A man distracted by his washing machine, that is Mike Figgis when I meet him in his North London flat on an overcast afternoon. He is sitting on a laundry bin in front of the machine, staring gloomily into its port hole, perhaps in the hope that it will feel sorry for him and start working again. Without much conviction he offers me a coffee and says he will be with me in a minute. I look around. There are deckchairs, bookshelves and, on the floor, a pair of knee-length, tan-and-black riding boots, which are what you might expect a Hollywood director from the silent era to wear, but not Mike Figgis.
On the wall hangs an acoustic guitar, which is more in keeping: Figgis is not only an Oscar-nominated director, he is also an accomplished jazz musician who scores his own movies and began his career playing trumpet in a band with Brian Ferry. I gaze out of the window next. There are extravagant views over a canal and, beyond them, can be heard the urban ambience of King’s Cross: sirens, pneumatic drills, Tannoys announcing departures. This is Figgis’ home when he is in his homeland — he was born in Carlisle and raised in Newcastle, with a few years in Africa in between — but he is often in America. Indeed he flew in from New York on the red eye this morning. He was hoping to get his washing done before flying off again to Prague but the soapy water, he explains over his shoulder, won’t drain away.
I don’t know much about washing machines but I do know that when they won’t drain it is probably because the filter is clogged up. I impart this information and his mood lightens. ‘Yes, yes, I remember now, someone did mention that when I bought it. The filter. Thank you. Did I offer you a coffee?’
The air of distraction suits him. He is 6ft tall and scruffy in an overcoat and white trainers, laces untied. At 59, his goatee is silvering. His electric fuzz of dove-grey hair is still distinctive — he doesn’t like it much, though, and would shave it all off, he says, were it not for his having a ‘big and lumpy’ head. We sit across from each other over a breakfast bar. There is a montage of family photographs here, as well as outsize novelty dollar bills and, I notice, some Rizla papers. For rolling joints? Yes, he confirms insouciantly. He likes to smoke with his sons — aged 32 and 26 — when they visit. He seems open and friendly then, though he has a reputation for being, shall we say, uncompromising. He always looses it, he tells me, when people drive badly. ‘I’m a tyrant. If someone is driving the crew and me I say: “Both hands on the wheel, please, and no phone calls.” I won’t tolerate sloppiness. The same with people using hand-held cameras — there is no direct energy, no dynamic. I cut the strap off straight away to force them to hold the camera properly.’
Though he is softly spoken — and well spoken — the lack of compromise can sometimes translate into volume and volatility. His first big success as a director was Internal Affairs in 1990. It not only revived Richard Gere’s career, it provided the actor with the gritty role of a lifetime, that of a corrupt policeman, an Iago to Andy Garcia’s Othello. ‘Richard says he finds it easier playing bad people than good,’ Figgis now says. ‘And certainly he is a perverse enough human being to understand perversity. When we started shooting he trusted me. I found him very easy to work with on that film. I then did another film with him — Mr Jones — and it was a disaster. It was about manic depression.’
Which other Hollywood director would so casually call Richard Gere a pervert? Either Figgis lacks the caution of more conventional Hollywood players, or he simply doesn’t care about making powerful adversaries. ‘I was really stitched up on Mr Jones,’ he continues with a thin, off-centre smile, ‘and unfortunately Richard was one of the producers. There was a certain point where he could have backed me up and trusted me, but he didn’t. He even approved Jon Ameil [the director of Entrapment] to come in and re-shoot, which was to me a terrible idea — because the film is now stupid.’ Figgis runs a hand through his wiry hair and sighs. ‘My version was beaten up, along with me. Despite the sniping of Ray Stark [the late Hollywood mogul] and the studio, Richard had put in a good performance on my version. Two films on, I made Leaving Las Vegas and everything that had been repressed in Mr Jones resurfaced unencumbered by the studio and, ironically, it was the most successful film I made. I would cite that as an example to studios that they should just fuck off and let directors do their thing. But they never learn.’
Oh, the suppressed anger beneath this calm surface. But it is understandable. Figgis was nominated for an Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas, the film that launched Nicholas Cage into the leading man first-division. Cage played a suicidal drunk, a role that won him an Oscar and upped his rate from $2 million to $20 million per film. Following an agreement between the two of them, Figgis wrote the lead role in his next film, One Night Stand, for Cage but the actor turned down the job [it went to Wesley Snipes] and left Figgis feeling disillusioned with Hollywood. ‘I was disappointed that I didn’t hear from Nick for about four years after he won the Oscar. I think he was suddenly getting offered all the parts that never came his way before. He turned my film down because he just wanted to fuck off and make a lot of money.’
There is an entertaining chapter about actors in Digital Film Making, a new book by Mike Figgis, published by Faber and Faber next week. ‘As I warn in the book,’ Figgis says, ‘actors can be temperamental. But who can blame them? They are expected to just turn up and start acting whether they are in the mood or not. The best advice I would give a budding film maker is: try acting yourself before you ask someone else to do it. It’s hard. I know, I tried it. You feel self conscious. Everything can affect your mood, from the time of day to what you had for breakfast. When you don’t have the answer for why something isn’t working, your nervousness increases along with your insecurity. The actors’ nerves increase too — you’ve made them feel inadequate because they can’t seem to give you what you want — but it sometimes takes the form of arrogance because they’re actors and they can impersonate confidence. As the director, you’re the one who ends up looking nervous. I think a lot of directors are frightened by actors, intimidated by them. I was when I first tried direction. It was like having to perform. Actors want to be directed though. They don’t want Hitler exactly, but they do want a firm hand and a clear vision. You do have to judge it. Even Richard Gere wanted to be directed, so as he didn’t look foolish.’
Actors like to test directors, it seems. Give them a trial period. This happened on Canterbury’s Law, the pilot Figgis has just been shooting in New York [starring Julianna Margulies from ER]. On this occasion, honour was served on both sides — but it isn’t always the case. For his last foray into television, Figgis shot an episode of the Sopranos. ‘I came in on season four and I was the only person on the set who wasn’t dug in. A lot of the crew were just phoning it in. Coasting. Being sloppy. I made the mistake half way through that shoot of getting firm with the crew. I made a lot of noise and told everyone to shut the fuck up. That was it. After that, they withdrew humour and good will. There were no big hugs at the end. But so what? As a director there is not point in trying to be everyone’s friend.’
It’s tough talk, but then he has had to deal with James Gandolfini, who plays Tony Soprano. When Figgis suggested he try acting in a certain way he turned on him and, in front of the whole cast, said: ‘Why the fuck would I do that? Tony Soprano wouldn’t do that.’ A silence fell. ‘I don’t think it was planned,’ Figgis says now. ‘It was spontaneous. He was in a grumpy mood. It was scary.’ The director backed down and allowed the actor to try it his way. ‘It didn’t work so then Gandolfini said he had had an idea and would try it another way: the way I had suggested in the first place.’
We talk about how actors manipulate emotions away from the screen — and it brings us to Figgis’s own experiences of dating actresses. ‘It’s every cliché. They are such high maintenance. At the time you don’t mind it but only later do you realise you worked quite hard. The root to being an actor or actress is that you have some kind of identity crisis. They all do. They have to have big egos because they are exposing themselves. They are expansive characters.’
He says ‘all’ but you know he is talking about Saffron Burrows, the actress with whom he had a five year relationship. Gossip blamed their bust up in 2002 on her close friendship with the actress Fiona Shaw — though Figgis himself dismissed this speculation as ‘crude’. At the time he observed: ‘It is painful to lose the everyday presence of someone in your life; but if you really love them, you just love them.’
Is he in a relationship now? ‘I am.’ Another off-centre smile. ‘But filmmaking is not a user-friendly profession in that respect. Too much time on location. Never in the same place.’
One of the more memorable scenes in Leaving Last Vegas is a sex scene. Figgis is known for them – a broad narrative sweep and a core of sexual obsession characterise his best work. In his experimental film Hotel, for example, he used a dizzying montage of erotic glossy, lesbian, sex scenes. I ask if digital filmmaking makes sex scenes easier because it is more low key. ‘Yes, but certain rules still apply. The director’s job is to create the ambience and maintain it. You have to be 100% there for the actors, not be in their eye line, and as soon as you cut a scene get straight in there — huddle with them and say this is great. Keep the energy going. It is seductive management. The crew have to understand they are part of that energy and if they stand there chewing gum in the eye line of the actors, bellies hanging out, it won’t work. I’ve seen people eating sandwiches in the eye line.’
More recently, Figgis directed Kate Moss in her film debut: a four-minute dream sequence for the lingerie brand Agent Provocateur. She stripped down to her knickers for him, take after take. Tough assignment that, one imagines. ‘The trickiest part was the first 10 minutes. It was just us in the room, and pitch black, because I was using night vision. I tried to create a comfort zone by telling her I was nervous, too.’ That film was an homage to a Jean-Luc Goddard, apparently. ‘With digital you don’t  have to give anything to a laboratory,’ Figgis adds. ‘I could just shoot whatever I liked. Whereas when you’re making a traditional celluloid film, you always have to go through the committee stages. If you’re doing something quite edgy or sexual, it can feel like you’re showing your parents.’
Though he finds black stockings, suspenders and high heels erotic, he is keen to point out that there is a burlesque element to lingerie. ‘The sensuality diminishes. Sexiness is really about light or the absence of it. For example, the Agent Provocateur shorts were shot without artificial lights. The implied is ten times stronger than the explicit. Sexuality is an interestingly dark area of our psychology — so that’s how you want to portray it.’
Figgis is a great innovator, and indeed an inventor, having designed the Fig Rig, which artificially makes the camera ‘big’, and impossible to use with one hand, thereby producing better picture quality. But in the film world he is best known as a champion of digital film making. In 2000, with his film Timecode, he pioneered a technique using digital, real-time editing and filming on quadruple-screens — four segments could be watched in any order and still make sense. This has been much imitated, most notably by 24. Figgis believes that the digital revolution is democratising filmmaking, and that everyone with a digital camera and a laptop can and should have a go at making a film. His new book is intended as a steer to those who are planning to do just that, but without any of the conventional film school training. I suggest to him that it is asking for trouble to encourage everyone to think they have a film in them — after all, people often claim they have a good novel in them, when usually they don’t. ‘Yes there is the danger that there will now be ten times as many bad films made, but there will also be more good ones. It doesn’t really matter either way because distribution is still the problem.’
Figgis has had his fair share of failure as well as success in the film world; how has he coped? ‘Well ultimately that is what weeds out everyone who shouldn’t be there. To survive more than a few years and make more than one good film is how you prove yourself. When the struggling comes, some give up, or modify their ambition. The truth is, the last time I made a feature was 2002 for Disney — Cold Creek Manor with Sharon Stone and Dennis Quaid. Huge crew. Horrible responsibility. It didn’t do very well and since that time I have thrown myself into making much smaller digital films, as well as writing, teaching, and photography —  all the things I love — and I have never been happier.’
But happiness is relative; is he happy now? He crunches on an apple. ‘Sooo happy. I’ve had periods of great misery but it has always been happy misery. I’ve never been able to not get out of bed without the feeling that something interesting might happen today.’
Even so, he admits he cries easily. ‘I’m especially susceptible on  transatlantic flights — the corniest film will work on me.’ His father, a journalist and PR consultant, cried easily, too. He was also a worrier. ‘He died quite young, 56, so he had no experience of me making films. The last thing he said to me was: “I hope you get a real job because I’m worried about you.” I wish I could have said to him it worked out OK; I did OK; it was worth it. Initially I was desperate to impress my dad who was obsessed with jazz — he was a frustrated jazz pianist. That was the great bond between us. I wanted to be a jazz trumpet player to impress him. He understood emotional playing.’
For all the affection with which he speaks of his father, his childhood was not happy — it was happy misery at best. He was brought up in colonial Africa until the age of 10 — when his expat parents, faced by ‘debt and disgrace’, decamped to Newcastle. Overweight, with frizzy curls and fine elocution, Figgis was never going to have an easy time with his northern peers. As a schoolboy he found an escape in photography, and he still does as an adult. ‘I don’t even like going  to a party unless I have a camera on me. I get frustrated. It’s not that I’m experiencing life second hand, I think it is more a way of understanding life. You can have a more hedonistic approach and live it or, like me, you can record it. It is a compulsion with me.’
Though Figgis is unassuming and lacking in vanity, you suspect this lack is tinged with a certain self loathing. He doesn’t find himself ‘attractive’, he says. And for all his good manners and mellow voice, he nevertheless seems to misread social signals and unintentionally cause offence, especially on a film set. He is, you suspect, not as in control of his emotions as he likes to think he is. He’s likable, though. And I see none of the prickliness associated with him — and anyway the prickles may be simply a matter of his being exacting and professional.
He seems willing, out of politeness, to continue, but I can see he is tired and so I say goodbye and leave him in his flat overlooking the canal — with his jetlag, with his dirty laundry, with his demonss

