perhaps ‘on radio’ she feels she is not only doing justice to Desert Island Discs, but also to herself.

Critics may have sent up her ‘sanctimonious and sentimental’ style of presenting. But Esther Rantzen, prospective MP, still isn’t afraid to hug her would-be constituents. Will her touchy-feely tactics work in Luton?

It is 11am on a flat and sunless winter morning and Esther Rantzen is holding a surgery with her constituents in Luton South. To point out that these are not actually her constituents yet, that she is still only the prospective parliamentary candidate rather than the sitting MP, would not only seem churlish and impolite but brave.

For beneath the high camp and flirty bonhomie – she calls everyone she meets ‘m’dear’, ‘darling’ or ‘sweetheart’ – lies a thin layer of icy determination and single-mindedness. As someone who worked with her once said: ‘Esther’s charm is like a light bulb being switched on and off. There is no natural sunlight.’

Her campaign headquarters, a small, two-room office, is in the town’s shopping centre and was donated to her by a local businessman. (‘Obviously,’ she jokes, ‘I’ll declare it in the register of members’ interests.’) When she opened it, both ITN and the BBC showed up to cover the event, a level of media coverage about which her rivals can only fantasise.

There are posters of Esther in the window advertising her website, esther4luton.com, and these remind you that she is one of the few people in public life, Boris and Nigella being others, who has no need of a surname.

She holds these ‘surgeries’ three mornings a week. The idea is that she opens her doors to the public to listen to their concerns, but what actually happens is that she becomes a magnet for the dispossessed, disillusioned and conspiratorial.

Because of the way she throws herself into ‘the people’s problems’, you could be on the set of That’s Life! circa 1981, a time when she was the third most famous blonde in the country, after Margaret Thatcher and Lady Diana Spencer.

She is a vision of calculated empathy. The widened eyes, the fluttering lashes, the head that nods as the mouth purses to denote seriousness, or opens generously into that toothy smile.

Esther Rantzen certainly knows how to talk to people, put them at ease, listen. She even hugs one man. He has been driven to despair by the Child Support Agency (CSA), which is forcing him to sell his house so that he can pay the £7,700 he owes.

When he starts sobbing she tells him to stand up. She then marches over and gives him a hug. And why not? Esther was doing hugs before Cheryl Cole was born. ‘You know what you should do?’ she says to him, looking up into his eyes (she is much shorter than you expect – ‘everyone assumes I am 6ft tall,’ she says). ‘When things look most grim you should find room in your life for something fun. Have you seen the film Up?’ The man shakes his head. Sniffs. ‘You should go and see it with your son. It will take your mind off the CSA, if only for a couple of hours. It will help restore some balance into your life.’ It’s good advice.

There is a lovely moment of confusion when the next Lutonian sits down for a chat. He is in his late thirties, I would say, and wearing a tracksuit and a beanie hat. ‘I like your hat,’ Esther says. ‘Made in Luton?’ ‘Yeah, I was born here.’ When the man has said his bit – about MPs’ expenses, quantitative easing and Agenda 21 – Esther asks him to come back in a month’s time and give her an update. Sensing she is humouring him, he says: ‘You think I’m a nutter.’ The blink. The serious face. ‘Not at all.’

When he leaves, she turns to her computer, which has an esther4luton screensaver logo bouncing around it, and taps in some notes, talking over her shoulder to me. One of the recurring themes of these meet-the-people-of-Luton sessions, she says, is that there are no leisure facilities for either the young or the old. Other concerns include parking, housing, street crime and unemployment.

As she is talking, a man in a cloth cap wanders in and asks for her autograph. ‘Would you rather have “with love” or “best wishes”?’ she asks him, without missing a beat. In many years of watching politicians on the campaign trail, I don’t think I have ever seen one asked for an autograph.

An elderly lady, who is pretty much deaf and says she has to put her glasses on to hear, comes in with ‘evidence’ she has gathered of corruption, but she can’t give any of the details away because it is ‘political dynamite’. It soon becomes apparent that she is what psychologists call a copper-bottomed loon. It ought to be embarrassing, what with me being there taking notes for a national newspaper, but somehow it isn’t.

Esther is unembarrassable. She just smiles that frozen smile of hers, shifting seamlessly from the serious to the frivolous, as she did all those years ago on television.

This is the second occasion I’ve seen her in action. The first begins with an early start at her seven-bedroom Georgian town house in Hampstead. The poster on the fridge here shows all the prime ministers of England. This is not her cramming for the job, but evidence of this being a family home.

She has three children and one or two of them still live here, on and off. The only other hint that this might be the home of a future politician is a photograph of her with Jesse Jackson. Most of the other photographs are of Desmond Wilcox – Dessie, as she called him – her husband who died in 2000.

We head up to Luton with her in the driving seat, behind the wheel of her hybrid car. She tells me not to worry because she is an advanced driver, a course that was given to her as a present. As she drives she tells me about her plans and I am impressed by her ability to multi-task, fielding my questions, pointing out The X Factor house, listening to instructions from her satnav, taking calls from her PA on her hands free.

Although she has two PAs who job share – as well as a team of five volunteers in Luton – she has a tendency to micro-manage her own life. You get the impression that this is a woman who could organise D-Day before breakfast. And she has nothing to prove as a campaigner.

In founding Childline, the 24-hour counselling service for abused children, she produced something of lasting value – it still receives two million calls a year. She even trained as a child counsellor and still does a lot of work for the charity. But you also suspect she is not a good delegator. ‘Domineering’ and ‘controlling’ are words that often crop up in connection with Esther Rantzen.

Her day today begins with a meeting at easyJet, one of the biggest employers in Luton. From here we go to a school and then to a hostel for battered women. It is exhausting just watching her.

There is no doubting her stamina, but you do have to wonder what her real motivation is, to be embarking upon a new, demanding career at the age of 69. Is it about craving an audience? Attention?

This would be understandable – after all, for 21 years she presented and produced one of the most popular shows on British television. An odd mix of consumer campaigning and misshapen vegetables, That’s Life! clocked up audiences of 22 million viewers at its peak.

But semi-retirement and the death of her husband seemed to leave her in an emotional void. She tried to fill it with appearances on Strictly Come Dancing and I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! but it yawned ever bigger. It is clear she uses activity as a way of staving off not only ageing but ennui.

When she appeared on In The Psychiatrist’s Chair more than a decade ago she discussed her postnatal depression, her fear of loneliness and her lack of introspection. Dr Anthony Clare noted that: ‘Ours is a narcissistic and voyeuristic world in which for some it can be difficult to be entirely sure one privately exists without some validation from the public world.’ Is that what her desire to become an MP is really about? We shall see.

Luton South was a safe Labour seat until Margaret Moran became one of the most high-profile MPs involved in the expenses scandal, claiming £20,000 in dry rot expenses for a second home in Southampton used by her partner.

It was this that made Esther angry. ‘I’ve got a cottage in the New Forest 10 minutes away from Southampton and so I know that journey. I know how far it is from Luton and know there is no way it can be justified as an expense. I thought, what an insult. I wrote in to a paper saying it was enough to make you want to stand against her. When someone from ITN rang and asked if I would be interested in visiting Luton to look into this, I thought, why not?’

She decided to stand against Moran as an independent. Then Moran announced she would be standing down at the next election.

Esther conferred with Martin Bell. ‘He made it clear his was a protest vote against the sitting Tory MP, and that was why Labour and Lib Dem didn’t stand against him. He said I should have waited to see who was the most notorious king or queen of expenses still standing and stand against them.’

Why didn’t she heed his advice? One reason, she admits, is that Luton is only half an hour from where she lives. ‘Had it been Glasgow East it would have been impossible for me. But more importantly, I fell in love with Luton. People in the street greeted me so warmly. I was touched and impressed. They kept telling me they didn’t feel listened to and that Moran was invisible.The more I saw Luton, the more I loved it. I love its history and its warmth and its ethnic diversity.’

History? ‘Famous for its hats.’ Luton is about two thirds Asian, with one of the highest Muslim populations in Britain. How does her being Jewish go down? ‘I went to a mosque and sat with a group of imams. I said: “Look I’m a 69-year-old Jewish woman, can I represent you?” And they said: “Of course you can, we’re British. All we want is for people to talk things through with us.” I think people are pretty practical. They just want someone to do the job.’

What about the Muslims in Luton who heckled the parading soldiers? ‘But it wasn’t the community in Luton doing that, it was a few people who were militant in their beliefs. I’ve had lots of Lutonians say: “That does not reflect what our community thinks.”’

A number of voters I spoke to said they thought she might be a good person to have as an MP because she is famous. She would get the town noticed in Westminster. When I tell her this she nods. ‘What I’ve been doing for the past 40 years is accessible. That will stand against me in terms of people who won’t like what I have done. On the other hand, they may be outweighed by those who like my record on child protection, or whatever.’

Either way, she will have some tricky opponents, including a new Labour candidate, Gavin Shuker, Nigel Huddleston for the Tories and a Lib Dem Luton councillor, Qurban Hussain. When we pull into a petrol station, she tells me she has to keep a record of all her expenses. ‘There are regulatory limits on how much you can spend in a campaign.

I can’t claim expenses but obviously you have to find the money from somewhere and people assume I am a rich television cat, but actually I’m an ex-rich television cat who doesn’t have the kind of spare money needed to run a campaign. I am working with volunteers, but they can’t afford to be volunteers indefinitely. I have to find a model, to see whether people who approve of the idea of an independent fighting a seat are prepared to pay to have someone with new skills and useful life experiences fight their corner. I am hoping people will offer small donations. I’m not new to fundraising.’

As to the specific policies she will be fighting on, she is keeping her powder dry. ‘The major parties haven’t brought out their manifestos yet so there is no point me rushing out with one. There is no point me making statements now that may soon become out of date. But in terms of national issues, obviously I am interested in child protection. And the expenses process – that needs to be transparent.’

Having reverted to her natural brunette hair colouring after an experiment with red and years of being blonde, and having made plain her approval of Botox, it is clear Esther cares about her appearance. Today she is wearing a leather jacket and pearls. ‘You do have to think about how you look. You want to be businesslike but not intimidating.

‘When I started in television, journalists would ask to do items about my clothes and I would say certainly not, because I want to be taken seriously. But now I have learnt that people take you at your own estimation and if you walk out looking like a pile of old washing they will think that is how you think of yourself. And that in turn is how they will think of you.’

At the school, the headmaster says something to me that makes me smile, for the wrong reasons. He says the trouble with the sitting MP is that she has no authority left since the expenses scandal. ‘She has no teeth.’

There is another poignant moment when Esther has to explain to a group of nine year-olds who she is, or was. ‘I made a programme which once featured a dog that could say “sausages”,’ she explains. This only makes them look more confused.

Afterwards, I say to Esther that realising these children had never heard of the dog who said sausages made me feel old. ‘I know,’ she says. ‘That is why I did I’m a Celebrity, I had realised that when I was talking about Childline to children, I no longer had the link I had had with previous generations, so I thought if I do a show like that, a new generation will know who I am. Quite a lot of them talk to me about the jungle.’

Esther Rantzen was born in June 1940 into a family of liberal Jews in north London. Her father was a BBC sound engineer; her mother was the governor of a day nursery. Educated at Somerville College, Oxford, Esther joined the BBC as a secretary in 1963 and soon became a researcher.

In 1967, Desmond Wilcox asked her to join Man Alive, where she became a trainee director. They embarked on an affair that lasted for about eight years. Wilcox’s wife found out and he moved in with Esther. They married in 1977, a month before the first of their children was born.

In 2001, when Esther published her autobiography, she became embroiled in a public spat with her stepdaughter, Cassandra Wilcox, who was unhappy with Esther’s scathing comments about her mother. Cassandra vented her contempt for Esther in a newspaper interview.

I ask how her relationships with her stepchildren are these days. ‘When I’m in Australia I try to see them. And the twins, I last saw them at a family wedding, which was nice. Cass, the oldest, I haven’t seen for a while. She was invited to Bec’s wedding [Esther’s daughter] but they were away.’ Does she regret opening that wound? ‘Yes, I wrote the autobiography at the time Dessie died and there were things that he wanted to say, things that had hurt him. Would I write it now? No.’

Before she had the affair with Wilcox she had one with Nicholas Fairbairn MP. What did she learn from him about the political world? ‘Nothing.’ Too young? ‘I think he was a barrister then. What I did learn about was the law. That a clever defence lawyer can run rings around the police. Nicholas was a dandy. He designed his own bowler hats.’

Ah. Hats again. And her preoccupation with them explained. Perhaps.

What would her husband have made of her becoming an MP? ‘Dessie tended to be the voice of sanity, but if he saw I was determined he’d support me. And it would be easier if he were alive because he was very practical and efficient. If there was a big decision to make we’d make it together.’

Esther appears to be someone who needs constant stimulation and deadlines to avoid the boredom of contemplation, of being with herself.

Is that what this is about, this need for a workload? She thinks about it, rolling her tongue against her teeth. ‘I do thrive on adrenalin. When I first said I was going to stand as an MP, Edwina Currie was quoted as saying that Esther doesn’t know about hard work. I thought, but then Edwina doesn’t know about presenting and producing a consumer show for 25 years.’