As every article that has ever been written about Richard Griffiths mentions his weight, I thought it might be highly original and possibly even witty to see if I could write one without mentioning it.

Alas, as soon as he enters the room – a white, high-ceilinged rehearsal studio near Waterloo station – he mentions it. A stage manager has set up two chairs for us, but he is not happy with them. ‘I want one without arms,’ he says, ‘arms make life very difficult for me.’ As if explanation were needed, he adds: ‘Because of my size, you see.’ Not just chairs with arms but seats generally, he explains, in cabs, on planes… He settles himself down, in a chair without arms, at a right-angle to me; a black scarf draped over his stomach like a modesty veil.

Without prompting, he tells me that what he hates most about his size is being photographed, a strange admission for an actor, you might suppose. But acting on stage and screen involves movement. Photography is all about being still. ‘And I hate that,’ he says, with a still recognisable trace of Teesside in his flattened vowels. ‘Some actors don’t mind it. Those who are pretty. They think it’s nice to be looked at because they are nice to look at. I appreciate that. I’m very happy to salute that aspiration. But I don’t like the way I look so I don’t like being photographed. I become defensive.’

When I ask if that is a form of vanity, he regards me with sleepy, bespectacled eyes, and his bearded face softens into a chipmunk grin. ‘My vanity is not remotely physical, it is cerebral. I suppose feeling self-conscious might be a form of vanity, though. Dickie Attenborough used to say…’ He launches into a long-winded account of his appearance in the film Gandhi. Most of his anecdotes take about 10 minutes, partly because he has a ponderous delivery, partly because he digresses constantly, even from his digressions. The upshot of this one is that the actors in Gandhi were allowed to see the rushes but not the stills, in case it made them self-conscious. ‘Actors do have good and bad sides. It’s because the passage down the birth canal distorts the face. People born by caesarean section are more symmetrical.’

Does he have a better side? ‘Yes, but I can’t remember which it is. Dirk Bogart had to be three-quarters left; they built sets to accommodate that side of his face.’

Talking of being self-conscious, Griffiths is about to star opposite Daniel Radcliffe, he of Harry Potter fame, in the first major production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus since 1973. Griffiths plays the psychiatrist, Radcliffe his patient, a young man who has a pathological sexual fascination with horses. There is much nudity in the play. ‘Yes, but thank goodness it’s not me being naked,’ Griffiths says. ‘I wouldn’t inflict my naked body on any paying audience.

‘I think it was difficult for Daniel at first, especially as this is his stage debut, but they have done it brilliantly. Initially there were just four of us in the room, then eight, then 40 – and they [Radcliffe and Joanna Christie, the two young actors who appear naked] became confident about it. Obviously what you worry about when you take your clothes off is the prurient response.’

And the temperature. ‘That’s true. I hadn’t thought about that. Knowing David Pugh [the producer] he will probably drop the temperature by three degrees to make everyone’s nipples perkier. I don’t think it is too bad for these two actors because they have lovely bodies, so they are admirable rather than mockable.’

We talk about his research for the role. Has he ever seen a psychiatrist himself? ‘Not formally no. I know a couple and I’ve talked around various things with them but I haven’t sought treatment.’ I only ask because his childhood was… well, a Freudian analyst would have a field day with it. ‘I’ve never thought about it, but I suppose they would. What can I say? I deal with it. I think I have come to terms with my absolutely hateful and vile childhood.’

‘No, I have, really. But I did hate it at the time. I resented it. There were elements of it that were positively Dickensian.’

Much of the misery was to do with his parents’ handicap. ‘They were both profoundly deaf and dumb. My Dad had lost his hearing at the age of five through some infection. It was genetic in my mother’s case. They could make noises when they were emotionally aroused, but they couldn’t form it into speech.’ As a consequence Richard was brought up in a world of silence. There was no television. He got his first radio aged 15 and was listening to a Proms concert when his father nudged him and asked what it sounded like. ‘I couldn’t explain music to him, and I felt monstrous; totally inadequate.’

The family lived in a council flat in Stockton-upon-Tees. Richard attempted to run away many times. ‘The trouble was I was sort of responsible for them. From the age of four I would help with the shopping. That is why I have a life-long loathing of shopping. They would sign and I would translate to the shopkeeper.’

Walking out of school one day, he was amazed to see children chattering to their parents. ‘I remember thinking, I suppose when they go home and have their tea, it will be like in our house – nobody will talk.’

Is that what he means by Dickensian, the pathos? ‘No, that was more to do with poverty. My Dad came in when I was 13 with various bags of comestibles – fruit and vegetables – and communicated that we would be having Christmas lunch this year but there would be no presents. ‘I could not believe it. It was just awful not having a new six-gun or bike or anything.’

He is still haunted by his father’s bitter struggle to pay off £50, borrowed at usurious interest rates when he fell ill and could not feed his family. Griffiths has never been in debt as a consequence, other than to have a mortgage. Even then he nearly sold his house when interest rates rose. He won’t use credit cards, if he can help it. But, in a spirit of contrariness, he does like a flutter on the horses.

His father was a steel-fixer. A question about this leads to a 10-minute explanation of what it is a steel-fixer does – he lays foundations for buildings. The point is, it was manly work. How did he feel about his son going off to study drama at the Northern College of Music in Manchester? ‘Pretty annoyed. It was major warfare. I had wanted to be a painter before that, which was fine. It was the one art of which he approved. In Teesside at the time it was the one thing you could do connected to the arts that didn’t prove you were a homosexual who had to die. If you said you wanted to be an actor it meant you had to be put to death. I had to keep the acting secret from my Dad. He raged at its pooffery when he found out.’

To this day, Griffiths has no love for the ‘ignorant, rough’ North and hasn’t returned to his hometown since his parents died in 1976. That was the year he was spotted by Trevor Nunn. Ten years at the RSC followed (he still lives near Stratford-upon-Avon).

Griffiths is known for being forthright, especially with members of the audience who forget to switch off their mobile phones before a performance. He has twice stepped out of character to berate offenders. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ he bellowed at one. It may be to do with his childhood fear of extraneous noise, but you sense it is also to do with his latent anger. For all the joviality of the characters he plays, he is an angry man, is he not?

‘Oh yes. I think I get it from my father. He was a very aggressive man. He used to fight for money in pubs. People would put money into a pint pot behind the bar and he would put on a pair of leather gloves and go out the back to fight anyone who would challenge him.’ The young Richard was in fights constantly, too. ‘I would never start them. But I would have to go and thump people at school for taking the piss or doing something upsetting to me. I would be the one who got into trouble for it because I was the biggest. I once attacked two kids because they threw an apple core at me and it hit me in the face and everyone laughed – and that was what really made me angry, being laughed at. So I pursued them round the school and beat them up. I was so angry. It was the best fight I ever had. Two of them. I do still get angry, especially over mobile phones. I wish there was some civil legislation based on the principle of disrespect…’ This leads to a 10-minute digression about Sixties hedonism and the scorn for good manners that it led to.

His sudden weight-gain as a child was not to do with unhappiness; it was glandular. He was so thin as an eight-year-old he was given radiation treatment on his pituitary gland. After that his metabolism slowed down and, within months, he began to balloon. His classmates called him Billy Bunter. Given the low self-esteem that came with this, wasn’t it masochistic of him to put himself on stage for all to stare at? ‘It’s perverse isn’t it? It intrigues me. I don’t know why it is. I was unhappy as a child, but that was not surprising because my parents were deeply dysfunctional and very unhappy, too. Us kids had no means of understanding what it was like for them.’

‘Us kids’ as in he and his younger brother? ‘Ah,’ he grins. ‘I’ve run into a buffer now: I’ve agreed with my family never to talk about them in the press. That includes my wife.’

He met his wife, Heather Gibson, in 1973 when they were both appearing in Lady Windermere’s Fan. They married in 1980; according to his Who’s Who entry, they have no children. In passing he mentions that Heather is Irish, that she is an excellent cook and that: ‘The thing that drives my wife nuts is this constant record I play about how shabbily actors are treated.’ But that is all. More generally, he tells me his taste in women is for the fuller figure. ‘I could never understand the attraction of Bette Davis. I always preferred Jane Russell.’ This may come as a surprise to some people as it is often assumed that, because he is best known for playing gay men, Richard Griffiths is gay.

He won an Olivier Award and, in America, a coveted Tony Award for his performance in The History Boys, the Alan Bennett play recently turned into a film (both directed by Nicholas Hytner). In it, Griffiths plays the motorbike-riding polymath Hector, a grammar school teacher who is enthusiastic, shambolic, subversive and vulnerable. He is also a groper of young men, one whose victims seem to pity rather than fear him. ‘They’re over 18, they’re adults,’ notes Griffiths, who says references to Hector as a paedophile make him furious. ‘I’d feed all paedophiles into a tree-shredder, if it were left to me. One minute with a tree shredder. Anything left the police can have.’

He is also famous for playing the predatory homosexual and aesthete Uncle Monty in Withnail and I. People still stop him in the street to quote Uncle Monty’s most memorable line at him: ‘As a youth I used to weep in butchers’ shops.’ Perhaps the best-known line in that film is said about him. Withnail, played by Richard E. Grant, shouts: ‘Monty, you terrible c—!’ People often shout this at him.

‘I have to explain that I am not Monty,’ he sighs. ‘But I have to accept that Monty has become one of the stately homos of England, along with Quentin Crisp.’

Griffiths is not known for his indulgence of members of the public. ‘I’m not interested in the casual interest of strangers,’ he says. Children, especially, he finds irritating. ‘I like playing Vernon Dudley in Harry Potter because that gives me a licence to be horrible to kids. I hate the odious business of sucking up to the public. I hate it.’

The stage manager reappears to say that the people-carrier she ordered for Griffiths has arrived. The actor rises from his armless chair and smiles toothily as he says goodbye. The smile is at odds with all that anger, all that fear – fear of debt, of shopping, of being laughed at, of noise, of life.

Dark as they look, Stephen Merchant’s spectacle frames glint red when caught in winter sunlight.

As he talks, sprawled on a sofa in a studio in west London, he stares over the top of them with pink-rimmed, pale-lashed eyes, his head resting on his hand.

In the fingers of the other hand he holds a fat Bolivar cigar which he draws on repeatedly until he disappears behind a wreath of smoke. When he reappears, he looks at the cigar and nods to himself.

It’s all true, apart from the bit about the cigar. I borrowed that from a history essay Merchant wrote as a student. He had been asked to discuss the Balfour Declaration and began with a vivid, imaginary account of Churchill chewing on a cigar as he prepared a White Paper on it. The essay came back with ‘Daily Mail?’ written in the margin.

Merchant mentions this story because he says it’s what journalists always do. ‘Journalistic speculation,’ he calls it. ‘You will go away and come up with some psychological insights about me, and people will assume that because they appeared in print they must be accurate.’

Let us start with some facts, then. Merchant was born in 1974 and grew up in Bristol. His father was a plumber. He got three As at A-level and a place to read film and literature at Warwick University.

A year after graduating, he went to work for the radio station Xfm. That was in 1997. His boss was Ricky Gervais. Together they went on to write The Office and Extras and, in so doing, invented a new genre – the comedy of embarrassment.

They also won armfuls of awards – between them an Emmy, two Golden Globes, three Baftas and five British Comedy Awards. They also became rich, especially when an American version of The Office was made (they are its executive producers). Their DVD sales have been record-breaking, as have their podcasts – banter between Gervais, Merchant and their friend Karl Pilkington. They entered The Guinness Book of Records for the most downloads: five million in a month.

So, before I start with the speculation, how would he describe himself? ‘Lanky funnyman [he’s 6ft 7in]. That’s what I’d push for.’

And psychologically? ‘A bit cautious, maybe. Probably not as gregarious as Ricky … I wish I had more angst and torment.’ Because? ‘It would make me much more interesting.’

He thinks he’s shallow? Long pause. ‘Not shallow, no. It’s more I have a fear of not having anything new to say.’

I feel a psychological insight coming on. Although he is warm and friendly, I think the business of being interviewed makes Merchant feel uncomfortable because he can’t control it. He is happiest when experiencing life second-hand, you see. ‘I always feel myself stepping out of myself,’ he tells me. ‘I always feel I am watching things from a removed point. I’m standing back thinking: What’s happening here? What are the dynamics? I always float above things, looking at the drama.’

He’s emotionally detached, then.

‘Yes, and I don’t think it’s healthy. I think it can translate as an emotional coldness. It’s like spending your entire holiday worrying about the photos you’re going to take. You become so obsessed with capturing the beauty of the Taj Mahal you forget to actually look at it and enjoy it. I suppose I have always wanted to live in a film. Take actual experience and make it artificial. Have a beginning, middle and end. And a cool soundtrack.’

Which leads us to his new BBC 6 radio show, in which he plays music that interests him and chats about the tracks, sometimes with guests. He is obsessed with music, he says – an eclectic mix, from Stevie Wonder to the Pixies and Guillemots. ‘I’m one of these perverts who like playing music at people. When I drive people in my car, they have to listen to my CD compilations. Don’t be bringing your own CDs when you drive with me.’

He locks the doors? ‘Lock the doors. Ride the volume. Drive for miles.’

He grins his wide, Creature Comforts grin. I ask him if his passengers are allowed to talk. ‘They’re allowed to ask me questions about each track, at the end. But no talking over the top of them. I’m fairly ruthless about that. No conversation. Just calmly listen to the music. That’s what it’s there for.’

He speaks, by the way, with rolling West Country vowels. It’s an attractive voice but he doesn’t seem to like it. He and Gervais gave the least sympathetic character in The Office, Gareth, the same accent. ‘It came about because, while we were improvising, I would take the part of Gareth and because I have a Bristol accent we started to have that feel in our heads. Also there is an association with dimness. My accent has a yokelish quality to it. So we asked Mackenzie Crook [Gareth] to emulate it.’

And here, ladies and gentlemen, we arrive at the second psychological insight. Merchant tells me The Office is not a reflection of his character, but the podcasts are. ‘I’ve got pretensions, I think. I have to display consciously what little learning I might have had. I think Ricky has fewer urges to display his natural intelligence. He has an incredible memory and studied philosophy at London University but is happy for people to think he is an oik from Reading. I quite like the idea of people knowing I come from a working-class background but went to university.’

He’s insecure? ‘I don’t know whether it is insecurity, but when I was younger, my heroes were the Cambridge Footlights types, like John Cleese and Stephen Fry. Clever men who made clever plays on words. I aspired to that.’

Merchant is 32, 14 years younger than Gervais. ‘I don’t think Ricky was a mentor in the traditional sense. He is much younger in his outlook than most people his age. He always seemed very savvy to me, thinking three steps ahead. He was quite stable in terms of his opinions and his relationship with Jane [his partner].’

Gervais taught him how to be less mannered as a radio performer. ‘He encouraged me to drop some of the façade I had learned on student radio, all those DJ mannerisms – “and now at the top of the hour”. Me trying to sound more slick than I naturally was.’

What did Gervais get out of the partnership? ‘I think he liked my deadpan reactions to things. I just used to tell him stories of the pitiful episodes in my life and he would find them amusing. They usually involved failed romantic encounters. It taps into the basic human fear that you will end up alone, embarrassed and humiliated.’

Gervais and Merchant have been dubbed the Lennon and McCartney of comedy writing, but that celebrated partnership imploded. I ask Merchant whether he consciously avoids arguments with Gervais. ‘I think we’ve been lucky in that he has done other stuff and I, through sheer laziness, haven’t. So we are not competitive in that sense. And we don’t socialise together as much as we used to.’

There hasn’t been a Yoko factor yet … Is he courting at the moment? ‘Blimey you slipped that question in! I don’t like talking about these things … There is a girl, but I’m very protective of that aspect of my life, for her sake. Besides, the Yoko factor was to do with Yoko wanting to contribute artistically and I don’t think that applies with our girlfriends.’

Although Karl Pilkington is a former radio producer, and a bestselling author, he is usually described in the press as an idiot savant. When I met him last summer, he told me that Gervais could be quite possessive of him, not wanting to miss out on any strangely wise – or stupid – observations he might have made to his girlfriend, Suzanne. Does the same apply to Merchant? ‘I don’t think Ricky feels that way about me. Not in quite the same way. I think I would feel jealous, though, if he wanted to work with someone else, because it is a very enjoyable process. Ricky has great enthusiasm. He bounces in most days riffing on some idea or other, making me laugh. It’s exhilarating to be around someone that creative.’

We discuss their working method. ‘Ricky and I always sit together. Sit in a room and stare at each other. I won’t let him play music, which he often wants to, because I find it distracting. We have a barren office. Few distractions. We throw ideas and anecdotes back and forth until something bubbles to the surface. Initially, we will talk about the mood of the project, trying to find a common language. With The Office, it started with realising we had met similar types of people. We had both had a little experience of offices and understood the dynamics of them.’

I ask about his childhood in Bristol, specifically whether it was true that his mother was, to use a catchphrase of his, a crack-whore. ‘Yes, my mother was a crack-whore and my father was a fighter pilot. A lot of people thought they would never end up together but they did. Very pleased for them.’

Actually, his mother was a nursery nurse. It was the comedian Richard Pryor whose mother was a prostitute, a biographical detail Merchant has said he envies because his own childhood was boringly pleasant.