There is no love lost between the two women, another feud. Esther once said: ‘Fishnets are many things, but elegant they are not. I think they are quite sluttish. In the Eighties, I did go through an Edwina Currie stage of wearing them.’ Me-ow!

Esther will turn 70 within weeks of winning her seat in Luton, if she does indeed win it. Does that worry her? ‘Turning 70? I will be a mere laughing child. Do I think about that? Never.’

Esther Rantzen seems to be something of a Marmite figure, someone the public loves or, because of the mawkishness, self-promotion and sanctimoniousness they remember from her That’s Life! years, loathes.

I warmed to her. She may be a megalomaniac but she also has a pleasing line in self-deprecation and she certainly has fire in her belly. As to her motives, I suspect she thinks a late career as an MP would make for a pleasing coda to a colourful career.

But that’s not to say she wouldn’t be good at the job. A couple of weeks after we meet, she rings to say that the man who was being hounded by the CSA has had his case resolved happily. Esther had mobilised the local press, accompanied him to court and got them to back down on forcing him to sell his house. I imagine she would also put Luton on the map… if she survives that long.

She tells me she plans to walk the streets of the city centre at night to assess for herself how serious the problem of street violence is there. ‘I’m going with a kid who said he didn’t feel safe. I’ve asked the police and they have said it’s OK. I should be safe enough. There are plenty of CCTVs.’ Of course there are. And a camera is a camera.

There is a story in Jack Dee’s autobiography, Thanks for Nothing, which has been haunting me since I read it. Because he was a ‘very low achieving pupil’ at Pilgrims’ prep school in Winchester, he was picked on by one of his teachers. This teacher would make the young Dee stand on a chair and then say things like: ‘Dee by name, D by nature.’ The rest of the class would laugh and point.

Dee took his revenge, coldly and systematically. ‘I would go around the classrooms during break and if one of the boys from my little blacklist was there, unattended by a member of staff, I’d simply walk up to him and before he could say: “What do you want?” would punch him in the face.’ The more people he attacked, the angrier and more isolated he became.

‘It was like a fire that had started inside me. I really hated fighting people and hurting them, but felt unable to stop.’ I know, not what you expect, is it? The Jack Dee with whom we are familiar from stand-up comedy and television may scowl, but you assume his misanthropy is an act.

In person, he is friendly enough, if a little halting in his delivery. Today he is wearing a baseball jacket rather than the suit and tie of his stage persona.

He is 47 and stands at 5ft 10in, ‘allowing for a two-inch margin of error’. His features are set into an expression of surly anger at the world. He says ‘mm’ a lot, but whether in agreement or disagreement it is hard to determine. This, given how funny he is on stage, is unnerving. You wish he would crack a smile, then you realise with a start that he is smiling – and this is even more unnerving.

‘It was quite dysfunctional,’ he says now of his school days. ‘But it was my response as a child to an unhappy situation. I don’t think I realised until long after I had left that school quite why I did it.’

This cold anger had nothing to do with his background, by the way. His father was an executive in a paper firm and life was, he says, comfortable.

‘And happy. Nothing unhappy about my background at all. I think possibly, knowing myself better now, the anger was to do with creative frustration. I had no outlet for my creativity.’

The teenage Jack Dee failed common entrance and ended up at a comprehensive where he didn’t fit in because he was considered ‘posh’ for having gone to a prep school. He then flunked his A-levels. While his peers went on to university he went from one unpromising job to another, including working in an artificial leg factory.

He didn’t discover comedy until 1986, the year he met Jane, his future wife and the mother of his four children. On an impulse, he walked into the Comedy Store and took advantage of the ‘open mic’ slot at the end of the evening to have a go at stand-up.

He wasn’t exactly sure why he did it that night other than a feeling he had that his sense of humour was nagging at him ‘like an impossible toddler’. But he didn’t have a single thing to say. Not one joke. ‘It’s the kind of thing you wake up from, sweating, heart thumping, hugely relieved to realise that it was just a nightmare.’

The act before him was booed off. The crowd was baying for blood. He stood there at the mic and someone shouted: ‘Come on, tell us a joke.’ Quite belligerently he said: ‘No’. And the audience laughed. Then a question popped in his head. ‘Anyone here from Finland?’ The audience sat there with expectant grins. He waited until the silence felt awkward then said: ‘Well that’s my act buggered then.’ This got an even bigger laugh.

Still, to go up there with no material prepared. What manner of masochism was this? ‘Yeah, it was a strange situation to have got myself into. I was compelled to it. It was an appointment I couldn’t get out of and it was getting closer and closer.

‘I think I was drawn to that which frightened me most. I was chasing it down. I was so keen to become a comedian that actually doing the comedy itself almost came second.’

Another disturbing layer to Jack Dee the man, as opposed to Jack Dee the comedian, is the realisation that behind the miserable act he plays up to on stage and screen lies genuine and clinical depression.

He sees a therapist. He takes medication. At one point he thought his depression was caused by his drinking, which he says was out of control, but in 1990, after six years of AA, he realised that drink was not the problem. Depression was the problem. And the only way he could keep it at bay was to throw himself into work.

Work would set him free. When I ask him about this, on an overcast afternoon in the office in Soho where he does his writing, he says: ‘Work is a self-preservation matter for me. Without it I slide into depression. If you have the impulse to be creative, you ignore it at your peril. If I get depressed now it is because I am not doing enough creatively.’

And he uses his misanthropy and depression as a comedic conceit? ‘I think it is more a cautiousness that protects me from enthusiasm about things. I tend not to get excited. People perceive it as a scowl, which is fair enough.’

This was the making of him as a comedian. Everything he said sounded arch and funny. When he tried to be jolly it sounded even more sarcastic.

Even so, you would think he could afford to be a little bit happy with how things turned out. Is it, I ask, like the Oscar Wilde quote: there are two types of tragedy, not getting what you want and getting it? ‘Nothing tops the feeling of discovering comedy,’ Dee says. ‘But everything after that was tempered with a feeling that I was not doing things as well as I would like to.

‘I never feel: “Oh great, now I’ve got my TV show”, or whatever. I’ve never ever been excited by any of that. I remember the first series I was offered at Channel 4. I just said: “Oh, that’s good.” And after I left the room, apparently the Channel 4 guy grabbed my agent’s arms and said: “Is he taking the p— or something?” It was because I didn’t react. Didn’t look happy. Wasn’t pleased. Didn’t even say thank you.’

So he didn’t feel happy even then? ‘No, I didn’t really. Too cautious to let go. I think it was more a feeling of: “I have got to deliver now.” To sit back and enjoy it is alien to me. I have a weird inability to enjoy myself.’

He must be a barrel of laughs to live with. ‘Possibly I am difficult to live with, but I don’t bring my work home much. I’m either busy or not busy. And I don’t work from home. I have an office here which has a white wall. No view. I did try working in a room with a view but it was too interesting. Too distracting.’

I am fairly certain there were no ghost writers involved in his book, which is unusual for a celebrity memoir. Only he could have written it because it has his comic timing and dry humour. He explains that he lives in a detached Victorian house in Wandsworth, for example, but ‘Like many bastards, I have a second home in the country’.

The book is an engaging mix of self-deprecating anecdotes and stark revelations. Did he like the young man he encountered in his memoirs? ‘Yeah, I felt the need to deal with him compassionately. Not mock myself. There is a journey there.’ As the jacket says, you don’t wake up bitter and jaundiced. It takes years of dedication and commitment.

There are some tender almost poetic passages, too. At one point he describes breaking up with a girlfriend on the phone. ‘When she phoned me it was as if the meter was running, a clock ticking, time being marked until she could reasonably say goodbye and go. I could hear, in her cracked, short answers, the sound of broken love.

‘Inevitably, the final conversation came. Two people talking through wire, one in an empty London flat, the other sitting on the busy stairs of temporary digs. Four hundred miles apart and talking about needing more space. The words were awkwardly handed over, like a child surrendering stolen sweets.’

Religion has always been just below his surface. He only grew out of what he calls his ‘Carrie phase’ at school after he had a religious epiphany of sorts, a feeling of calmness while sitting in Winchester Cathedral one day contemplating a statue of Christ.

‘I remember wanting to look away but being unable to.’ Yet, though he felt a certain ‘longing’ and was drawn to prayer, he found it as disturbing as swimming with bricks tied to his feet. He even considered ordination at one point and went to discuss it with the director of ordinands for Westminster. It didn’t work out.

‘I was in a spiritual vacuum. I didn’t feel empty so much as unmotivated. I felt I was on the wrong train and didn’t know what station to get off at. What I felt most was a mounting realisation that life is too precious not to be spent pursuing what you ought to be pursuing. In many ways it was a positive force because it drove me. The sense of being lost was a self-preservation. It was a voice telling me: you haven’t found yourself yet.’

When he is working on Lead Balloon, the wry BBC sitcom he writes with Pete Sinclair, Dee is disciplined about spending time in this office, unlike Rick Spleen, the character he plays. Spleen is a hopeless procrastinator who complicates his life needlessly with excruciating lies. He is also almost pathologically parsimonious.

Dee describes Spleen as being a ‘what if’ version of himself. ‘There is a part of me that can be very stingy and it drives Jane mad. What Rick has, which I don’t have, is that capacity to be excited by things. He gets excited only to be bashed down when things go wrong. Maybe I fear things going wrong so much that I pre-empt them by not getting excited about them when they appear to be going well.’

Spleen is an indulgent father; is Dee unpushy as a parent as well? ‘The only thing I care about is that they don’t waste their time. I have to be careful not to push my own anxieties on to them and they would probably be happy if they were more relaxed than me.’

Lovely scented soap, that’s what Bob Hoskins likes about this restaurant around the corner from his house in North London. I know this because when he returns from what Americans call the bathroom he says: ‘They have lovely scented soap ’ere.’ He doesn’t call it a bathroom, by the way, even though he has spent a lot of time in Hollywood working with the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and Oliver Stone.

‘I reached a point where they said you may as well live here, Bob. It’s where the work is. Where the money is. Get yourself a nice house with a swimming pool. It was an attractive offer but I couldn’t possibly have brought my kids up there.’

Though he does a decent American accent, notably in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, you only have to hear him say a couple of words in his natural speaking voice to know that he is as cockney as jellied eels. He couldn’t live full time anywhere other than London – even his country retreat in East Sussex, an oast house.

Today he is sitting in an enormous, high-backed chair which seems to emphasise his height, or lack of it. He is 5ft 6in. Pauline Kael, the film critic, once compared him to ‘a testicle on legs’. For his part he describes himself as a cube and says that ‘not even my mum would call me pretty’.

But the camera loves him. He grips you with his eyes as he talks. And he has a mischievous grin, which he deploys generously.

Where were we? Scented soap. I was about to explain why this observation was telling. Hoskins, for all the high testosterone of The Long Good Friday, his unforgettable film debut in 1980, is oddly in touch with his feminine side. You could see it in his first television drama, Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven in 1978. He did a rather delicate, skippy little dance in that.

‘The choreographer got me to rehearse in a room without mirrors and convinced me I was Fred Astaire. Then when I saw the film there was this little hippopotamus running around.’

Getting in touch with his feminine side came as a revelation to Hoskins. ‘I realised one day that men are emotional cripples. We can’t express ourselves emotionally, we can only do it with anger and humour. Emotional stability and expression comes from women. When they have babies they say “hello, you’re welcome” and they mean it. It is an emotional honesty.

‘I started my career by becoming a stalker, watching women in the street, the way they greet each other. I thought if I could capture some of that expression, that depth of emotion, it will make me interesting to watch as an actor.’

What is he like now, away from the camera? Can he express emotion in private?

‘No, I’m terrible. I can only do it on screen. My dad died recently at the age of 93 and I found myself crying, then I stopped and thought this is acting. This isn’t honest. You’re not giving him the honest emotions he deserves. But the truth is, I didn’t know how to anymore. I was completely confused. It had become a curse. I can turn the tears on professionally.

‘When my dad died I thought I’m doing this for the people around me rather than for myself.’ And when he was on his own? ‘Didn’t cry. Partly because whenever I remembered my dad I grinned. He was a funny old stick.’

Hoskins’s father was a shy man, a bookkeeper; his mother, a nursery school cook, was more of an extrovert. Bob was their only child, born in 1942 and he perhaps felt he missed having siblings, given that he went on to have four children himself, two from his first marriage, two from his second.

He has been with Linda, his second wife, for 28 years and is devoted to her to the point of being uxorious. He has suffered from depression in the past and when he is feeling ‘fragile and pathetic’ only a cuddle from his wife will help.

I ask if he ever catches himself using his actorly skills with her, manipulating emotions to win an argument, say. ‘You do sometimes think, Oh, I could pull one here. But I’m not going to give you specific examples because my wife will kill me when she reads this.

‘One of the things I’ve realised is that I am very simple. My wife asked me once if I loved her. I said: “Look love, I’m a simple man. I love you. End of story.” But I guess you gotta keep saying it with women. I guess she needed reassurance. Blokes are very arrogant, they always assume the woman still loves them.’

Hoskins left school at 15 with one O-level and drifted from job to job: porter, lorry-driver, window cleaner. He then did a three-year accountancy course but dropped out.