Did his parents have aspirations for him to break into the middle classes? ‘Yes. I think my father would have liked to have gone to university but circumstances prevented him. He did not go to a school where they primed you for it. Ricky and I have discussed a new project called The Men from the Pru, which would look at the small-time lives of men working for Prudential Insurance, men with aspirations to move out of their class. I always feel moved by the idea of frustrated dreams and lives of quiet desperation.’

His father, Ron, had a cameo in The Office as a handyman who becomes transfixed by the documentary cameras whenever he walks into shot. Did if feel strange giving his father a job?

‘There wasn’t any great significance to it. He just put on this funny, deadpan face one day and it really tickled Ricky and me. He’s a naturally funny man. A guy to break the ice at parties.’

It was his father who first made him laugh. ‘He’d do silly things. Always mucking around. You know, he’d pull his underpants too tight and walk funny.’ Are they similar in character? ‘In some instances yes, though I don’t feel like I am a show-off naturally. If I go to a party I will happily listen to someone else be entertaining. I used to be quite shy.’ Was that to do with his height? ‘Not so much now. When I was younger, yes, I would feel self-conscious about it. I would get stared at.’

He had a cameo himself in The Office, playing nerdy Gareth’s even nerdier friend, Oggy. David Brent (Gervais) made fun of his height and called him a ‘goggle-eyed freak’, at which point he ran from the room. In Extras, Merchant plays a more robust character, Darren Lamb, the incompetent agent of Andy Millman (Gervais), a role for which he won a British Comedy Award for Best TV Actor, beating Gervais to the title. Gervais was present at the event via satellite from New York. ‘A British Comedy Award, quite a prize,’ he enthused. ‘Not to me: I’ve won American ones.’

Merchant plans to do less comedy in future and more drama. He appeared briefly in an episode of 24, and a part in the Brideshead Revisited remake has also been lined up. He doesn’t like learning lines, though. He has to write them down and hide them around the set, which is why he is often sitting down in Extras.

Performing on stage terrifies him. ‘Yet I have a weird compulsion to do it. I suppose it is a challenge. I don’t like what it means to be labelled a comedian. I find it a bit distasteful. The sort of person who says: do you know what? I am so entertaining I am going to walk on that stage on my own and amuse you for an hour. What does that say about someone’s ego?’

But his greatest fear is not of forgetting lines or being on stage – it is of being bored. ‘I can’t bear a bore, someone who dominates a party. It exhausts me. When I talk to a bore I feel the life draining out of me. I don’t want to have to compete.’

That’s why he doesn’t really enjoy hanging out with fellow comedians. ‘They are the worst audience because they consider it a sign of weakness if they laugh.’ An exception is Gervais. ‘The great thing about Ricky is that he loves being entertained. He is a great audience.’

Gervais likes to boast about his wealth, as a joke. In his new stand-up show, Fame, he recalls how annoyed he felt when the Sun revealed that his new house in Hampstead cost £2.5 million, because in fact it had cost £3.5 million. Merchant, too, lives in Hampstead. Just how rich is he? ‘It’s never as much as you think. I’m not fabulously rich but I’m not on the breadline either. I’m in the sort of comfortable position where I can do things that entertain me, like this music show on radio.’

On the contrast with his impecunious childhood, he has this to say: ‘I’m very cautious with money because I never had any growing up. I’m sort of wary of it. I’m not a gambler. I’m careful. I’m always half expecting people to turn round and say: “Right, you’ve had your moment, Merchant. That was it. You blew it all? Well I’m sorry, no more.” Money doesn’t govern me. I’m not lavish. I don’t buy jewellery or fast cars. I do think: would my father buy this? I will go out of my way to find a bargain. If I buy a DVD and then find a cheaper one a few shops down, I’m furious. I’m angry.’

Does money embarrass him? ‘Yes, because there is a presumption that I have a great deal of it. I don’t know how I am supposed to react to it and behave with it. I don’t know what the etiquette is. Am I supposed to buy everyone a drink when I walk into a bar? That would be crazy.’

Like Gervais, Merchant is a canny observer of human nature, especially of people who lead ordinary lives.

Presumably now that they lead extraordinary lives – living in big houses in Hampstead and hanging out with Hollywood stars – they will have to rely on their imaginations more. ‘True, it’s not as easy as it was for us to observe people in pubs or on buses. But I do consciously try to remain in touch with that. I listen to builders who come to do work on the house. And cab drivers. And there’s a guy who works in the supermarket where I buy my stuff and he is an extraordinarily eccentric character. He sings and tells stories and I always make a beeline for him.’

Expect to see a supermarket character in a future sitcom. Meanwhile, Merchant has to get back to editing the DVD of Extras, the extra bits.

He grins, shakes hands and rises from the sofa like a giraffe with sideburns. As he strides off I recall his self-description. He is lanky and funny. But he is also interesting, even if he doesn’t see it himself.

When Jools Holland’s not suppressing rebellions in Kent, he’s listing the service stations he’s visited or playing boogie-woogie. Whatever happened to rock’n’roll? asks Nigel Farndale

Like a water spider skitting across the surface of conversation, that’s Jools Holland. It’s to do with his wandering focus: he nods and smiles constantly, but rarely concentrates on what you are saying, still less on what he is saying. It’s also to do with his relentless flippancy and jocularity.

When, for example, the talk turns to his move from a town house in Blackheath, south-east London, to Cooling Castle, near Rochester in Kent, he gives a cheery nod and a smile. ‘Wherever I lay my flat cap is my home,’ he says, pleased with his joke, and with himself. He also seems pleased with his new role as lord of the manor: when he got married last year, after a 16-year courtship, he gave a slice of wedding cake to all of the villagers.

His wife, Christabel, is a member of a landed Scottish family and was formerly married to the Earl of Durham. Among the 800 wedding guests were the couple’s 16-year-old daughter, Mabel, Ringo Starr, Stephen Fry and the McCartneys, who flew in by helicopter for the reception. The Prince of Wales couldn’t make it, though he did invite Holland to his wedding, earlier that year. Connected, in a word. A pillar of the establishment, even. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that this former punk rocker has just been appointed deputy lieutenant for Kent.

Does he, I ask, wear a flat cap in his official capacity? ‘Not when I’m being DL, no. I wear one when I am going dog-racing. Hardly any dog tracks left. All gone now. Catford. Wembley. Mad. Great sadness.’ This is how he talks, by the way. In rapid, clipped, one-word sentences delivered in a reedy, back-of-the-throat, south-London voice.

I ask if the DL of K gets to pin medals on people, on behalf of the Sovereign. ‘I haven’t yet but I would be very happy to deliver a telegram from the Queen to someone who is 100. I think it is my duty to promote Kent and to suppress any rebellions. Every five minutes there is an uprising of some sort. Peasants revolt – that started in Kent. And when Mary I was marrying Philip of Spain it was the people of Kent who came and rebelled. But I would like to reassure all your readers that they can sleep soundly in their beds now that I have control of Kent. I also keep an eye on our coastal borders, in case there is an invasion. There was a report recently that the Germans were planning to include Kent as part of France in a new map of Europe, and that is exactly the sort of thing I like to keep my eye on.’

As we are in Kensington today, at the HQ of his record label, Holland is not wearing a Kentish flat cap. He has gone, instead, for a more spivvy, London look: black suit with velvet piping, Chelsea boots, clunky diamond cufflinks and a Rolex watch. His fingernails are dirty and there is writing on the back of his hand. ‘It’s only within the past five years that I have found the right thing to wear,’ he says. ‘When Squeeze started touring America in the summer of 1978 – one of the hottest summers America had known – I turned up with a fur coat and snow boots. I had had no idea what to expect and I had to carry them around America for two months.’

He was only 20 then, a tender age to experience rock stardom. Squeeze had two big hits under their belts that summer: Up the Junction and Cool for Cats, both of which sold more than half a million copies. They weren’t really a punk band – their tunes were too catchy and cheerful, their lyrics too clever – but they got lumped in with the punk movement, like the Police, with whom they shared a manager. Did they also share groupies? ‘That is one of the benefits of being young and handsome and playing music. I still play music.

‘Also, if the other members of the band were off their faces that meant you could move in on the lady folk. I look back with fondness on all that, but it is like looking back on another life. We would check into hotels that were more comfortable than my flat. Now my house is more comfortable than most hotels.’

Ah yes, the hotels. Holland keeps a diary in which he records such minutiae as the size of hotel room he is staying in, as well as the merits of service stations he has frequented. It suggests he is in touch with his inner anorak. Still to be obsessed with boogie-woogie after all these years also, perhaps, shows a want of imagination. He has, after all, been playing it since he was eight.

He had been taught to play St Louis Blues on the piano by his Uncle David and could soon play fluently by ear. ‘I was lucky,’ he tells me rather touchingly, ‘because when I heard my uncle play boogie-woogie on the piano for the first time, the cosmology of the room came into focus. I was mesmerised by the way the left hand could play a constant riff while the right hand rolled off on its own. And I’m still mesmerised.’

Holland left Squeeze at the height of the band’s success, because ‘I like to be in charge. I like a benign dictatorship. In Squeeze I wasn’t the dictator.’ He formed his own band, which soon fizzled out. The chance then arose to host a documentary about the Police recording a new album at George Martin’s studio in Montserrat. Holland proved a natural in front of the camera: confident, irreverent, witty.

At one point, Stewart Copeland, the Police drummer, was demonstrating different styles of guitar-playing and Holland silenced his exhibitionism with an abrupt, dismissive: ‘That’s enough of all that.’ The documentary led to him being asked to co-host The Tube, with Paula Yates, live from Newcastle every Friday night. ‘When we did the audition we thought: We don’t want to do this. Imagine coming up here every week. So we were off-hand and rude and badly behaved, which it turned out was just what the producers were looking for.’

The Tube, which ran for five years between 1981 and 1986, was chaotic, ground-breaking and compelling. It featured unsigned bands alongside rising and established figures, but the undoubted stars were the hosts: Holland’s nonchalance and cynicism was the perfect complement to Yates’s flirtatiousness and anarchism. ‘I feel I ought to apologise to the people of Britain for my interviewing style on The Tube,’ Holland says. ‘I think I ushered in a more ill-mannered and disrespectful form of television. All I can say in my defence is that there was a certain earnestness and humourlessness about television interviewing at that time and we wanted to subvert it a bit.’

Later With Jools Holland has re-awakened the innovative spirit of The Tube, and is now in its 26th series. Among the new talents it has introduced over the years are Catatonia, Travis, Macy Gray, Gomez, Stereophonics and The Fugees. The highlight of each show is the moment when all Holland’s guests play together. That the show has been running for so long – 14 years – makes you appreciate Holland’s own longevity. He is 48 but seems older. Not in terms of looks but… When he was a young man hosting The Tube, he seemed oddly old and world-weary, using old-fashioned, not very rock’n’roll expressions, such as ‘splendid’ and ‘ladies and gentlemen’.

‘I know exactly what you mean,’ he says, helping me out. ‘Funnily enough, a friend of mine had a load of videos of The Tube and is just putting them on to DVD for me because I wanted to show them to my daughter who is friends with Pixie, Paula’s daughter. [Holland has three children: two from an earlier relationship.] And I watched a bit of one yesterday and it was odd to see what an overly confident, cocky person I appeared to be – because I hadn’t done that much television at the time. But I was clearly a big “reckon-I-am” person and, for some reason, that seemed to work. At the time, market research suggested that people saw me as an older brother figure, even though I was only 23.’

He must miss Paula Yates. ‘Well, it was sad what happened to her. She was so funny and sharp. The friend who is transferring The Tube onto DVD came across this moment where she calls me a stupid c— just off the microphone. He isolated the sound and said: “Listen to this. Probably the first time that word had been used on television and no one noticed it.” Well done Paula. You couldn’t be pretentious with her. She would catch people off balance. The moment she made me howl with laughter was when she introduced “Fred Mercury”. Freddie was so not a Fred…’ Holland has been commissioned to write his memoirs.

‘I’ve got up to 1994 so – when did Paula die? – I don’t think I’ve quite got up to where she drops dead yet.’ He is referring to Yates’s death from a heroin overdose in 2000. ‘But you have to have the high and lows,’ he continues in an inappropriately jokey voice, ‘the tears and the laughter!’ Did he have no intimation of Yates’s impending meltdown? ‘I didn’t sense the seeds of that at all, no. There was no sign at all that she was anything other than a teetotal, devoted mother who was very quick and amusing. There was no portent of things to come.’

How has he managed to survive so long himself in the rock world, without sliding into drug dependency, I mean? ‘It’s funny, I dreamed last night that Rod Stewart was trying to give me loads of cocaine. That was a strange dream to have.’ Especially given Rod’s legendary stinginess. ‘Exactly… But it was just a dream.’

What about when Holland is awake? I imagine he is no stranger to cocaine. Long pause. Much nodding. A smile, slightly cautious this time, the smile of the DL of K. ‘Inevitably around music there is drugs.’ Inevitably. ‘But you can’t generalise because one person can have a puff of marijuana and it will send them off their rocker. And cocaine can make people go mad, too.’

‘People’ as in Jools Holland? Pause. ‘I think I went mad on cocaine for a while, yes.’

And then? ‘And then, after a while, it made me nauseous, so I was lucky. What I did notice before I stopped was that three days later it would make me very short-tempered. It crept up on me and was changing my personality, making me twitchy and unpleasant. Also, I would spend hours talking to people I wouldn’t normally talk to. Also, it doesn’t make music sound any better.

‘People taking coke grind their teeth and imagine they want more and more sex. A jazz cigarette, on the other hand, can sometimes open the door to helping you understand a piece of music better. It’s like alcohol. Some people can’t drink. Paula Yates couldn’t. After one drink she would go mad. No tolerance. Personally, I do like a nice pint of bitter.’

Born in Deptford in 1958, Julian Holland had a happy if impoverished and peripatetic childhood. He is vague about what his father, Derek, did for a living, partly because he never stayed in one job for long. They once went without electricity for a year, and he recalls his father hiding from the rent-collector – but there were also short periods when there was money for cigars and vintage claret.

Did it bother him that there was no money around? ‘Actually, once I was aged 14 there was quite a bit of money. My father had various successes. My parents were very young. Still alive. My father had lots of books. Always read to me. Greek myths. Firing my imagination. And once I started to play piano he would bring home abstract jazz records for me to listen to.’

Did he want his father’s approval? ‘Every child who plays an instrument wants his parents to look at him. You want to show off your talent. And the desire and ability to show off is essential to success as a performer. I would drive everyone mad playing the piano. I would do it all day, relentlessly. In a confined space. You need to be obsessive about it.’

Holland’s relationship with Christabel was threatened in its early days by a potentially disastrous episode. Christabel asked Holland to put £35,000 worth of jewellery in a bank before going on tour to America. Instead, he left it in a briefcase at his studio and it was stolen – by his own father. Jools had to sit in court and see Derek Holland admit to having sold the hoard to finance a trip around the world. Holland Snr was jailed for 15 months. Holland Jnr described the case as embarrassing but said that both he and Christabel had decided to help his father seek psychiatric treatment.

I wonder if he sees some of his father in his own behaviour. ‘What do you mean?’ I mean his impulsiveness, a certain self-destructiveness. ‘Such as?’ Well not only did he leave Squeeze when the band was on a roll, but also, in a way, The Tube. He was suspended from it for declaring on a live trailer for the programme: ‘If you’re a groovy f—–, you’ll watch The Tube.’ He must have known that would get him sacked. ‘That was an inadvertent slip of the tongue. I wasn’t concentrating.’

Freud would argue that slips of the tongue are a way for the unconscious mind to reveal true feelings and motives. ‘You mean I might have unconsciously been trying to get out of the show? Well, possibly. I think by then I was getting tired of The Tube. It was convenient to be out of it.’

Also, he was expelled from school for wrecking a teacher’s Triumph Herald – he let the handbrake off and it rolled down a hill. ‘Expulsion is a strong word. It wasn’t as if I was an awful trouble-maker. Just one or two misunderstandings. I don’t think it was deliberate, letting the handbrake off. At the time, in my shallow mind, I found humour in the situation. Not really caring about school. I felt I already knew what I wanted to do, which was play the piano and show off.’

He wanted to be famous? ‘In a babyish way, yes. I fantasised about it. I wanted to be like The Beatles. I would listen to Motown and country and think: I could do that.’

Looking back at his life as he writes his memoirs, has he learned anything about himself? ‘Yes, I look at that fellow on The Tube and the fellow in the Squeeze video and I see a different person. I think I’m a slightly improved person now. Or, at least, more aware that there is scope for improvement.’ Less arrogant then, but is he more introspective? ‘Not particularly, no. More tolerant of my own mistakes and, therefore, other people’s perhaps.’

He seems a cheerful person. Is he always like this or are there ever long nights of the soul? ‘The short answer is no, I don’t. I have a lot to be positive about.’ What I’m getting at, I think, is that actually, it might just be that he is rather shallow. Is he? ‘Um. No, I think… Um. I think there is great joy in making music. It is the main focus for my life. Wherever I go, as long as there is a piano in the room, I am happy.

‘As you get older, you realise what your true needs are. Although I have more stuff, I have come to realise that my requirements in life are quite basic. I do get a certain cheerfulness and positive-thinking from my mum. She was once knocked off a motorbike and, as she was up in the air, she was thinking: this is good. I might get a day off tomorrow.’

Part of the positivism is a tendency to talk himself up. ‘I have made and sold more records in the past seven years than I have at any other time in my career, ‘ he says. ‘More than with Squeeze. It’s amazing at my age to be doing that. It feels like I’m doing my career in reverse.’

Soon after Squeeze ended he formed The Jools Holland Big Band, which consisted of him and a drummer. This gradually metamorphosed into the current 18-piece Rhythm and Blues Orchestra. They are touring until Christmas, including dates at the Royal Albert Hall. They also have a new album out, ‘Moving to the Country’, featuring Bob Geldof, Dr John and Mark Knopfler, among other guests.

It is essentially a country album, hence the title. A departure for him. Who is his market going to be? Is his intention to lure people in who don’t normally try country? ‘Lure is a good word. I like the word lure. Yes, because it is playing country songs, but not in the country style. Brian Eno is one of the guests and he sounds like Brian Eno. I hope people won’t be frightened off by the word “country”.’

His band is certainly successful: his last album, in 2004, went straight into the charts at number five. Still, Squeeze could have been… well, maybe as big as U2, with whom they used to tour. Does he have no regrets about giving that up? ‘Squeeze did play huge stadiums in America. Places such as Madison Square Garden… I remember playing the Hope and Anchor with U2 and there were two men and a dog in the audience then the dog left. So we were each other’s audience. You want success for your friends so I look at Bono with pleasure rather than jealousy.’

So Gore Vidal’s aphorism – ‘When a friend succeeds a little part of me dies’ – does not apply? ‘There is an element of that. If you want to see jealousy look at artists. People who own vast amount of land are very jealous, too, I’ve noticed, of people who own slightly more vast areas of land. But, no. Not really. With U2, I don’t think it matters the size of the venue as long as that love of the music is there. I know that sounds…’ Cheesy? ‘Cheesy. But it’s true.’