His life changed dramatically in 1968 when he accompanied a friend to an audition and got mistaken for a candidate. He was asked to read for a part and ended up being given the lead. As soon as he started acting he knew it was for him.

‘I fit into this business like a sore foot into a soft shoe. But when I started I thought, Christ I ought to learn to act now I’m doing this for a living. I was a completely untrained, ill-educated idiot. So I read Stanislavski, but I thought it was all so obvious. Same with Strasberg. He just seemed to be saying look busy. Impress the boss. I soon realised actors are just entertainers, even the serious ones. That’s all an actor is. He’s like a serious Bruce Forsyth.’

The other great turning point in his career was when he realised that the camera could read his mind. It was when he was playing the doomed London gangland boss in The Long Good Friday. In the film’s closing scene his character realises he is being driven to his death. In two long minutes, without a word, Hoskins moves with measured facial gestures from shock to terror to wry acceptance.

‘For that last shot,’ he says, ‘John Mackenzie said I’m going to put the camera on your face Bob for five minutes and I want you to just think your way through the film. I said “you’re f—ing joking, ain’t you?” So I thought my way through the film and there you see it in the final edit.

‘We drove all round London for that scene. What I learnt from that was that if you was thinking the thoughts of your character, whatever you are doing is right, it is conveyed in your eyes and body language. The camera can see your mind. It takes quite a bit of concentration. You feel exhausted afterwards. But it’s worth it.’

Sometimes though, the camera delved too far into his mind. His latest film is Disney’s long-awaited Christmas Carol. It stars Jim Carrey as Scrooge and Gary Oldman as Bob Cratchit. Hoskins plays Old Fezziwig, to whom Scrooge was apprenticed as a young man.

The film uses ‘digital performance capture’ technology which captures the movements of the actor on computerised cameras in a full 360 degrees. It also uses groundbreaking 3D technology and animation.

Endearingly, when I mention this, Hoskins says he hadn’t realised the film was in 3D.

The director is Robert Zemeckis, the Oscar-winning director of Forrest Gump. He also made Who Framed Roger Rabbit? That film left Hoskins feeling very odd indeed. His doctor told him he should have a five month rest after that.

‘I think I went a bit mad while working on that. Lost my mind. The voice of the rabbit was there just behind the camera all the time. You had to know where the rabbit would be at every angle. Then there was Jessica Rabbit and all these weasels. The trouble was, I had learnt how to hallucinate. My daughter had an invisible friend called Jeffrey and I played with her and this invisible friend until one day I actually saw the friend.

‘I was following where she was seeing it. If you do that for eight months it becomes hard to get rid of. I went to this one do where I got talking to a very county lady with a big hat and there was this weasel in her hat with a big pr–k!’

Does he think now that he did actually go insane around that time? ‘My daughter, when I came back from filming in San Francisco, she said “Dad, slow down, slow down. You’re going barmy, mate.” And I was.’

He was hyperactive? ‘Probably talking too much, yeah. The character that frightened me most though was when I did Felicia’s Journey. I played a serial killer in that. Two weeks after filming, Linda said: “Bob, you do realise you are being very strange don’t you?” And I thought, Oh f— I’ve still got a killer inside me.’

Another psychological tipping point had been the break-up of his first marriage. In the aftermath his first wife accused him of being violent, though he denies it.

He now says he simply wasn’t mature enough to be married. He had a nervous breakdown, he says. ‘And funnily enough theatre cured it. I used to go to see a psychiatrist in Harley Street but then my friend Verity said if you are going to have a nervous breakdown you should do it on stage as a one man show instead, so I did.

‘I wrote a play called The Bystander about a bloke looking through a hole in the wall and talking to pot plants. On the first day, when the tickets had been sold and I was supposed to be on stage, I wondered off in a trance and Verity had to come and find me. I was talking to the ducks on the pond. She said: “There is not one f—ing duck here who has paid for a ticket. I’ve got a full theatre waiting for you get yourself in there.”

She grabbed hold of me and dragged me down the stage in front of the audience. I did the show and when the audience applauded at the end it was like something popping. I was fine after that. Verity opened a bottle of champagne and said: “Welcome back to sanity”.’

After his first marriage failed he assumed marriage wasn’t for him. ‘But obviously it was. I thought: what would my ideal wife be? I made this woman up in my head and on the Royal wedding day in 1981, when they kept pubs open to midnight, she walked in and I thought that’s her. Sweetheart, you don’t stand a chance.’

He claps his hands and grins. ‘I didn’t need to project. She was what I wanted. That’ll do. I’m very romantic. I’ve emptied flower shops.’

How important has his second marriage been to his mental health? Does Linda keep him grounded? Tease him? ‘Yeah. She will say, all right, you’ve done well, but remember you live here with a family and two kids. That’s more important than your work.’

I ask what he is like as a father. ‘I had quite a lot of time away from them, but Linda always used to bring the kids out with me on location. With my first kids it was difficult because I didn’t see as much of them growing up as I would have liked.’ Fame puts a strain on relationships, he says, because one person has a lot of attention and the other doesn’t.

‘But it also puts a lot of pressure on you. It separates you from the human race a bit because you can’t talk to anybody about anything apart from your career and who you know. That is all anybody wants to ask you about. You can’t have a normal conversation.

‘I just want to say: “F— my career, how’s your life?” I met a little old fella in Regent’s Park when I was walking a character around. He said: “You are who you are, ain’t you?” and I said: “Yeah, I am who I am.” And he said: “That’s good. I grow roses.” And we sat talking about roses all afternoon. It was wonderful.’

There have been occasions, though, when the attention from the public has become tiresome and he has lost his temper. Linda gets quite embarrassed when this happens, he says.

‘The thing is, when the kids were babies I used to take them up the park. There was one occasion when this group of people started pointing and if you have two kids you have to give them your full concentration and so I said: “Sorry I’m with my kids today” and this woman said: “Without your fans where would you be?” And I lost it and told her to f— off. I said: “I don’t need you. If you’re a fan then pick someone else.”’

The majority of people don’t see him as a celebrity, though, he reckons. ‘They think they know me. I was in Marks & Spencer the other day when this woman said “Bob, where’s the tea?” and I showed her and she said: “No, not that fancy organic tea. Real tea, the sort of tea we drink. PG Tips. Typhoo.”’

Although Hoskins has had requests from publishers to write his memoirs, he says he hasn’t got the memory for it. He has no film posters in his house, not even for Mona Lisa, the 1986 film for which he was Oscar nominated.

‘Dementia will be a friend. It will grin at me and say: “How you going son?” I’ll be like my dad. He phoned me up one day and said: “The mafia is laundering money through my bank account.” I shot round there and realised it was the pocket money I was giving him. “You prat,” I said. “It’s the money I’ve been paying into your account.”’

I suggest that he could always have told his father: ‘The mafia? I s–t em.’ He rolls his eyes, recognising the line from The Long Good Friday.

‘Yeah I suppose I could,’ he says. ‘I still get people coming up to me and quoting lines from that film. They will say “Cut ’im” and I wonder what the hell they are talking about because I haven’t seen it for years.’

He rarely watches the films he has starred in and having made more than 80, he often can’t even remember which ones he has been in. ‘I’ll be watching a film on television at home and then realise with a shock that I’m in it.’ That’ll be the dementia kicking in, I say. ‘Yeah,’ he says with a grin.

‘I’ll be ringing my son up and telling him the mafia are using my bank account to launder money next.’

There is a photograph of Jo Brand as, I would guess, a nine year-old, wearing a floral dress and looking slim and pretty. No, more than pretty. With a plait of hair over one shoulder and, with her big eyes and big smile, she looks adorable. It is reproduced in her new memoir, Look Back in Hunger, and the caption reads: ‘Yes, I was a nice little girl once.’ How poignant is that?

She is 52 now, with a long and successful career in comedy behind her. She has, indeed, a valid ticket to ride on the celebrity memoir gravy train, which has seats still warm from Paul O’Grady, Dawn French and Julie Walters, the top three best-sellers of last Christmas.

But her motivation, you suspect, was more than mere avarice. She wanted to work out for herself how she went from being that adorable child to her first incarnation in the mid-Eighties: The Sea Monster, as her act was called, a Doc Marten-wearing, spiky-haired, overweight, alternative comedian who, with her aggressive, scatological, gynaecological and, generally, feminist comedy, delivered in a bored monotone, scared the bejesus out of a generation of men.

It was often assumed that she was a man-hating lesbian, an assumption she did nothing to dispel (despite being a man-loving heterosexual). For the record, she is married to Bernie Bourke, a psychiatric nurse, and they have two young daughters.

She became a mother at 43 and was funny on the subject. ‘They say men can never understand the pain of childbirth. Well, they can if you hit them in the testicles with a cricket bat for 14 hours.’

The impression I get, as we sip coffee on a rainy morning in the bar of the British Film Institute, is that it really was all an act. In person there is a gentleness to her which takes you by surprise. And the impression you get from her memoir is that her defining characteristic was, and probably still is, kindness. After all, for almost a decade she worked as a psychiatric nurse herself.

‘It’s such a stressful job you shouldn’t do it all your life,’ she says in her lugubrious, slightly nasal voice. ‘After a certain amount of time you become blunted to people’s needs, or cynical, or in some cases rather sadistic. People do snap and they’re the ones who make bad nurses.

‘You need patience and empathy. Sometimes you only need to give the illusion of control, because if someone is waving a machete, as happened to me once, the worst thing you can do is be a weak, heap of begging, because that feeds into their feelings of being out of control. They behave worse if they feel they’ve created chaos.’

Because they sometimes seemed so happy when they were in the manic, or ‘up’ phase of their illness, Brand used to feel strangely envious of her bipolar patients. ‘They do all those things that you would quite like to do yourself but you don’t because you lose your nerve.’

Such as? ‘They react to every impulse. If they want to throw their house keys off Waterloo Bridge they do it. But however strange their behaviour, a good nurse has to always remember that her patients are still paid up members of the human race.’

She sips her coffee. ‘You just have to see through the abuse – and sometimes the smell – and treat them with respect. What matters is not degrees in psychiatry but whether you are a warm human being who wants to help people who are suffering.’

As it happens, Brand did also have a degree, in social sciences. And in recent months she has been able to put her experiences of working for the NHS to good comedic use, co-writing and starring in Getting On, a darkly satirical, three-part drama series for BBC4 about life on a geriatric ward. It does for the medical profession what The Thick of It did for politics (and it is no coincidence that Peter Capaldi directs it). A further six series have now been commissioned, and yay to that.

As for Brand’s empathy with her patients, she thinks that may have had something to do with her family background. Though her father, a structural engineer, was not diagnosed at the time, he was a depressive, one who would fly into uncontrollable rages.

‘At the time I just thought he was a grumpy old sod. Whatever situation you are in, that is what is normal for you.’ At one point, when she was 16, this anger led to her father piling up all her clothes and burning them. Is her father embarrassed by the portrait of him in her autobiography?

‘Not really. I think he would have been 40 years ago because there was more stigma about depression then. At the time I wasn’t aware of how ill he was, so I thought he was just being sadistic and nasty. You try and protect yourself as best you can. I would just lie about what I was up to with my friends and so on. I got away with it most of the time.’

If there was a moment when the girl in the photograph began to transform herself into the Sea Monster of her early stand-up career it was when, after her O-levels, she was taken out of the grammar school in Tunbridge Wells that she loved and sent to a sixth form in Hastings that she hated. It was a huge upheaval that left a core anger.

‘I knew at the time I was angry. At my new school I deliberately picked bad girls as my friends. Skivers. We played truant most days. I suppose I was punishing my parents by harming my own prospects.’

Things became so bad, she was kicked out of the family home. She went to live with her boyfriend, a ‘posh’ junkie four years older than her: ‘I thought Dave was the most magnificent person to fall in love with because you don’t want a conventional nine-to-fiver at that age. Wild men are so enormously attractive. He was Heathcliff. Mr Rochester. He was enormously bright and unpredictable and funny.

‘Other people thought he was a knobhead and I quite liked that about him as well. He never did heroin in front of me so he was being slightly responsible in that sense. But we did smoke joints and do LSD.’

So she never tried heroin?

‘I have tried heroin, but it wasn’t what I was looking for.’ What happened next gave her one of her most memorable stand-up lines. ‘I went on the pill when I was 16, put on four stone… so that proved to be a very effective contraceptive.’

Actually, she says now, it was three stone in six months, which must have been a huge blow to her confidence. But there is no denying that the subject gave her some funny material.

Her early stand-up routines would begin with her putting her mic stand to one side, so the audience could see her. She would then say something like: ‘I must be an anorexic because an anorexic looks in the mirror and sees a fat person.’ Or: ‘I was the child who was asked to play Bethlehem in the school nativity play.’

The jokes made audiences laugh, but did they also give them permission to bully her? ‘I didn’t see it that way. If anything, it was a shield. I was saying: I know I’m fat but I’m funnier on the subject than you will ever be, so why bother heckling me about it.’

As a child she was always told by her parents to think of the starving Africans and ‘finish her plate’, and she thinks that may have had something to do with her attitude to eating. Certainly, she doesn’t tell her own children to finish their plates.

‘I’m not a flag waver for obesity,’ she says. ‘It’s not healthy and you have a crap life because there is such a downer on it.’ I ask what effect her dramatic weight gain had on her psyche. She did, after all, find herself drawn to that which should have frightened her; you don’t need to be told by a heckler, as she was at her first gig, to ‘F— off, you fat cow’.

‘Yes, but it wasn’t as if I had never had comments about my weight. And I also felt that no one in an audience could abuse me worse than the sort of abuse I had had at work as a psychiatric nurse. People in a manic phase of bipolar are enormously eloquent and their abuse is focused and personal and raw.

‘So to go on stage and have someone shout “F— off, you fat cow” was almost a pleasure. A lot of them were just showing off in front of their mates. But sometimes I would get heckled and I could tell there was real hatred in it. I don’t know what that was about, perhaps common-or-garden misogyny.’

Brand believes crowds can take on an aggressive mob identity and become sadistic. ‘You get a sense of what the Coliseum in Rome must have been like. If the atmosphere turns against you they go for the kill. Usually though, an audience has booked to see you and that is fine.

‘But sometimes I will do a corporate gig where it isn’t me they have come to see and you will sense there is a sigh of despair when I come on. Then it becomes a challenge and it really feels like a victory when you get them laughing despite themselves. I like the purity of stand-up because it is all about whether people laugh at your jokes. Either they laugh or they don’t.’

Sometimes, when they didn’t, she would come off stage and cry.

‘Yes, the dressing room can be the loneliest place in the world when you have just died on stage.’ She shakes her head. ‘No, actually, the loneliest place can be in the car afterwards, when you are sharing a lift home to London from Manchester, say, with three other comics who stormed it while you died. They are embarrassed on your behalf. The etiquette is that no one mentions it.’

And here is another paradox, one that reveals a pattern in her life. Jo Brand was the aggressive feminist who turned out to be kind and gentle in person. She was the passive, self-sabotaging person who hoped to find lasting love from boyfriends who were incapable of being faithful to her (she split up with Dave after he cheated on her).

But her most contrary act was to try to get whole audiences to love her, as a form of self affirmation, of filling the emotional void left by her parents. She did this even though she knew they would attack her, and she would have to attack them, at least at first.

We seem to be in the realm of sado-masochism here. ‘Well, the more scary the gig,’ she says, ‘the greater the satisfaction if it works. And I did want to be liked by an audience. Feminism was not a fashionable school of comedy. I wanted people who hated feminists to realise we could laugh at ourselves, and be funny as well as serious and boring.

‘A lot of men after gigs will come up to me and say: “You were quite funny.” They never go: “You were very funny.” But quite funny is the ultimate praise from a bloke who would originally have hated me. I was happy to settle for grudging respect, I suppose.’

I ask her why she played up to the tabloid assumption that she was a lesbian.

‘Well, in terms of my dress sense I would have looked like that anyway if I was going out. But the whole black, baggy top and trousers look was because I knew a lot of women comics who would dress up in a glamorous way for a gig and that became a huge focus for the male elements of the audience. I would rather have men shout: “F— off, you fat lesbian” at me than “Get your t— out”. Men used to say the most awful things to attractive female comics.’

Did she enjoy the thought that some men were scared of her? ‘Yeah, I rather revelled in that. I had garnered a reputation for chewing up and spitting out hecklers and that served me well. But actually the toughness was all front.’ She is afraid of heights and the dark, she adds. And there is a vulnerable side to her which the public doesn’t see.

‘But I don’t cry easily and I deliberately don’t cry when people want me to, for documentary programmes and so on. Like when I did my Vera Brittain documentary and we visited her grave. It was p—— down and the crew were clearly hoping I would cry, like they always do on these programmes. But I think crying on those occasions, in an exhibitionist way on television, reduces the value of the emotion.

‘Crying should be a private thing. Of course I do cry from time to time, but I would never want to have an audience for it.’

With its white picket fence, Labour red front door and brown plaque commemorating his late wife Caroline, Tony Benn’s house in Notting Hill is something of a local landmark. He has lived here since 1952, mostly downstairs in the basement. There is a small printed note on the front door directing visitors down there. When I find him, the door is open. I ask about the plaque. ‘I put it up myself. Didn’t ask permission. Am too old to ask for permission. Takes too long, asking for permission.’

Too old is 84, though, as I am to discover, everything about Tony Benn, from his demeanour to his idealism, is strangely youthful. Harold Wilson once quipped that Benn ‘immatures with age’, but I think it is more that he is a Benjamin Button, living his political life in reverse.

His grandfather was a Liberal MP, so was his father, before becoming a Labour one. And when Benn first became a Labour MP in 1950, he was quite moderate. By the time he retired in 2001, ‘to devote more time to politics’, he was one of the most radical politicians in his party, and a constant thorn in the side of the Establishment, one remembered for trying to have the Queen’s head removed from stamps. Nowadays, his campaigning tends to be about single issues: he is passionately opposed to nuclear weapons, for example, as well as the European Union and ID cards. He is also the president of the Stop the War Coalition.

But we were talking about his wife, who died in 2000. ‘She was an extraordinary woman,’ he continues in his wuffly voice. ‘An educationalist and writer. I was so shy when I first met her at Oxford. Didn’t propose for nine days. Afterwards I bought the bench I proposed on. Had it in the garden here for years, then when she died, I moved it to our place in Essex, where she is buried. There’s a space at the bottom for my name.’

Benn taps down the tobacco in one of two pipes he alternates between as he talks. He tries lighting it, but without much success, and draws on it regardless. The clicking of the lighters, he has several lying around, seems to be a tic of his, something for him to do with his hands.

When not engaged in this way they flutter like trapped birds. And when he is making a point, which is all the time, his wrists rotate faster. Only when I ask if he ever catches himself talking to his wife when he sits on that bench now does a stillness descend upon him. He stares out of the window. Thinks. ‘Well, you know, you continue communication. Death doesn’t divide you,’ he says.

The basement is dimly lit. In-trays and out-trays teeter with papers and letters. ‘My filing system is messy but orderly,’ Benn says with a shrug. The shelves are laden with political biographies and lever arch files and on his desk there are a number of mugs and pots brimming with pens and pencils.

There are also several cans of butane gas about the place, making it look like a bomb factory. They are for the ubiquitous lighters. He still hasn’t eaten meat since becoming a vegetarian in 1970, still hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol in his life and still drinks about a pint of tea an hour. Teetotal indeed.

‘My whole life is in this room really. I come down at seven and go to bed at midnight. I don’t have a secretary so there are thousands of emails and letters to deal with. Very satisfying. Really enjoying life,’ he says. Benn’s idea of a dream day is speaking to all four of his children on the phone, which he usually does, and having his 10 grandchildren popping in and out. ‘My day rotates around my family. I am very lucky. Hilary [his son, the environment secretary] rings twice a week. We’ve never fallen out over politics. He said when he was elected that he was a Benn, not a Bennite. And so am I.’

Benn sometimes does his contributions to the Radio 4 Today programme from this basement, too, but more often he goes over to the studio in White City. While we are talking, his phone rings regularly, and one of the calls is from the Jeremy Vine Show on Radio 2. They want him on at lunchtime to talk about the moon landings. Often, he says, the calls these days are requests from obituary editors wanting a quote about people he has known.

For he has known everyone, from Ramsay MacDonald and Oswald Mosley to Ghandi and Mandela. His circle of friends has included Enoch Powell on one end of the political spectrum and Arthur Scargill on the other. He was, furthermore, the last Westerner to interview Saddam Hussein, a few weeks before the war. ‘I wanted to ask him to his face whether he had WMDs. He told me he didn’t. Turned out he was telling the truth.’

Benn’s compulsive diary keeping, he reckons, is to do with a moral responsibility he feels to give an account of his life. ‘I will present the Almighty with 18 million words and say, what do you make of it? I can’t go to bed if I haven’t done my diary. I always record them just as I’ve always recorded all my interviews and speeches,’ he says.

‘Experience is the only real teacher and if you keep a diary you get three bites at educating yourself – when it happens, when you write it down, and when you reread it and realise you were wrong. Making mistakes is part of life. The only things I would feel ashamed of would be if I had said things I hadn’t believed in order to get on. Some politicians do do that.’

Example? ‘Neil Kinnock. When he started in 1970 he wrote to me saying he believed everything I believed. Politicians are divided into signposts and weathercocks. Neil Kinnock gave up everything he believed in to get power and ended up with no one believing him about anything. That makes him a weathercock. Margaret Thatcher was a signpost. The trouble was, I thought her sign pointed in the wrong direction. She was not affected by spin-doctors, she said what she meant and people knew what they were voting for. I see myself as being more of a signpost, like her,’ he says.

Benn talks in aphorisms like these, as well as self-detracting anecdotes, well polished from his popular stage show: An Evening with Tony Benn. Given all his years of experience (as well as being an MP for 51 years he was also a cabinet minister, first in the Sixties, then again in the Seventies), I ask whether the political world still has the capacity to surprise him. What does he make of the current low standing of MPs following the expenses scandal?

‘I think you should always be suspicious of people who want power. I don’t mean cynical, but someone who has power is someone you have to watch carefully,’ he says. ‘When my father was elected there was no pay for MPs at all. He was a journalist who went to the House in the afternoon. The interesting thing for me about the expenses scandal is that it shows the importance of having a Freedom of Information Act. If that had been around at the time, no one would have been claiming expenses. The government want to know everything about us, but it doesn’t want us to know about them.’

Benn doesn’t miss the House of Commons, but he does miss his weekly surgeries. ‘Being a politician is the only job where you have one employee and 65,000 employers. I do miss that,’ he says.

Even Benn’s enemies would have to admit he has beautiful manners. He is always courteous, however heated the debate. ‘Well, I don’t believe you should attack people personally,’ he says. ‘My father taught me that. Democracy is about competing opinion, but you don’t have to be nasty about it. The personality side of things switches me off completely. I stopped reading the papers when they were full of all these personal attacks on Gordon Brown. What matters is what is done, not who does it.’

He was a victim of the personalisation of politics himself. The Sun constantly vilified him in the Eighties, running ‘Benn on the couch’ features that questioned his sanity. ‘It was very unpleasant. My black sacks of rubbish were collected every day in a Rover car. Now I know the Kensington Borough Council is Conservative and very efficient, but I don’t think they were that efficient,’ he says. ‘That car was being driven by The Sun presumably, or MI5. My son invented a rubbish bell so that when the sacks were lifted a bell rang and we could see who was taking it away.’

He also became convinced that MI5, or someone, was bugging his phone. Did he begin to question his own sanity? ‘No, never. But they always do this. If you argue for progressive change you are ignored at first, then you are dismissed as mad, then dangerous, then there is a pause and you can’t find anyone at the top who doesn’t claim that it was their idea. Watching those stages is a good way of analysing how far you have got with your cause.’

And the smears? ‘There is always some of that. They said I had a bank account in the Bahamas and I thought: Really? I had better write to the bank and ask for the money back then. My family suffered. Had to train the children how to deal with being photographed on their way to school. The photographers would eff and blind at the children in the hope that they would react. A horrible experience,’ he says.

In retirement, Benn seems to have acquired something that always eluded him as a working politician: likeability. He is still not clubbable exactly, but he does suit the role of sage. And the popularity of his theatre talks is a testament to the broad affection in which he is now held, and not only by those on the left. What is perhaps most extraordinary is his popularity among the young. In 2002, he captivated audiences at Glastonbury with his political talks.

To what does he attribute this? ‘I would like to be remembered as someone who encouraged people, that is all. When I talk to young people I say: “I owe you an apology because my generation made such a muck of the world, killing 100 million people in two world wars. Your generation has to get it right”.’

He sucks on his pipe. ‘I think Ali G did me a huge amount of good with the young. He came to this house and completely took me in and I argued with him when he said “bitches only get pregnant in order to get benefit” and “people only go on strike to chill out”. And I said: “Don’t be ridiculous”.You see, a lot of the people he interviewed were frightened of him.’

But as Benn was so confident that he was neither racist nor sexist, did that mean he was able to stand up to Ali G? ‘Yes and when I was told it was a hoax, I was furious. But then when I saw it and saw what he had done with the other interviews, I found it hilarious. He’s my main man!’

He is chuckling now. Before things become too cosy, I turn to a subject about which Benn is known to be prickly. There is an immoral equivalence between fascism and communism, I argue, because of the genocide committed in the name of both. Yet while the BNP is rightly vilified for its association with fascism, Socialist parties are not vilified for their association with communism. Why is that, does he suppose?

He stares at me indignantly. ‘Socialism? Socialism is a democratic idea. The most socialist thing we ever did was the most popular thing we ever did, the NHS.’ But isn’t socialism just a polite version of communism? ‘Oh that’s just the media. The two attempts at socialism in my lifetime have failed because the communists weren’t democratic, and the social democrats adopted capitalism. Margaret Thatcher said Tony Blair and New Labour was her greatest achievement, and she was right,’ he says.

Benn quotes Mein Kampf, a passage in which Hitler writes that democracy leads to Marxism. Yes, I say, but doesn’t Marxism always lead to dictatorship? ‘Good heavens no. Marx was a philosopher. Think of the things that have been done in the name of Christ. The Pope stole Christianity from Jesus and Stalin stole Marxism from Marx. All Marx said was the world is divided between the 95 per cent who create the wealth and the five per cent who own it. That was an explanation, like Darwin.’