Key interests ‘Wherever I go, as long as there is a piano in the room, I’m happy,’ says Jools Holland In reflective mood ‘I look at that fellow on The Tube and the fellow in the Squeeze video and I see a different person’

 

It’s not the crisply-tailored suit and tie that makes Rory Stewart OBE stand out in a London hotel lobby. It is not even his dark, slightly dishevelled hair — hair that allows him to pass for a native while travelling across dangerous terrain in the Middle East. It is the small, incongruous rucksack slung over his shoulder. It is not an affectation. The man is one part diplomat, two parts explorer — and he is about to fly back out to Afghanistan where he is running a project to preserve the country’s heritage. He is, moreover, a figure from a bygone age: imperial, heroic, a Lawrence of Arabia who has somehow slipped through a crack in the time-space continuum.
That is not to say he is physically imposing. When, at the relatively tender age of 29, he was appointed deputy governor of a province of 850,000 people in the Marsh Arab region of southern Iraq, he was known as ‘boss’, ‘governor’ and sometimes, because of his slight 5ft 8in frame, ‘chicken legs.’ That was in September 2003, six months after the US-led invasion. In that role he not only had to negotiate hostage releases but also deal with gangsters, tribal vendettas and a full Islamic insurgency during which his governor’s compound was besieged for three days by mortars and heavy gun fire, an experience which even he had to admit was ‘slightly alarming’.
I say ‘even he’ because, for all his mildness of voice and gentle, Old Etonian manners, Rory Stewart is made of strong stuff. In 2000, he took an 18 month sabbatical from the Foreign Office to go on a solitary, 6,000-mile walk across Asia. His journey culminated in a six-week trek through Afghanistan, shortly after the collapse of the Taliban. It took him over some of the most forbidding terrain in the world, in an area where US forces were hunting Osama bin Laden. Besides mountain ranges and freezing temperatures he had to contend with Pashtun soldiers demanding that he voice his support for Al-Qaeda. As he wrote in The Places in Between, an evocative account of his journey: ‘The new government had been in place for only two weeks; there was no electricity between Herat and Kabul, no television and no T-shirts. In many houses the only piece of foreign technology was a Kalashnikov.’
It helped that he was a speaker of Dari, the local Persian dialect. He also speaks Farsi and some Arabic, which was one of the reasons he was chosen to be a deputy governor in Iraq. Other reasons include his background. After Eton, a short service limited commission with the Black Watch and a degree in History and Philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford, he became, like his father before him, a diplomat and was duly posted to a war zone, Kosovo.
He has written a new book. It is about his time governing in Iraq and is called, Occupational Hazards — My time governing in Iraq. He volunteered for that job; was it, I ask, with a view to getting a book out of it? ‘No, I was actually extremely reluctant to write a book because I was working for the government. My previous book had been about what I did as a private citizen.’
Does the Civil Service Code apply to him? ‘I’m not sure.’ Was the book vetted? He shakes his head and grimaces jokily. ‘One of the flaws of my new book, I think, is that I sometimes gave into the temptation to see things as slightly comical or exotic. It can seem strange, especially when people are mortaring you or screaming that you are an infidel in these very artificial, melodramatic engagements. But I wanted to convey the texture of ordinary people’s lives, what their expectations of government were, and how they negotiated cocky, strutting, self-confident foreigners.’
There were indeed some strange episodes. He was given so much development money by the Americans he wasn’t able to get through it all. In one month alone he was encouraged to spend 10 million dollars: the money arrived vacuum packed in million dollar bricks. He ran out of projects and had to return $1.5 million. ‘It felt surreal, at times. As if we were in a parallel world, normalised only because of the way Saddam had administered these provinces through personal governors who only handed out cash to Ba’ath party supporters.’
He is being modest. His book is not flawed. It is, on the contrary, a compelling, insightful and beautifully written memoir that makes you suspect that the occupation, or liberation, depending on your viewpoint, was doomed from the start. ‘Better plans and more troops might have given us a small advantage in 2003,’ he says now. ‘But direct foreign rule was never going to turn Iraq into a liberal democracy. Retrospective analysis that focuses on the failure to stop looting in the early days, or the abolition of the Iraqi army or the de-ba’athification programme, is missing the point which is that, even if those things had gone right, it would still have been a mess. It’s partly because of who we are, and what our culture is, and partly because of what Iraqi society was like after the fall of Saddam.’
He was in favour of the invasion, back in the spring of 2003. ‘I thought it would be a good thing. I felt that a lot of the opponents of the war had underestimated how horrendous Saddam was.  I went in thinking that, with a little bit of goodwill, it shouldn’t be too difficult to out-perform Saddam, and make Iraq more humane and prosperous. But the good will simply wasn’t there. These things were difficult to predict in advance. I haven’t seen anyone who was anti the war predicting exactly this would be the mess we would be in. As the months rolled on, it became clear to me that the hostility among quiet large areas of the population meant our errors were being magnified. People keep saying  “the electricity in Iraq still doesn’t work” but it still doesn’t work in parts of Afghanistan and Kosovo: the difference in those countries is that large numbers of people are well disposed toward us and are prepared to see our failure as incompetence rather than a deliberate conspiracy to humiliate them, which is how the Iraqis see it.’
Did the Iraqis not believe that our presence was temporary? ‘No one believed that. Even when the date of handover was clear — June 30 2004. However much I said: “We are leaving in three months” I couldn’t get anyone to believe me. Even if they had, they were just so horrified and insulted by our continuing presence that the fact that we would eventually hand over didn’t matter to them.’
So we should withdraw now? ‘My instinct is that Iraqi politicians are much more competent than we give them credit for being and that among the many evils the least would be taking the risk of withdrawing and letting them take more responsibility. The Iraqi government is canny enough to come to some accommodation with the insurgents and they haven’t so far been forced to do that because of the presence of our troops.’
One day, during the Sadr insurgency in April 2004, five thousand people suddenly arrived outside Stewart’s building shouting ‘Death to the Governor!’ and ‘Mr Rory is a donkey!’ When the shells started landing, did he think his number was up? ‘I was surprised by the feeling that, sub-consciously, I had always been expecting it. Maybe because I’d read children’s stories about it, or watched films about it. Watching my bodyguard team, former soldiers who were manning the guns on the roof and defending the compound during those three days of siege, I felt calmer because I could see how calm and professional they were being — not just rising to the challenge but almost enjoying it. There is a degree of play acting  for someone like me. I was in charge of planning how to react and it was quite empowering. The more difficult  experience was for my civilians who were locked in a room with no idea of what was going on, just hearing a hundred mortars and RPGs slam into the compound, and the sound of a 50 cal on the roof, but not being able to see what was happening. Although it was theoretically more dangerous being outside the concrete room at least we could see what was happening.’
He must have gone into Iraq with every expectation of not returning. Did he write last letters to his parents? ‘Oh yes, all that sort of thing. Every time I left Britain I mentally prepared myself and felt, as far as I could be, at ease with the world. I’d said what I wanted to say to my parents and friends.’
He dedicates his new book to his father: ‘A great man, a fierce ally and a most constant friend’. ‘He’s now 84 and just flew back from Fiji where he’s been writing a guidebook. He’s an amazing man. Fought at D-Day. When I was a child he was posted to Malaysia and there he would take me out into the jungle and teach me jungle craft. My three sisters would say I was the son he desperately wanted because I was happy to do irregular Greek verbs with him when I was six. Between six and nine every morning before I went to school he would take me fencing in Hyde Park.’
Rory Stewart didn’t take his sword with him for his trek across Afghanistan. Instead he took a dictionary, a walking stick, two pairs of socks, a change of clothes, a sleeping bag and some emergency rations. He suffered diarrhoea and dysentery, became riddled with bed bug bites and survived on little more than bread and vegetables. Now and again, Stewart’s diplomatic skills failed him. He got it badly wrong in Bamiyan, the site of the desecrated Buddhas in Afghanistan, when he ignored the security patrol’s orders to stop. ‘One of them chased after me and punched me in the face. The others just kicked me. In the end, I talked myself out of it and got away with one black eye.’
He took it as a compliment when British special forces, meeting him in deep snow, wound their transport window down to tell him: ‘You’re a fucking nutter’ before motoring on, leaving him on the road, exhausted in frozen socks.
Did he wonder if he was, actually, a nutter? ‘I did feel in Afghanistan that I had overstepped the mark. One of the reasons I ended the walk there was that I realised how lucky I was going to have to be to make it to Kabul and felt I owed it to my parents to come back if I made it that far. I never regretted it. I could have been shot but it felt like being an explorer and that was exhilarating. No one else has walked across Afghanistan in the winter maybe in the last 20 years and possibly the last 400 years.’
Did he feel lonely on his walk? ‘My objective was to try as much as possible to force myself into village culture, so it was easier travelling alone because it gives me sufficient vulnerability and isolation to push myself into a village and talk to people.’
When I ask why he felt the need to do that trek, he talks of the near-hypnotic pleasure of walking, of the unhindered connection with the physical world made by his rhythmic progression. ‘But also my great text is Don Quixote. He is sitting reading all these books about chivalry, then he puts his barber’s basin on his head and gets out this old map and sets of to be a knight errant. But he finds that 16^th century society is not corresponding at all to his dreams of Arthurian romance and dragons. I think, in a sense, we are all Don Quixote. One of the aspects of being human is wanting to be more than human and creating heroes and playing a grand game with your life. Like Don Quixote, though, we all realise that what we are doing as we are strapping ourselves up and putting on our helmets is faintly ludicrous. The kind of glamour you are pursuing is vain and dies with you. It means nothing. But you do it because it makes you feel alive. On high ridges looking out over an intense, dark blue sky I feel more alive — more alive than I would feel walking down the King’s Road where I feel a tiny, isolated, irrelevant person surrounded by people in fashionable clothes and huge adverts for underwear that I don’t really understand.’
Chasing dragons? Wouldn’t it be easier to do it with mind expanding drugs? “Maybe I should try that. It would finish any possibility of a diplomatic career, though.’
It hasn’t hurt David Cameron’s career. ‘Well, OK. But at Oxford I was too square to do that.’
The lonely self exploration; how does that impact on his love life? ‘I’m pretty single. It is very difficult, that aspect. The reality is, I feel much lonelier in London than I do on an Afghan mountain. In London you feel you ought to have all these things — the wife and children — and so you feel more lonely. Whereas in Afghanistan I have a whole rationale, a story I can tell myself.
His friend the actress Clemmie Burton Hill had told me: ‘Rory has great equanimity, optimism and integrity. His adventurism is not gratuitous. He operate on different parameters to the rest of us, to a moral purpose.’ Sigh. Women, I put it to him, must love his swashbuckling ways. “I don’t think they do, actually. I hoped my walk would impress the girls — definitely — but I don’t think  it did.’ His full lips part into a wide toothy smile.
How about the family seat in Crieff, Scotland; that must make hearts flutter? “No, I think what I need is a sports car.’
It is academic anyway — for English debutants, at least — because for the next two years Rory Stewart OBE will be in Afghanistan, a place which in recent weeks has become almost as dangerous for Westerners as Iraq. In one incident alone ??? were killed. Does he blend in there? ‘I’m not very good at growing a beard. It comes out all wispy and rubbish.’ Has he learned to live with the threat of being taken hostage? ‘Being an Arab speaker, or being immersed in their culture, doesn’t seem to help. Look at Margaret Hassan in Iraq. The only thing that does help a bit is body language, I think.’ He pats his chest. ‘I instinctively do this, all the time. It’s all about manners. How you sit. How you place your feet. The amount of energy you put into greeting.’ At this point he holds his hand to his chest and says softly: ‘Salaam aleikum. Chetor hastid? Jan-e-shoma jur ast? Khub hastid? Sahat-e-shoma khub ast. Zinde bashi.’ It translates as: ‘Peace be with you. How are you? Is your soul healthy? Long life to you.’ Or more simply: ‘Hello.’ When I was in nasty situations in Afghanistan I thought if I can just get them to say ‘salaam’ back I will be 50% safer. I smiled a lot in Iraq, but Afghans are much more reserved and austere… But none of this being polite to people on the street is going to stop me getting my head chopped off!’ He laughs the enigmatic laugh of a Kipling hero, an intrepid Englishman, a fucking nutter.