Last autumn, when the banks were part nationalised, did that seem like a Marxist moment to him? ‘Not at all. A classic case of the state funding capitalism. If it were Marxism you wouldn’t have this continuation of the bonus culture. The economic crisis we have now is a product of Thatcherism and Blairism applied to the economy. No one has said the trade unions are responsible for the credit crisis.’

Does he now accept that the unions abused their power though? ‘Well they used to be described as the barons of the TUC, but barons don’t get elected. Emperor Jack was elected, unlike Rupert Murdoch. I think we do live in a one-party state in that all three parties believe socialism has failed and capitalism has somehow got to be made to work, and it hasn’t worked.’

His 19-year-old granddaughter Emily may be about to become the fifth generation of the Benn family to enter politics, having been selected for the seat of Worthing and Shoreham. ‘I went to speak for her the other day. Very bright girl. The interest in politics runs in the family. Both my grandfathers were MPs, as was my dad and my son,’ he says.

He had tears in his eyes when he spoke for her. Has he become more emotional with age? ‘Oh yes, I burst into tears at the drop of a hat. When I introduced my son in parliament, my family were in the gallery and they said: “It’s The Railway Children all over again.” I always cry in that,’ Benn says.

‘There is nothing wrong in crying, and laughing. The tight-lipped Englishman is a totally artificial construct. I think bottling up emotions is so unnatural. Why are we given strong emotions if they are not to be expressed? Hating people damages you and doesn’t damage the people you hate, and if you hate someone it makes you unhappy and doesn’t affect them.’

He may not hate people, but are there things he hates? ‘I hate war. War is murder, rape, torture and plunder. Churchill was right, jaw jaw is always preferable. But I’m not a pacifist. I believe in the right of self-defence. I joined the RAF in the war but didn’t get my wings until the end so never had to kill anyone.’

His older brother Michael died in the war, while serving with the RAF. ‘I think of him every day.’ He shakes his head. ‘Every day. I got the telegram at the beginning of an RAF training class about weather and I had to sit there for an hour and then I went outside and wept. I remember him writing to me and saying he had shot down a German plane and he was thinking of the German’s family. He wanted to be a Christian minister.

‘You can never fill the gap that’s left, but you can decorate the gap with the flowers of memory. Everyone dies. At funerals I think: here we all are grieving this person but in a hundred years’ time everyone in this church will be dead. All that is left is memory and what you remember is the things people did in life. You remember the people who helped you lead a better life, the great artists, thinkers, leaders.’

He stares at a pigeon eating grain in his back garden. There are 12 of them who come every morning. ‘I go outside and say: “Birdies”, then throw down some seeds. I also leave some nuts out for a squirrel who comes. Then a cat comes round and scratches at the window. It is a way of having pets without the responsibility.’

I ask whether he thinks Enoch Powell was right when he said all political careers end in failure. ‘Not in my case because I was a failure much earlier on. I was attacked all the time. Everything I did was denounced. In old age people are much kinder. Also I don’t want anything anymore. I don’t want your vote, and that is a great strength,’ he says. ‘You become a Buddhist by default because you rid yourself of desire. If I had known what fun it was to be 84 I would have done it years ago.’

Perhaps his career hasn’t ended in failure, but in a worse fate – he has been sentimentalised by the public. ‘That is the worst corruption, to become regarded as a kindly, harmless old gentlemen. Well, I am kindly and I am old, but I am not harmless.’ He chuckles. ‘I got a death threat last year. Hadn’t had one for years. I was so chuffed.’

In Rome the souvenir shops reproduce Gina Lollobrigida’s face on keyrings, pens and mugs, even now. They are movie stills, mostly, from the 1950s and 60s, a time when she was as much an Italian icon as the Vespa — Gina the bare-foot gypsy girl, Gina the wasp-waisted trapeze artist, Gina the coquettish queen of Sheba. And on the Appian Way, the Roman road leading out of the capital, there is a shrine to her. It is a three-storey pink villa she bought in 1954, with high walls, an electronic gate and sprawling lawns populated with statues, peacocks and lemon trees. Her house.

A maid answers the door and leads me inside to where she is waiting, standing straight spined on a mosaic floor surrounded by vases, old masters, and sculptures. At 81, she is still unmistakable — the red dress, the dark eyes beneath thick mascara, the big, auburn ‘tossed salad’ hair. (So much of a trademark did this hairstyle become, the Italians named a type of curly lettuce after her, the lollo.)

I say the house is a shrine to Gina Lollobigida because there are marble sculptures of her everywhere, ones she has made. As a sculptress she represented Italy in the 1992 Expo in Seville and in 2003 there was an exhibition of her work at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. (It is quite sentimental and kitschy, it has to be said, and has been compared to Jeff Koon’s ‘only without the irony’.) There are her awards here too, including the lifetime achievement award she was given last autumn by the National Italian American Foundation. And there is an entire wall of photographs of her with, well, everyone: Fidel Castro, Henry Kissinger, Indira Gandhi, Salvador Dali, Vladimir Putin, Mick Jagger… And Marilyn Monroe (‘Marilyn told me she didn’t sleep the night before she was photographed with me,’ she says, speaking English with a thick Italian accent, ‘because she was so afraid, so in awe.’) Also some of her leading men, such as Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra and Yul Brynner.

One of her most popular films was Come September (1961). Her co-star in that was Rock Hudson. He’s on this wall too. Was she surprised when she subsequently heard he was gay? ‘I tell you, he was not gay! He changed. He was normal. He was adorable. He was one of the person I had most joy to work with.’

She leads the way through to a sitting room dominated by a baby grand piano — as well as more vases and marble cherubs — and here she perches on a velvet sofa. I ask if she ever fell in love with her leading men. ‘I liked directors and cameramen more; actors were like my sisters because we would gossip and we were in the same profession. One exception was Yul Brynner. When we kissed in Solomon & Sheba we lost our heads and we couldn’t stop. The director says, “stop!” but we continued and we were very embarrassing. But it is something that can happen in life. You can get physical and get carried away. We didn’t hit it off at first but something happened on the love scenes. It never normally happens in the movies because it is so technical.’

Did the men she slept with consider her a trophy? ‘No, I was the one who choose all the time. I knew what I wanted. And if they didn’t want me that made me worse. I was like a man, seducing them. I was very independent. I was not waiting for someone to choose me. Obviously, at that time I could have who I wanted.’

It was reported last year that she was considering marrying her long term partner, a Spanish estate agent 34 years her junior, was that true? ‘Yes, I changed my mind though. That is what women do.’

She did get married once, to a Yugoslavian doctor. That was in 1949, just before her movie career took over. They had one son, in 1957, and divorced in 1971. In 1956, meanwhile, when she was featured on the cover of Time magazine, Humphrey Bogard was quoted as saying that ‘Gina made Marilyn Monroe look like Shirley Temple.’ That cover is now one of thousands she has collected over the years. ‘I have 6,000 with my face on. I stopped collecting after that.’ Yet she claims she does not like to be photographed. ‘I don’t feel comfortable. I don’t like being photographed. Behind the camera, I am a different person.’

She gave up acting in favour of photography and sculpture back in the 1970s, and she shows me some of the giant black and white prints of Fidel Castro she is preparing for a major retrospective of her work in Rome this June. ‘Castro trusted completely me. He was like a child. Not aware of the camera.  That was in 1974. He was more anxious to see me than I was to see him. He was very private. He took me to see his brother Raul and Raul was angry saying: “Oh because Gina is here, now you come to see me! It was been five years, Fidel!’

Her photographs of Paul Newman will also feature in the exhibition. ‘It was quite funny Paul said, “OK you can photograph me in the sauna on one condition, that you come in the sauna with me and you are also naked.” So I said yes because I had worked out a way to cut the photograph so that it only showed my shoulder. I thought I could make it decent. But my agent said, “You are 50, you are crazy to do that!” And so we decided to do it in winter in his home near New York instead. There was a little river and he broke the ice and then, wearing just his little pants, he went down through the ice and even put his head under the water. Someone else might have died. He just came up smiling. And then I had an interesting photograph with his blue eyes. He had a very masculine beauty.’ Pause. ‘He was faithful to his wife.’

Gina Lollobrigida has the most robust ego I have ever encountered (and I have encountered Julie Burchill). Her anecdotes usually end with someone telling her how beautiful and talented she is. Vainglorious, yes, but perhaps only because this is what people expect of her, of a diva, of a legend. And she is sweet with it, funny and mischievous too, rolling her eyes suggestively. She is, above all, a good storyteller with some good stories to tell. ‘I am like an icon,’ she says, ‘a legend and even now if I go to the most remote place in the world they recognise me. Yet at the same time I am very unknown because they don’t know the real me, they just know an idea of me from the movies. Some people when they see that I also do the sculptures and the photography they think it is too much. It disturb them. They think this successful, beautiful woman shouldn’t have to do anything else. They think the beautiful woman shouldn’t have a brain. In the end my name worked against me as a photographer and sculptress because people were jealous that I was also to do other things so well. If it had been Mrs So-and-So then my photography could have been recognised for how good it is.’

She grew up in Subiaco, a medieval hilltop town not far from Rome, the second of four daughters. Her father was a carpenter. Hers was a strict catholic upbringing. ‘The priest where I was born was more important than the mayor. We could not have sex before marriage. Even when I was singing for the soldiers that was thought too much. I couldn’t even wear the trousers.’ She used to get about on a donkey, an image she made famous in her first big feature film, Luigi Comencini’s Bread, Love and Dreams (1953).

She says she became an actress by mistake. ‘I had won a scholarship to study art and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Art in Rome and wanted to continue with that, but then I was spotted in the street and asked to be an extra. They paid me 12000 lire, about 12 dollars. I bought a coat and an umbrella and I couldn’t sleep that night because I was so happy, and I remember when I bought my first diamond necklace I could sleep because it didn’t mean as much to me as that umbrella. After that they asked me to be in another film. I said no thank you because I wanted to be an artist not an actress and after ten days they came back and they persuaded my mother instead. I said OK I’ll do it, but only if you pay me one million lire. I thought this would make them stop and go away, but they said yes.’

How did her husband feel about being married to a sex symbol? ‘ I wanted him to be jealous but he wasn’t, he was Yugoslavian, you see, not Italian. Perhaps he just pretended he wasn’t jealous. Anyway, an Italian man would not have been able to hide his jealousy. Howard Hughes was the jealous one. When he saw me in the movie that I got one million lire for he wanted me so badly that he had me flown out to Hollywood. I stayed there two months and a half and saw him every day. He gave me the use of a chauffer driven car and when I wasn’t with him he would have his secretary keep an eye on me. He was very possessive. And secretive. He wanted to marry me but I was already married and divorce was not possible for me. It was not in my head. For me at that time marriage was forever. But he was so persistent. He probably wanted me more because he couldn’t have me. He didn’t stop wanting me for 13 years. He was the most persistent man in my life. He wasn’t used to a girl who didn’t care about money like me. The difficulty for me was that he was too rich. I didn’t like the imbalance.’

I ask about the crowds who used to mob her at Cannes and New York. ‘When I did the New York premiere of Bread, Love and Dreams there were 1,000 photographers waiting for me at the airport. The flashbulbs. It was unbelievable. the photographers were so excited to get me. One photographer even managed to bring along a donkey. In New York! Do you imagine! It was even more crazy when I went to see Peron. There 60,000 people were waiting for me at the airport.’

Did the adulation go to her head? ‘No, it was more that I was afraid that someone would be killed. Big crowds are dangerous. I never got used to the popularity. I didn’t like the publicity, but you had to do it. The first time I went to a theatre in Buenos Aires there were 30 arrested, nine wounded, that is frightening. Another time I went to open a casino with Peron on a private train and we couldn’t get off because there were so many people and the train had to go one kilometre back so as we could get out. There were 700 bodyguards, but the trouble was they wanted to see me as well so that caused trouble.’

I ask about her most controversial film, The Dolls (1965) in which she appeared to be naked during a love scene, a cinematic first in Italy. She claimed she wore a flesh coloured body stocking. Nevertheless, she and the director were charged with an offence to public decency. Both were given a two month suspended sentence. ‘We wanted to make a point, not only the director but the actors. The scene was nothing compared to what you see today in the movies but it was considered too sexy, then. Too daring. Movies today go too far. They are not subtle. I like a gentle suggestion rather than something vulgar. The imagination is the most erotic tool.’

What does she make of actresses today who have plastic surgery and breast implants? ‘I think if they feel better about themselves after the surgery that is their business. For me it would be the opposite because being with a man, if instead of touching you he touch a piece of silicone that would be disturbing. The real trouble with actress today is they all look alike. You don’t know what is real, what is silicon. In my day we were different one from the other. And we were natural, our breasts were natural.’

Stories of her feuds with other sex symbols were legendary. Whenever she was in the same room as Anita Ekberg or Sophia Loren, for example, the hisses could be heard all over Italy. When I ask about this she gives me a steady look. ‘No, I had no rivals because I was number one all over Europe. To be the rival of Gina Lollobrigida was a fashion. Everyone claim they were my rival but it was silly because I was the symbol of Italy. I was an icon. I was Gina Lollobrigida.’