Seven years after a van ran into him, leaving him with a dislocated hip and 25 broken bones, Stephen King still aches. His gait is stiff and awkward. His lank frame is still a little hunched. But it seems to suit his manner: a curious combination of languor and frustration.
He will be 60 next year and this looming milestone has got him worrying about his legacy, his place in the canon of literature. In some ways this might seem perverse. He is, arguably, the most popular novelist in the world – the 50 or so books he has written have sold more than 300 million copies worldwide. He is also, probably, the world’s richest author – according to Forbes magazine his annual income is about $US50 million ($A65 million).
And as if this wasn’t enough, some of his stories have been turned into classic films, including The Shining, The Shawshank Redemption and Misery. The trouble is, his particular genre – the gothic thriller – has worked against his critical reputation. He tells me wearily that he is bound to be described as a ‘horror writer’ in the first line of his obituary. He wants to be taken more seriously, is that it?
‘That doesn’t bother me,’ he says, ‘it’s never that I’ve felt that much need for respect. My family has been eating. My house is paid for. And, in the end, after you’re gone, the work finds its own level. The critics don’t have much say in that. Some of the books which everyone sneered at for being disposable, such as Agatha Christie, have actually survived the longest on the bookshelves. No, what drives me crazy is when I am treated as a sociological artefact. No one wants to be reduced to a human beetlewig or a Halloween mask.’
His point is that when you are a famous author ‘everyone wants a piece of you’, even when you are dead. This is, in part, the subject of his latest novel, Lisey’s Story.
Lisey is the widow of an award-winning author. Two years after her husband’s death, she is going through his personal effects. Scholars are circling like vultures wanting to know if there are any unpublished manuscripts left in his study, any memorabilia, any incunabula. Lisey, hearing this as ‘incuncabilla’, begins to think of them as ‘incunks’.
‘I sent an early draft to an academic who has written a lot of books about my work,’ King says with a lugubrious grin, ‘and he didn’t get back to me. I think he took it personally. I think he thought I was suggesting he was one of the incunks, one of the crazy academics …’
King’s relationship with the academy is uneasy. When, in 2003, he was awarded a National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters – one of the highest honours an American writer can be accorded – he gave an ungracious acceptance speech in which he accused the literary establishment of ‘tokenism’.
‘You can’t sit back, give a self-satisfied sigh and say, ‘Ah, that takes care of the troublesome pop-lit question. In another 20 years or perhaps 30, we’ll give this award to another writer who sells enough books to make the bestseller lists.’ It’s not good enough.
‘Nor do I have any patience with or use for those who make a point of pride in saying they’ve never read anything by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Mary Higgins Clark or any other popular writer. What do you think? You get social or academic brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture?’
The literary establishment declined to be cowed. Harold Bloom, one of America’s most distinguished scholars of literature, declared the award ‘another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I’ve described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls,’ he said, ‘but perhaps even that is too kind.’
It sounded like intellectual snobbery. Equally, King’s sense of injustice sounds like an inferiority complex, despite the staggering superiority of his book sales.
‘That award nearly killed me,’ he now says. ‘I was determined I was going to accept it and make my speech. It needed saying. Two days later I was in hospital.’ He stayed there for two months with pneumonia. ‘The whole thing was an outgrowth of the road accident. My lung had collapsed and the bottom part of it had not re-inflated, but no one knew that. It stayed collapsed and got rotten and infected the rest. I had the thing with the tube in the chest. I thought I was going to die.
‘My wife Tabby came into the hospital and said, ‘I want to use this time to re-do your office.’ At that point I was so full of dope and tubes, I didn’t care. But when I got back from the hospital she said I shouldn’t go in there, to my office, because it would be too disturbing for me. So of course I went in there and it was like the Christmas Carol, the ghost of Christmas yet to come. It was like having a vision of the future. I was standing there thinking this is what it will be like, not this time but within the next 20 or 25 years. I will be in a coffin and Tabitha will have rolled up the rugs and will be going through all my effects, all the papers and unfinished stories. This is the final act. The clearing up after a life. I remember my brother and me doing it when my mother died of cancer.’
Stephen King married Tabitha Spruce in 1971. He had met her in the library at the University of Maine, where they were students. They live in Maine to this day – in Bangor – and have three grown children. She is also a novelist. Although he insists that the character Lisey in his new novel is not his wife, he does acknowledge that his book is a homage to the ‘invisible’ wives of famous authors.
‘The book is a celebration of monogamy, in a way,’ he says. ‘It is also about how even in the most intimate relationships we are always holding something back.’
We can never be wholly known? ‘Exactly. I think of my wife as holding a deck of 52 cards – if you ask me how many she is showing me I wouldn’t know. We are as close to each other as two people can be, but one can never be sure how much you do and do not know about another person.
‘I’ve been married 35 years so I guess we know more about each other than a lot of couples do. But even we don’t know everything. Some couples, I guess, give up trying to know. They give in and their marriage ends in divorce due to lack of interest, or the other partner straying outside the marriage. But sometimes creative people get creative about their marriage and find ways to revitalise it.’
Did his accident change his relationship with his wife? ‘It made me appreciate how vulnerable we all are. For a while I became overly protective about my family, especially when they walked on the street. I remember vividly – the way you remember traumatising incidents – the first time they let me out of the hospital after the accident. I couldn’t go out the front because there were all these fans and press waiting. So they took me out the back in a wheelchair to this loading bay. My wife had been able to get an apartment next to the hospital – one of the advantages of money – and I saw her walking towards me down the street and I shouted: ‘Stay on the sidewalk, Tabby! Look both ways before you cross!’ My heart was pounding with anxiety.’
I ask if there was an understanding between them that Tabitha would play the invisible spouse, that she would support his career from the sidelines.
‘No, I don’t think any woman makes that deal, or man in the case of Denis Thatcher. No one writes in their yearbook: ‘I want to marry a man known worldwide as a bestselling author so that my chances of being divorced from him when some famous actress catches his eye go way up’.’
Have any famous actresses caught his eye? ‘There are temptations when you are off on tour and doing the conventions. All sorts of temptations on offer, plenty of groupies. But what I mean is: no wife wants to become a Little Miss Nobody aged 42, traded in for a trophy wife. But what helped me personally in this respect was that my father deserted my mother when I was three and I saw what my mother’s life was like after that – what the consequences were when the man leaves.’
King felt ashamed at school about not having a father, he adds. He also recognised that his mother felt ashamed about being abandoned. But he doesn’t think he has tried to make amends for his father in his own marriage. ‘You mean like making amends for all the wronged women in the world? No, that’s too big a job, even for me!’
It was Tabitha who rescued his first novel from the bin when, in 1973, he threw it away in disgust. The book turned out to be Carrie, his first bestseller. Tabitha has also had to put up with her husband’s stalkers over the years. Once she heard the window break only to look up and see a man standing with what he claimed was a bomb. It wasn’t. He was an escapee from a mental institution who was convinced that King had stolen the plot for Misery from him. Another stalker claimed that King had flown over her house in a U2 plane and stolen her thoughts for The Shining. A third, a man in California, became convinced that King had murdered John Lennon, in a conspiracy involving Ronald Reagan.
It was Tabitha, too, who helped King overcome his addiction to drink and drugs. ‘Cocaine seemed to help at first,’ King says. ‘It seemed like a really good energising drug. You try some and think: wow, why haven’t I been taking this for years? So you take a bit more and write a novel, and decorate the house, and mow the lawn and then you are ready to start a new novel again. I just wanted to refine the moment I was in. I didn’t feel that happiness was enough: that there had to be a way to improve on nature.
‘As an older, wiser and sadder man I realised you can’t cheat nature. You take a hit of cocaine and it makes you a new man, but the first thing the new man wants is a hit of cocaine. Basically, I was an addict. I would take anything. In the daytime I used to be pretty straight, not getting blotto until five in the afternoon. But by the end I was a round-the-clock drink-and-drug addict. I rewrote one book – It – in a blackout.’
With Tabitha’s help he started going to AA and NA meetings in 1988. ‘By the time I had the road accident in ‘99 I had been clean and sober for 11 years. But then the doctor asked me where my pain was on a scale of one to 10 and I said 11, and he offered me a breakthrough, time-release pain killer called Oxycon.
‘So I took the pills until I didn’t need them any more. I continued to take them because pain is subjective. But the addict part of my brain began inventing pain just to get these painkillers so I could have more of the drug. I had to kick it the way a junkie kicks heroin. It was a two-week process. I didn’t sleep for two weeks. My feet twitched uncontrollably – that is why it is called kicking the habit, your feet literally kick out. It was horrible.’
His only addiction these days is to his work. The addiction is to the pleasure he gets from discovering plots, bringing characters to life and seeing what will happen to them.
‘Philip Roth has a great line in Everyman,’ he says. ‘Amateurs wait for inspiration, the rest of us get up every day and go to work. That is a good line in an uncharacteristically bad piece of work. Work is the clear channel I can go to.
‘After that bout of pneumonia back in 2003 I picked up one of those hospital bugs and couldn’t keep food down. I lost 15 kilograms. Yet even in the worst days of that illness, even when I was vomiting, I was still able to write. That was when I started Lisey’s Story, my best book. I think it’s my best book. Even when I felt dizzy and weak, the words were always there for me. The writing was the best part of the day.’
As a writer, he continues, he has to have an understanding wife – because the writing process can be selfish. He has to disappear into a world of his own.
‘I get under her feet. When I’m writing in the morning, she stays out in the garden or does her own writing, or worries about the Republicans getting back into office. In the morning I work for three hours then go for long walks in the afternoon – my thinking time. As I walk, I try to guide my otherwise ungovernable mind back to the story I’m working on, looking for a hook.
‘When I’m not working, my mind doesn’t take kindly to being unhooked from its dope. I get migraines and nightmares. Very vivid. It’s almost like the DTs, like my mind and body is trying to scare me back to work. And once I’ve got back to work,’ he adds with a slow grin, ‘I can pass on my nightmares to everyone else.’