‘Vulgar, self-pitying, greedy’ – impressions of Cherie Blair weren’t exactly sympathetic during her time as the Prime Minister’s wife. But two years after she left Downing Street, the human rights lawyer is frank, funny and (whisper it) quite charming

From the moment she enters the room, Cherie Blair manages to wrong-foot me. We are meeting at the chambers in London where she works as a QC specialising in human rights law and, as she shakes hands, she stands way too close, invading my personal space like a one-woman Barbarian horde. Then she says, while still pumping my hand and smiling up at me, ‘I read your columns, including the stuff you sometimes write about me!’

Argh! For the next 10 minutes I cannot concentrate, trying to recall what I might have written about her over the past decade or so. Was it anything rude? Did I refer to her as Cruella de Vil, as journalists lazily do? Compare her smile to a Scalextric track, perhaps? Oh God… You have to admire the tactic, though.

I also find her perky manner disconcerting. By way of preparation I’ve been watching footage of this 54-year-old mother of four being interviewed on television, and she often comes across as edgy and cold. Yet in person there is a lightness and warmth to her, her sentences punctuated with laughter. I’ve been told by the third party who set this interview up that I am not to ask about the expenses scandal or the fate of Gordon Brown – because she won’t be able to comment on either – but it soon becomes obvious that she will answer pretty much any question I ask.

I have also been reading Speaking For Myself, her best-selling memoir. Some reviewers gave her a kicking, calling her vulgar, self-pitying, grasping, cringeworthy and so on. One amusingly suggested she should take out an injunction against herself, or perhaps sue herself for libel. But this is to be expected. Few people have been as divisive and unpopular in recent years as Cherie Blair. A Radio 4 poll even voted her the person listeners would most like to see deported.

Everyone seems to have an opinion on her. My devoutly Catholic mother-in-law, for example, is not keen, mainly because Cherie claims to be devoutly Catholic, too, despite the very non-Catholic revelation in her book that she used contraception, or rather forgot her ‘contraceptive equipment’ when they visited Balmoral (and lo, unto them, a baby was born nine months later).

My mother isn’t that keen either, come to think of it. Like many people who used to ride to hounds – including the Princess Royal – she blames Mrs Blair for the hunting ban, or at least for forcing her husband’s hand on the issue (Mrs B, as she was known in Downing Street, claims this wasn’t the case, by the way).

Being neither a Catholic nor a subscriber to Horse & Hound, I read her memoirs with an open mind and was surprised by how funny they were. She has fine comic timing and does a nice line in self-deprecation, describing herself as looking like ‘the mad woman from the attic’, for example, in that photograph where she opened the door in her nightie – ‘with my hair like a bird’s nest, and bleary-eyed’. And her account of how Tony proposed to her while she was on her knees cleaning a loo is hilarious. ‘I know,’ she says when I mention this. ‘So romantic. Him standing, me on my knees scrubbing the toilet, then after that, the wretched man said: “Let’s not tell anyone yet, let’s keep it to ourselves!”‘

Plenty of reviewers loved the book though and, on the cover of the paperback, published this month, there is a quote that reads: ‘Charming, frank and funny.’ And that is about right.

We are meeting on the Thursday of the European elections. Downing Street is in turmoil. Gordon Brown is a gibbering wreck. There is speculation he might not survive until the weekend. On a day like today, I suggest, when the body politic is pumping with adrenaline, she must miss being at the heart of things. ‘Not really. Been there, done that, got the scars on my back. It’s quite nice being a spectator again, rather than the subject of a spectator sport.’

Presumably she doesn’t miss things like the press scrutiny of her finances – the £100,000 fee she was paid for a lecture tour of Australia in 2005, on behalf of a charity, for example. ‘Rather naively, I thought because it raised $250,000 for charity it was a good thing, but the press didn’t think so. I’ll never do that again. You learn by your mistakes.’

Did she consider paying her fee back? ‘No, I didn’t. The caterer was paid. The comic was paid. I was paid. Together we made a lot of money for the charity. In England I speak all the time for charities without asking for a fee. But I had gone all the way over to Australia and spent a week away from my children and my work, whereas I wouldn’t have to do that for a speaking engagement in Manchester.’

Long before the current expenses scandal, Cherie Blair was involved in an expenses dust up of her own: whether she should pay for André, her personal hairdresser, out of her own money, or whether he was a legitimate government expense. ‘In the end I did pay for him, but I couldn’t have done my duty as the wife of the PM without him or someone like him.’

So, can she empathise with MPs who feel their expenses are justified? ‘I think – what can I say about the expenses row? – not much other than I am glad I am no longer involved in that world. There is now an impression that MPs are out for what they can get, which usually isn’t the case. Our MPs are not crooks and it is wrong that people should think they are. I think there is a real danger now of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.’

The word greedy is often applied to her; is that fair? ‘No, because personally I don’t think I am all that greedy. Like everyone, I am formed by my background and mine was, well, we didn’t have a lot of money. I didn’t live in a cardboard box but I did live in a place where at the end of the week the money was gone.’ That was in Crosby, Liverpool. Her father, the hard-drinking, serially adulterous actor Tony Booth, was absent for most of her formative years, and she was raised by her grandmother and mother, a RADA-trained actress who worked in a fish and chip shop to make ends meet.

‘That must have affected my own anxieties about money, about paying the bills. We knew that when we left Number 10 we had no house to move to because we had sold ours in 1997. Sometimes I used to say to Tony, “We could be out of here tomorrow and it could be me, you and four children with nowhere to go”.’

Now they have bought a house in London (for which they paid £3.5m) and another in Buckinghamshire (£5.75m). Tony Blair has consultancies with investment banks thought to be worth £2.5m and he is also thought to have earned around £2m from speaking engagements, as well as £4.6m for a book deal. In addition to her salary as a QC, Cherie Blair was reportedly paid around £1m for her book. Are all her money worries over now? ‘I’m in a fortunate position now, but do I still worry in the back of my mind that it could all be gone tomorrow? Yes.’

She was the original WAG (Women Against Gordon) and complained about the way he was constantly ‘rattling the keys’ to Number 10. Does she now think that her former neighbour should have been careful what he wished for? She laughs. ‘There is this whole image about my relationship with Gordon being… Look, he has many good qualities and it was not wrong of him to have wanted to be prime minister – most politicians do, and why shouldn’t they? It’s just that as Tony’s wife, when Gordon’s ambition got… when he became impatient, I was on Tony’s side.’

Hence Tony Blair’s quote that there was no danger of his wife running off with the man next door? ‘Yes, I think that was quite observant of him.’ And the reason why, when Gordon said in his conference speech that it had been a privilege to work with Tony, she said: ‘That’s a lie’? ‘I didn’t say that, I didn’t! The trouble is, everyone thinks I might have said it.’ But she did think it? ‘I might have thought it, but even I’m not so stupid as to say it.’

Well if she didn’t say it then, she has now. We are on the subject of her gaffes and they seem odd for someone with an alpha brain. Upon leaving school, she studied law at the LSE, going on to gain the highest bar examination marks of any student in the country in her year. There are, it seems, two Cheries; the smart lawyer and the not-so-smart embarrassing politician’s wife. They even have different names – Cherie Booth and Cherie Blair.

She does indeed talk of a disjunction between her life as a high-flying QC, a world in which she feels comfortable and in control, and her former life as a prime minster’s wife, less sure of herself, more prone to gaffes. ‘The thing is, I knew the decisions I was making in the legal world would only affect me. In the political world, if I made a gaffe Tony took the consequences, and it is always worse to hurt the ones you love than hurt yourself.’

Is it true he would sometimes bury his head in his hands and say, ‘For goodness’ sake woman!’ ‘He does say that, you know, quite a lot. But he kind of only half means it. He’ll have a rant and get it out of his system. He is not one to hold grudges. We’re both optimists.’ She reckons one of the reasons
he loves her is that she is so unpredictable. ‘I hope so, otherwise he wouldn’t have stuck around for
so long.’

Any advice for Sarah Brown? ‘Be there for your husband. But she doesn’t need my advice. She’s done a lot better than me in the press.’

And Samantha Cameron? ‘Exactly the same. In the end, it’s about having someone to share it with, which Ted Heath didn’t have. Even now Margaret Thatcher gets confused and looks for Denis.’ She describes her tempestuous relationship with Alastair Campbell as a ‘double act’. He went ballistic over what became known as ‘Cheriegate’, the time she bought two flats in Bristol at a discount, with the help of the fraudster Peter Foster.

‘Yes, that was not one of the high points of our relationship. I’m very fond of Alastair. He was extraordinarily loyal to Tony. But he was slightly prone to barging in without knocking. And I think he felt the pressure towards the end, especially when he became part of the story. What he was trying to protect me from was what he fell victim to himself.’

Does she now resent the way Campbell bullied her into doing her emotional mea culpa speech about Cheriegate on the evening news? ‘I don’t… I don’t think I was bullied. The trouble was, Tony had insisted I tell him what had happened in terms of my contact with Peter Foster and he would pass on what I said to Alastair… Today Tony has a Blackberry but when he was PM he… He had a computer on his desk but never turned it on. So when I said I’d had an email from Foster, it didn’t really mean much to him.

When we left Downing Street in 2007, I said to Tony: “We’re going to sit down and I’m going to show you how to use a Blackberry.” And now the kids say, “Mum, he’s never off that ruddy thing, why did you teach him how to use it?” ‘

Speaking of equipment, I tell her my Catholic mother-in-law was somewhat surprised by her admission that she used contraception. ‘I suppose it was the Catholic in me that meant I couldn’t bring myself to go into any more detail.’

But surely the term raised more questions than it answered. ‘Some people have speculated that it might have been a wooden shelf to put between us in bed… But part of me said that because, though I like to think of myself as a good Catholic, I couldn’t have had the career I had without contraception. The fact is, even in Spain, France and Italy there must be a lot of Catholics who bend the rules.’

So is she going to solve the mystery of what the equipment was? ‘Nooo! Certainly not. You can probably guess anyway.’ A cap? She covers her ears and laughs. ‘I’m not saying anything!’

Here is another mystery. As a couple, their friendship with the Clintons is easy to understand, all four are left-leaning lawyers. But the Bushes? What was that about? ‘It’s not really that baffling because one of the main job descriptions of the British prime minster is to get on with the American president. Whatever the domestic policies, on foreign policy Tony and George saw eye to eye. That said, I talked about policy and politics with the Clintons in a way I never did with George and Laura. Most of the time I talked to the Bushes about the things we did have in common, like having children the same age. We have stayed friendly with them.’

OK. Time to authenticate some tall tales. Is it true that when Bill Clinton came to Chequers she was worried he would try and get off with Carole Caplin – the masseuse, one time soft porn model and New Age ‘therapist’ – who was walking around in her stretched leotard? Another laugh. ‘I just think Bill is one of those men who appreciated… feminine company.’

Why did she trust Caplin when she was so obviously flaky, what with her crystals and her ‘toxin showers’ and everything? ‘I don’t think my judgement… I shouldn’t have bought those flats [Foster was Caplin’s boyfriend] because even to this day they are not worth what the Daily Mail claimed they were worth.’

What does she make of Lord Levy’s insinuation in his memoirs that Tony was the father of Carole’s baby? ‘I think that’s a load of old rubbish, frankly.’

Is it true that Cherie and Tony rolled round in mud as part of a rebirthing ritual while on holiday in Mexico? ‘That’s a load of old rubbish, too.’ Really? ‘It wasn’t rebirthing. We went to Mexico and we thought we would try some treatments and one of them was the Mayan equivalent of the sauna.’

And it involved mud? ‘No, actually. Did it involve mud? I can’t remember. Don’t think so. Although you get all sorts of things these days, don’t you. Seaweed wraps and so on. I don’t think that one was about mud, particularly.’

Is it true that her husband has a pact with the Queen never to watch the film The Queen? ‘That’s my understanding. I don’t know whether the Queen has watched it but I’m pretty sure Tony hasn’t. I watched it on my own on a plane. My daughter Kathryn was miffed because they didn’t get a red-haired actress to play her. And I wish I was as thin as the actress who played me. And I hate Michael Sheen as Tony. Doesn’t do it for me at all. Tony is six foot and quite broad shouldered and Michael isn’t six foot and isn’t strapping and doesn’t have that physical presence.’

Is Mrs Blair a monarchist? ‘I am a great fan of the Queen. I miss her.’ That was not what I asked. Is she a monarchist? A knowing smile. ‘I’m a huge fan of the Queen.’

When she left Downing Street she shouted at the waiting press: ‘I won’t miss you!’ She describes in her book how her husband cringed, telling her through clenched teeth: ‘For God’s sake, you’re supposed to be dignified, you’re supposed to be gracious.’ Obviously she doesn’t miss the press, but what about Number 10?

‘The big difference with our life today is that Tony is constantly travelling to the Middle East and America. The irony is that we saw more of him when he was PM. Leo would pop down and see him, sometimes he would pop up for lunch. But, you know, today Tony is working at home so we just had lunch together.’

Their eldest two children have graduated from Bristol and Oxford and are now working. Kathryn is around the corner from here at King’s College, London, and has just finished her second year exams. Leo is eight and Mrs Blair now says she is aware of being one of the oldest mothers in the playground. ‘Sometimes I think I’m older than some of the grandmothers, frankly.’

Time to go. Cherie Blair has, indeed, been charming, frank and funny. I can only think it is to do with the freedom of being out of what she calls the goldfish bowl. Her happiness must also be a little to do with Gordon Brown’s unhappiness. She would have to be inhuman, I say, not to allow herself a chuckle about the pickle Gordon has got himself in.

‘Well you forget that I am a Labour Party animal. I joined the party at 16. We have our Labour poster out today. This is the government that I think deserves to be re-elected. So there is not much joy in seeing the turmoil at the moment.’ ‘Not much’. She is a lawyer who chooses her words carefully.

She stands close again to shake hands and, as she is leaving, turns and asks me a question. ‘Your Catholic mother-in-law doesn’t approve of contraception, but what about your Catholic wife?’ Damn she’s good. Wrong-footed again.

Elvis Costello is a doting father, friend to presidents and writer of ‘proper’ love songs – but he’s still got the same old fire…

On a roof terrace overlooking Manhattan, an awning flaps lazily in the breeze. The man sitting underneath it is wearing sunglasses, as well he might given that a) the afternoon sun is unforgiving, even in the shade, and b) he is a rock star. Well, rock star up to a point. At 54, Elvis Costello is still leaping from genre to genre like a young pond frog spoilt for choice with waterlilies.

Having produced hit after New Wave hit in the late Seventies with his band The Attractions, he turned a little bit country in the early Eighties. After that came, in no particular order, recordings of jazz, swing and opera, as well as his innovative work with the Brodsky Quartet, a collaboration that is still going strong after 17 years.

Now he is back with Secret, Profane & Sugarcane, an album of bluegrass and traditional American country music, recorded in Nashville. It’s a beguiling collection. Appeals to the heart and the head. And lyrically it reminds you why Costello has been described as Britain’s answer to Bob Dylan – reminds you, indeed, why Dylan wanted to tour with him and why songwriters as great as Burt Bacharach and Paul McCartney have queued up to collaborate with him.

But this said, he is still a bona fide rock star and today he is dressed like one, in his black suit, black shirt and black tie – and his purple fedora and matching socks. The sunglasses could not be more rock star, in fact, big as they are with silver frames that contrast with his gingery sideburns and ’tache.

In conversation he is expansive and articulate, but easily sidetracked. And it is disconcerting talking to a man with whom you cannot make eye contact. ‘These?’ he says touching them. ‘I’m blind without them. They have prescription lenses in. Anyway, trust me, you don’t want to see what’s underneath them. I’ve only had three hours’ sleep.’

He and his wife, the multimillion-record-selling jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall, live mostly in Vancouver with their twin boys who are two-and-a-half years old. Is the lack of sleep because of them? ‘No, I’m just an early riser and yesterday I flew in from the West Coast so I’m still on West Coast time.’ His son from an earlier marriage – he’s been married three times – is 34. How is he finding being a father again at his age? ‘Wonderful. Being a father at any age is wonderful.’

Who do the twins take after? ‘Thankfully their mother. Light hair and light eyes. I see temperamental things that might be like me. They travel a lot for young children. They’ve just crossed the Canadian prairies on a tour bus with us and they will be here in New York in a few hours, and then my wife is going to Europe to do some television shows, so they will stay here with me while she does that. I have help of course, but it’s great. We can sit and watch football or read The Hungry Caterpillar.’

Anyway, the point is, the twins have been listening to music since before they were born, and I ask Costello if he sings to them now. ‘No, and I don’t think they are all that keen on my songs. It’s Randy Newman they love because he wrote Toy Story. They know the score so they can say what action is happening when. Randy must have a great trick there to imprint that music in children that young.’

The twins, he tells me, by the way, think he looks like Mr Potato Head, or at least that the drawing of him on the sleeve of his new album does. For his own part, he describes himself as a combination of Cheeta, the elderly chimp from the Tarzan movies, and Liza Minnelli. ‘The dynamism of Liza,’ he adds, ‘with the hairiness and long arms of Cheeta.’

Oh, and another aside while we are at it; he was born Declan Patrick MacManus in London in 1954, the year Elvis cut his first record, and he has had his stage name since 1977, the year Elvis Presley died (the Costello part was taken from his great grandmother).

But back to his music. Does his 34-year-old son like it? He smiles a rare, gap-toothed smile. ‘You’d have to ask him. I think so yeah, but I can’t speak for him. I can speak for my wife because we are both musicians, so of course we influence each other in our musical choices, but as for him, I can’t really say. Up to a certain age you can say our life together is beautiful but then the child becomes a separate person with his own identity. I love them all and am proud of them all. And I often don’t feel deserving of the love I get back from them.’

His relationship with his own parents seems to have been equally healthy, even after their divorce in 1972. It was a musical family. His mother sold records, his father was a successful big-band singer and his grandfather a trumpeter, working the cruise ships. Does he ever look in the mirror now and ‘see’ his father looking back? ‘I see both my parents. My dad in some respect but also my mother. I look like both of them. I think we made some of the same choices. They worked hard to make sure I had a decent standard of living. And I’ve worked hard, every single day since I left school. I think I have a protestant work ethic.

‘Never sleep in the day. My mother doesn’t enjoy great health and I sometimes hear my dad’s voice in my own saying to her, “You should take a nap during the day”, but she won’t. I’m a bit like that. I haven’t taken a holiday in 16 years.’

In his case the not wanting to sleep during the day is to do with his insomnia. That said, he now points to a couple of sun loungers on the other side of the roof terrace and suggests that we could always go and have a lie down on them and carry on the interview there ‘side by side, like Eric and Ernie’. Elvis Costello, it seems, is in a playful mood. This isn’t always the case. He has a reputation as a serious man – serious about music, serious about politics, serious about the subject of Elvis Costello.

This is reflected in his physical paradox – he manages to convey an air of slovenly nonchalance and tightly coiled energy. And it occurs to me that his reputation for reticence and being difficult may be something to do with his manner and voice. He is a mumbler. As it competes with the breeze, the traffic and the sirens below, his voice becomes so whispery, I worry it won’t pick up on my tape. He shields the recorder with his hat. ‘See? The hat has two purposes, shields my head and shields your mic.’

His whispery speaking voice is in contrast to his singing voice, which has extraordinary range and power. We had originally been scheduled to do this interview when he was over on a visit to London, but then he decided he would have to rest his voice that afternoon and when I heard the concert at the Barbican that evening, I could see why.

‘You do have to be a bit careful with your voice,’ he says now. ‘It is an instrument. I think when you know the songs, your voice works around them, finds the slots with more ease, but you need to know how to pace yourself because we were doing 10 new arrangements in that show. I try to find the character for each song and I wasn’t sure how much vocal stamina it would take to follow one from the other. It seemed to hold out OK.’

The Barbican audience that night was warm, with many standing ovations; he was in a friendly mood, too, with much good humoured banter. Was this, I ask, a case of him making amends for the comment he made in 2005 that, in effect, he had fallen out of love with England? ‘I don’t care if I ever play in England again,’ he said at the time.‘I don’t get along with it. We lost touch. I don’t dig it. They don’t dig me.’ He shakes his head.

‘That was a mischievous sub-editor taking a quote out of context. I was opening for Bob Dylan and was just coming off stage and I was saying that, compared to America, I feel like I don’t connect any more in Britain. My mother rang up and said: “Did you say you hate England?” You can scour that interview and you won’t find that quote. Then the broadsheets pitched in with arts page editorials about what it all meant. I mean, if I’d known that was all I had to do to get publicity I would have said goodbye to England earlier.’

It’s not the first time he’s been taken out of context. At the end of the Seventies, details of a drunken argument in a Holiday Inn in Ohio were leaked. Having apparently described the soul legend James Brown as ‘a jiveass nigger’, and Ray Charles as ‘a blind, ignorant nigger,’ he woke up with a hangover and called a press conference in New York to apologise.

‘I said some stupid things and can’t blame anyone but myself,’ he says now. ‘I hope I have made amends now and anyone who has followed my career will know I am not racist and cannot doubt my respect and admiration for black singers. But the English thing I didn’t even say. I don’t know whether any one noticed, but I haven’t been in England for 20 years. I moved to Ireland 20 years ago and now I am mainly in Vancouver. But ultimately…’ A shrug. ‘I didn’t get into this business to be loved.’

But loved he is. Besides T Bone Burnett, Elvis Costello has worked with, among others, Bacharach, Brian Eno, McCartney. It’s often said he’s the Kevin Bacon of the music world, connected to everyone and everyone connected through him. ‘I don’t feel I went looking for them, though. Most of the major collaborations came to me. I didn’t go knocking on Paul McCartney’s door.’

Sounds like a cue for a Wings song. ‘Exactly. It’s funny but with Wings, Paul didn’t refer to the musical language of the Beatles at all, he wouldn’t even make passing reference to their harmonic cadences, what he did instead was create another highly original sound. But by the time our collaboration occurred I thought his reluctance to refer to the Beatles was perverse, because everyone else was ripping the Beatles off.’

And as McCartney once said, ‘I think I can do Paul McCartney better than Noel Gallagher can do Paul McCartney’. He nods. ‘Well Noel is deluded about a lot of things, most obviously that he is a songwriter at all. That he even brackets himself in the same sentence as Paul is laughable. You have to keep these boys in line! None of us are Irving Berlin or Burt Bacharach, you know. I sat at the side of the stage recently watching Burt sing Alfie and it was magical.’

He had been a member of the Beatles fan club as a child, so working with McCartney must have been daunting enough, but to work with Bacharach must have been… well, what? ‘We worked section-by-section, phrase-by-phrase, both composing, answering one another, it was a fairly extraordinary thing for him to allow me to do – after all, he doesn’t exactly need to collaborate at this stage in his career.

‘It’s probably what appealed to him. Having a dialogue in music. With him it was a case of finding the lyrics that would confer the meaning of the music that was already in the song. It was so vivid to me.’

Yet this is not the collaboration of which he is most proud – that would be his work with the country singer George Jones. ‘In 1981 I had not a writer’s block exactly but an impasse because I had done five albums and I felt I was no longer saying what I was feeling, so I used other people’s songs and that became the country album Almost Blue.’

To his fans, was that like Dylan going electric? ‘I don’t think it was that big a deal. We joked about it and put on the album – “Warning! This album contains country and western music and may offend narrow-minded listeners.” I didn’t have people heckling but even if they had at least that would have shown they cared.’

He sips his coffee. In his youth he was a legendary drinker. It is just coffee these days. No hard liquor. Did it get in the way? ‘Not so much that really, I just drank my share and it was enough.’

But is it true he split from the Attractions because of arguments fuelled by drugs and alcohol? ‘We just had our time, I think. We thought, “let’s go and do some other things independently.” In the end we were copying ourselves. Self parody. Other people were doing it just as well as us.’

There is something endearingly Eeyorish about Elvis Costello. At one point I find myself in the bizarre position of defending one of his songs, to him – Every Day I Write the Book. ‘It was OK,’ he says begrudgingly. OK! I say. It was the soundtrack to the summer of 1983! ‘I like singing it now, but I don’t much care for the record.’

So the layers of personal meaning and association that the listener brings to it count for nothing? ‘That is to confuse quality with nostalgia. Certain songs have indisputable quality such as I’m Gonna Make You Love Me by the Temptations. Objectively that is a great record with five great vocal performances on it. But the records that were the hits were not always the best songs, they were just the ones the labels put out which caught the mood of the time.’

He even manages to downplay Barack Obama’s request that he be the bandleader at his inauguration. ‘I’ve not met him. My wife has and says he’s very charming. He sent his regards to me, which was nice of him. You’d think he would have too much on his plate to bother with a pop singer.’

The Clintons were fans, too, naming their daughter after the Elvis Costello song (I Don’t Want to Go To) Chelsea. ‘I think Bill is more a fan of my wife,’ he says. Even so, last year, Costello hosted Spectacle, a chat show series on Channel 4, and proved an able interviewer, his skills honed from standing in for David Letterman.

Guests ranged from Lou Reed, Smokey Robinson, Herbie Hancock, Elton John and Tony Bennett… to Bill Clinton. ‘That Bill took an hour out of his time when his wife was running for president to come on was good of him. That was only the second interview I did. It was bad enough trying to remember the technical stuff, like which camera to look at, without having to think of coherent questions.’

Another week featured what was probably the last television performance by the Police before they disbanded, again. ‘With them it was a case of let’s have some banter with these three guys who after tomorrow night are probably not going to see each other again for a very long time. I had been on the road with them and knew there had been this begrudging tolerance of each other.’

Costello was known as an acerbic songwriter in his early years, as well as a thorny personality. I ask what he makes of the perception that he was an angry young man who mellowed. ‘I don’t think there is any mileage in that. I just think it is a safe thing to say. A safe guess. Mellow about what?’ One thinks of the energy of his early music. Oliver’s Army. Pump it Up.

‘You saw that concert at Barbican, there was a lot of energy in that. A 23 year-old couldn’t have done that.’

What about the anger of the lyrics of Tramp the Dirt Down, in which he looked forward to the death of Baroness Thatcher. ‘Well that was much later. To people who say I have lost the fire of some of my early commentary, I say there are many ways to express things. Shipbuilding is not a ranting song, it is melancholy.

‘The River in Reverse, the song I wrote about [Hurricane] Katrina, wasn’t a pious song, that was an angry song about the lack of care for the victims.’

Besides, often his songs were about love and betrayal. Of The Crooked Line, one of the songs on his new album, he says that it is the first time he has written about fidelity in an unironic way. ‘I think when I was younger I was not very good at writing love songs that didn’t have a twist. You know, Smokey Robinson writes the heartfelt songs, whereas it was my job to write the songs about weakness and failure in love.’

He says it took a long time to admit that it was love with Krall, not just musical empathy. He believed they could be friends and collaborators. ‘Then something happens that you can’t control and I’ve never felt better in my life.’

So The Crooked Line is about finding love and happiness after two unsuccessful marriages? ‘Actually, it was written for someone else to sing. Imagining a much longer relationship to reach a peaceful place. If I was going to write something that personal it would be in the song, I wouldn’t need to explain it. Maybe none of my songs are directly from my own life.’ Note the ‘maybe’. Costello is always careful in his use of words.

Forget the ‘X-Files’: Gillian Anderson, one-time ‘world’s sexiest woman’, is about to tackle Ibsen in a new West End production of ‘A Doll’s House’

The first surprise is Gillian Anderson’s accent. I have heard about how she can slip from English to American as effortlessly as silk runs through fingers. Indeed, by way of research, I have watched her being interviewed by Jay Leno (for whom she adopted an American accent) and Michael Parkinson (an English one). I even know how and why she does this – she lived here until she was 11, moved there until she was 35, then, five years ago, came back to live here. Still, nothing quite prepares you for sitting opposite FBI Special Agent Scully and hearing the head girl of Cheltenham Ladies’ College.

The second surprise is how insouciant and unguarded she is. She has a light and breathy laugh, more a catch in her voice, and a friendly and confiding manner, again in contrast to the humourless and sceptical Scully. This guilelessness is also unexpected because her relationship with the press has not always been cordial – the paparazzi in LA used to ram into her car deliberately so as she would have to get out and exchange insurance details. Yet here she is sitting in a London bar at eight o’clock at night telling me about where her 14-year-old daughter goes to school, how she has been enjoying taking the bus to rehearsals for her new play and, well, how she had to cajole her partner into having sex with her. No, really.

Also, I ought to describe her. She is much shorter than you imagine, 5ft 3in, and yet not short looking – in proportion, I mean. She has slightly sad, downturned eyes, a mole above her puffy top lip (one that they used to cover up on The X-Files) and a tattoo on the inner part of her wrist, Asian lettering that is something to do with yoga. With her long, blonde hair tumbling down against her black top (she is also wearing a black skirt and black calf-length boots which she tucks under herself as she sits) she looks immaculate – half a pint of velvety Guinness.

You would not guess she was a 40 year-old with three children, the youngest six months old. And yet she says other mothers in the park aren’t intimidated by her appearance so much as appalled at how scruffy she is. ‘They look at me like, “Doesn’t she have mirrors in her house?”’ Yeah, right. I should say something about her work, too, or rather her reinvention from the glamorous star of a hugely popular and long-running TV show about alien abduction to a highly respected stage and film actress. Although she returned to TV for her Bafta-nominated performance in the BBC’s Bleak House (and, if the rumours are true, will do so again as a villain in Doctor Who), she has also been discriminating in her choice of film roles, favouring the intelligent and stylish, such as A Cock and Bull Story and The Last King of Scotland, over the commercial (even if she did manage to slip in an X-Files movie last year).

The rehearsals, by the way, are for Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, a new version that opens at the Donmar Warehouse later this month. Anderson plays the lead, Nora; a woman who leaves her husband and children after having her feminist consciousness raised (when first performed in 1879 it caused a great scandal). While Anderson cannot empathise with that aspect of the play, she says she does appreciate the feminist arguments and understands the emotional journey Nora takes. Also she does know what it is like to be patronised and objectified by men (as Nora is in her Doll’s House) and she knows, too, all about the responsibilities of motherhood.

Her first child was with her first husband. She divorced him, married someone else and divorced that one 16 months later. Her two youngest children are with her partner, the British businessman Mark Griffiths (he made his fortune working in the private parking and wheel-clamping business). Earlier tonight she was having a battle of wills with her two-and-a-half-year-old son Oscar, who didn’t want to eat his supper. And thanks to her six-month-old son Felix, she was, as usual, up at 5.30am this morning.

‘He wakes three times in the night and once I’ve settled him, it is more or less time to get breakfast ready for Oscar. I used to do yoga a lot but I don’t seem to have time anymore. You would think that I could work in an hour somewhere, but I can’t. I don’t want to eat into the time I spend with the children. Then I have to be out of the house by 9.15 to get to rehearsals for 10.’ A pause. ‘When I start work on a play I do behave as if I’m about to fall off the side of earth. Sometimes my heart stops. It’s absolutely terrifying. It’s a big play and I’m in every scene but one.’

She keeps her energy levels up by taking a nap at lunchtime, she says. ‘I used to find it impossible to sleep during the day but… I’ve never done a play with little ones before. I did film very soon after my first child, 10 days, after a c-section, five days after coming home from the hospital. It seems crazy but at the time I thought, “OK this is my penance for having got pregnant when they had invested so much in the show and me”.’

That was in 1994 when The X-Files had only just completed its first season. She thinks if it hadn’t been for the chemistry between her and her co-star David Duchovny (who played Agent Mulder) she would have been sacked. ‘They would have loved to have punished me but they realised there was steam picking up. I thought they were overreacting but now I see it from their perspective. I would have been bloody p—ed if I had been them and had cast a girl, against my better judgement, who got pregnant after the first season.’

They got the green light for the play a year last February. ‘I had decided I wanted to get pregnant in February… oh my God, I’d forgotten about this! I’d just got back from India and was going straight into filming The X-Files movie. I knew that I wanted to have the baby at a certain time because there was another film I wanted to do after that. Yeah, so the perfect time was February and…’ She puts her hand over her mouth. ‘I was bloody lucky, but I was also determined because I didn’t want to be too nauseous by the time we had finished filming The X-Files. And I’d worked out the amount of time it took me to get big last time.’

So she’s not a control freak then. ‘Oh dear, I am aren’t I?’ She laughs. ‘The first two weren’t planned.’

Did she and her partner synchronise diaries for when she was ovulating? ‘Not quite, but it is hard work when you decide to plan it. It can get very unromantic, especially when you are working 16-hour days. You get home at 3am and say, “OK, we have to do it now.” “But it’s three o’clock in the morning!” Then when you wake up it’s: “What? Again? Before I go to work? Oh no”.’

Having had a peripatetic childhood herself, with all the insecurities that come with that, does she worry about her children having the same? ‘I moved a lot for university and work. But I never thought it was a negative thing. I thought how lucky I was to have had formative years growing up in London. A lot of Americans never set foot outside America. It can be an inward-looking country.’

Gillian Anderson was born in Chicago and, on balance, she feels more American than British. ‘But even on the phone my accent will change. Part of me wishes I could control it, but I can’t. I just slip into one or the other. When I moved to the States I tried hard to cling on to my British accent because it made me different.’

But presumably by then she was getting noticed for her looks? Wasn’t that difference enough? ‘Not in my teens. I was either a nerd or… I never thought about clothes until I was 15, when I dyed my hair and wore pointy red shoes to be different. I was never the pretty girl. I was always somewhere at the back.’

So when did she start to feel confident about her looks? ‘It took until the sixth season of The X-Files, when a new hair person came on and said, “Are you sure you want to look like that?” and I said, “What’s wrong with it?” She said I think we need to straighten your hair, you look dowdy. The pastel suits. The plaid suits, the horrible hairstyles. It had never occurred to me. To go from that to the cover of magazines made no sense to me. In my twenties and thirties I just kept thinking “I am really pulling the wool over people’s eyes. When am I going to be found out? I’m not good enough”. All that self-depreciating stuff. I remember a cover shoot for Jane magazine, feeling such low self-esteem, so much self criticism that I wasn’t able to get out of myself and join in. Last year I came across that photo shoot and saw this really pretty young girl with short hair who was toned and thin and I know I was thinking I was too fat at the time, tormenting myself. And yet there were these lovely pictures. I thought “how much time have I wasted in my life beating myself up about how I look?”’

In 1996, she did a cover shoot for FHM which proved to be something of a landmark in the lad’s mag market. The editor came up with the idea of having a cerebral woman posing provocatively on the cover. Sales broke all records and the approach has been much imitated since. When I tell her about this ‘Gillian Anderson factor’ it is news to her. ‘Really? But now I’m 40 that is nice to hear. I remember doing that first interview for FHM – I was in Vancouver wearing flannel pyjamas with cowboys on them. My hair was messy and I didn’t feel sexy at all. I felt exhausted, my daughter was downstairs and there I was being told I was a sex object. I laughed out loud. It’s an odd one. I can see the funny side of it now but part of me, the feminist side, did worry about how I could justify it.

‘In my younger years I was very naïve. I did a lot of shoots. I probably shouldn’t have because they were embarrassing or in bad taste. It took me a long time to be able to step back and say “that didn’t feel right inside. I didn’t realise I had the choice”.’ The year of that first FHM shoot the magazine’s readers voted her ‘World’s Sexiest Woman’. But this also led to insecurity and a need for reassurance. ‘I was always being asked why I got that job? Fox Television wanted a buxom, leggy blonde and they got me. I never thought about it till this minute, but it must have added to this feeling of being found out.’

I ask about the time she dug her heels in when she discovered the salary of her male co-star on The X-Files was twice hers. ‘It made sense at the beginning because he had been cast first and had a body of work already whereas I was plucked from obscurity. Also I was being paid more money than my parents or I had ever seen in our lives. [Her father worked in the film industry on the production and editing side.] So I felt very lucky, then after three years I was like, “Know what? This isn’t working for me anymore”. I made a stand and the gap in our pay closed. Was it sexism? Maybe. It’s like the way we were directed by the studios, I was to walk behind him, never side by side. I mean, that is f—ing priceless when I think about it now. When we would get out the car and walk towards the house I would have to be behind him, even though I had equal dialogue.’

She also says now that she feels she didn’t allow herself to enjoy her fame as much as she should have done. ‘For the first five years of the series we were up filming in Vancouver and I was hardly ever in LA. I didn’t really know anyone. The first year, I married a Canadian and had a child. If things had happened differently I might have gone to the fashionable parties in LA, might have ended up with a different life. But I didn’t, I ended up with a responsible life very quickly, and my only priority when I wasn’t working was to make time to be with my child. I got hugely controlling and hugely anal. All my spare time was spent either exercising, painting our house, or being with my child.’

Was the time she spent with her daughter relaxing? ‘No, it was pretty intense. Whenever we were together my brain was going at a thousand miles an hour in other directions. It trained me to be vigilant with my down time. I still have a hard time with it… Everyone in my life…’ She trails off. ‘It’s a joke. I have to work hard to be relaxed.’

Might there be aspects of her character that would make her difficult to live with, even if it weren’t for the demands of her work? ‘Oh, oh I see, I’m sure, yes, I can’t pin it all on work, yeah, I could make a huge list of things that make me difficult to live with.’

She has described herself as an angry teenager, one who pierced her nose, had a Mohican haircut, and was voted ‘Most Likely To Be Arrested’ by her classmates at high school. It was prompted by the move back to the US, which left her feeling lonely and the odd one out. It also created an abiding sense of impermanence, as though nothing in life was dependable. She began seeing a therapist around that time and has continued seeing them off and on all her life. ‘Yeah I still see a therapist. Not as regularly as I used to, but yeah. I find it essential to have someone out there who is not interested in saying the right thing, someone who is blunt and honest with me about their perception of my behaviour. Otherwise I’d just rely on my own opinion of myself, or what my partner said, and that would be too close to home, especially if he said things that were painful to hear.’

She thinks her anxieties are rooted in her childhood. ‘There are patterns in my life, aspects of my personality that are still there and were there as a child, my mother always said I was single-minded. There was no compromise with me, she felt powerless as a parent.’

Meaning? ‘I don’t think I ever needed parental approval. I want to do this NOW and I am going to do it. My mum says she didn’t know where I got this attitude from, this idea that I could do anything I set my mind to. Now I am more aware of my own fallibility. When I was 16 I directed a play and I wanted to do everything, from the lighting to designing the programme. Now I have taken a play on and I am scared s—less. I tell myself everything will be OK then my brain will start asking “but what if it’s not OK? What if you go blank on stage? After all, I am 40. Will the lines still be there? What if my memory goes?” I have anxiety dreams where I show up for the first night of a play and I haven’t been at any of the rehearsals. I feel like I’m not prepared enough.’

Blimey. But fair enough. She has experienced panic attacks during performances, and once nearly had to walk off the stage at the Royal Court. Yet she seems to be drawn to that which frightens her the most. Rather daffily, she now hunts around for some wood to touch because she has said she thinks the play will be OK. ‘F—! There has got to be some wood I can tap… Some wood… Tap.’ Her hands flap like trapped birds until she finds a wooden window ledge. ‘Sorry,’ she says, looking relieved. ‘Tapping wood is a big deal for me.’