First came a panicky trip to Mississippi. Then the nightmares. Rosamund Pike tells Nigel Farndale about the pain and pleasure of taking on Tennessee Williams

It is 9.25 in the morning. I take a sip of coffee, my first of the day, and try hard not to stare at Rosamund Pike’s chest. It’s not that her breasts are particularly large, or small, it’s just she is not wearing a bra and her low-cut halter top struggles to contain them whenever she leans forward, which is most of the time. I wouldn’t mind – really I wouldn’t – only I haven’t, as I say, had my first cup of coffee yet. And it is 9.25 in the morning.

She must have left home in a hurry, that’s all I can think. Her long, honey blonde hair is, after all, still wet from the shower. And she did sleep badly. In fact she is ‘completely exhausted’. Because? ‘Oh, only a two-and-a-half-hour play!’ Right. A play.

‘Mentally exhausted,’ she elaborates, her green eyes widening. ‘The physicality you can train yourself for, but it’s the concentration … and the emotional journey.’ Of course. The emotional journey.

‘I’m having horrifying dreams.’ She is? ‘Vivid dreams. All those references to birds. I dreamt I was being pecked by birds last night.’

The play is Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke. It is directed by Adrian Noble and is about to open in the West End. Rosamund Pike plays Alma Winemiller, a neurotic Southern belle. ‘My character is terrified of sex,’ she says in a measured and refined voice. ‘She denies her sexuality.’

She went to the Mississippi Delta by way of research. ‘I just think it is arrogant to do a play that is set somewhere so foreign without trying to get a sense of it. You have to feel what the heat is like and that peculiar languor. I was quite frightened actually. I’d travelled on my own before but …’ she takes a bite of toast. ‘It took me about two hours to pluck up courage to leave the airport. No one could understand what I was saying. I was a strange creature there. I went in search of Southern belles but barely saw a woman. It was all beer and rednecks.’

Did she have any Thelma and Louise moments; unwanted male attention in bars? ‘No, because I found this self-help book in the airport: What Southern Women Know (That Every Woman Should). It turned out to be rather calculating – cynicism clothed in sugar about how to get men and keep them, how to flatter and ingratiate yourself, how to stave off unwanted attention.’

So how do you go about the staving? ‘By making a man feel at ease. So if I was on my own sitting here [we are in – well, sat outside – a cafe on the Brompton Road] and a man asked if he could join me I would pre-empt things by saying: “You’re probably shocked at seeing me sitting here so comfortably on my own, but don’t worry because my husband back home keeps phoning to check up on me”.’

I see. Did she get stared at in Mississippi? ‘A bit.’ Can she remember a time when she wasn’t? She glances up and down the street. ‘No one’s looking at me now.’ Trust me, I say, they are … What did she look like in her early teens? ‘I was a very late developer. I had no conception of sexuality. My first boyfriend thought me rather adult and mature but inside I wasn’t at all. I didn’t know about make-up or clothes.’

She is 26 now; how old would she have been then? ‘Eighteen.’

So she came across as aloof and distant? ‘I didn’t say that .’ She laughs indignantly. ‘Explain yourself, sir.’

Sorry, I say. Lapse of concentration. What was it she said? Mature and adult? Perhaps it was to do with her height: she is 5ft 9in. Also she does seem quite self-possessed. Did she have poise back then? ‘I was never the girl boys would want. They wanted the pretty ones with the lovely smiles and lots of hair. I was never that. I always felt awkward.’ She went to a girls’ boarding school in Bristol. ‘But I always had male friends. I wasn’t a recluse. I don’t know why people think that if you go to a girls’ school you never meet any boys … I didn’t choose to board; I just got this enormous scholarship, so it seemed rude not to.’

You can imagine why she got a scholarship. She is an accomplished cellist and pianist. She fences. She is fluent in French and German. I ask if she shone at school.

‘I don’t like these questions.’

Why not?

‘I’m so unattached to my schooldays.’

What about university? [She read English at Oxford]. ‘I never felt rooted to either school or university. I didn’t belong in either place. They didn’t reflect who I was. I was only interested in drama so I escaped by joining the National Youth Theatre … Are you staring at my breasts?’

Actually she didn’t say that last bit, but she clearly thinks it because she sits back and folds her arms, briefly … Come to think of it, she does have an amusing story to tell about her breasts. Just before she graduated, she was cast as a Bond girl in Die Another Day. When she had to do her inevitable sex scene with Pierce Brosnan, she wore ‘modesty panels’ taped to her nipples.

When, after the clinch, she and Brosnan pulled apart, she looked down to check the tapes and there were hairs sticking out. She thought: ‘Oh my God, I’m pulling off his chest hair!’ Then she realised it was just some strands from the furs that they were sitting on.

Though she won considerable critical acclaim for her last stage role – in Terry Johnson’s Hitchcock Blonde at the Royal Court, full nudity in the name of art, that sort of thing – and though she won Best Supporting Actress at the British Independent Film Awards for her role opposite Johnny Depp in The Libertine, it is for being a Bond girl at the age of 20 that she is perhaps still best known. ‘Just last night these boys on a stag night came up to me and grabbed me. They wanted to have their photograph taken with me. They were saying: “You should have killed Halle Berry”.’

Was it hard being taken seriously after James Bond? ‘Isn’t it harder for me to say I’m not serious? People see the pedigree: boarding school, Oxford, opera. It sounds so dull.’

Good answer. The ‘opera’ she refers to is to do with her parents. Her father, Julian, is a professional opera singer; her mother, Caroline, an opera singer and concert violinist. She grew up in west London, ‘surrounded by costumes and make-up’. Her parents would take her along when they were doing Verdi or Stockhausen: ‘Lots of short-wave radios in that one – didn’t go down too well.’

Although she is an only child, hers wasn’t as solitary a childhood as might be supposed. ‘My childhood was spent constantly sitting in rehearsal rooms,’ she says, ‘and I spent a lot of time in the company of quite theatrical adults … so I saw dramas off-stage all the time. Big personalities. I became quite watchful and curious. Interested in other people’s emotional lives. From early on I understood about people having affairs … people’s marriage problems … It is sometimes hard for people who aren’t in the acting world to understand.’

So it’s best to go out with someone in ‘the profession’, as she does? ‘Yes, we both understand the creative process and how vulnerable it makes you feel. Criticism and anger play much more deeply on you, but it is hard to express this to non-actors.’

She met her boyfriend, Joe Wright, when he was directing her in the 2005 film Pride and Prejudice (which also starred Keira Knightley). ‘You do expose yourself, so it is conducive to starting relationships, being on a set.’

Part of the exposure, I suggest, might be to do with being preserved on celluloid, in her case as a 20-year-old – never ageing on screen, only in real life … always in competition with her younger self. ‘Actually, I think people think of me as the picture of Dorian Gray – they assume I was much older than I was when I became a Bond girl. So that is the ageing one and now I look younger … I’ve lost my puppy fat.’

I ask if she has ever considered sitting for a portrait. ‘I sat for Stuart Pearson Wright … and I wasn’t very good at it. I haven’t got a very good face for that. I found it deeply embarrassing. I was really self-conscious. It lasted two days and I knew he was finding it difficult.’

Was it because she has the sort of features – rosebud lips, tiny nose, big eyes, all symmetrical – that bad street artists tend to draw because they want to flatter their sitters? ‘Yes, you want to be craggy, deeply furrowed and interesting, whereas I look like a doll … Also I think to be a proper artist’s model you must give yourself up completely, whereas I am always trying to hide.’

A telling and admirably self-aware answer. What about if Lucian Freud asked her to sit for him? ‘I don’t think he would because I don’t have the sort of interesting face he likes to paint.’ She leans forward. ‘I always think with his nudes that the breasts look as if they are being squeezed.’

What if he asked her to pose nude for him, her head turned away? She thinks for a moment. ‘That would be an honour. I’m better at doing the whole body than the face. I’m a bit scared of just being a face, actually.’

 

For entirely selfish reasons I have been trying hard to like Diana Krall. I go to see her in concert, you see. I have all her albums. And the next time I go to see her in concert, or play one of her albums, I don’t want to have it ruined by a voice in my head saying: ‘What a cow.’ But the fact is, from the moment she turned up late, pointedly ignored me while she poured herself a coffee, and then greeted me with a crusher handshake, the world’s bestselling jazz singer and pianist has been in a foul mood. Ominously, when I try to melt the permafrost by congratulating her on her pregnancy (her first, at 41, baby due in December) and asking her the standard jokey question about whether she has developed any odd cravings or caught herself behaving erratically she glowers at me, actually glowers, and says in a flat voice: ‘You might just find out.’
After five minutes of her blocking my questions with defensive, one-sentence answers delivered in a Canadian monotone, I consider throwing in the towel. Upon reflection I wonder whether I shouldn’t just ask her if she wants to reschedule. But then I remember how tight her schedule is: she flew into London from LA last night to begin a three week tour of Europe — and so jetlag may partly account for her charmlessness. Anyway we have already rescheduled — the interview was originally going to happen in Italy. So instead I smile and say: You don’t like being interviewed much, do you? It seems to help.  She sighs. ‘I don’t like talking about myself.’
So why did she agree to meet me? She shrugs, rubs her bare arms and complains about the air conditioning being on too high.
Does talking about Diana Krall make Diana Krall feel self conscious? Silence. ‘It’s not my favourite thing to do. It’s boring.’ Another silence. ‘I’m quite shy.’ (The default excuse of rude people.) ‘And people have preconceptions about me.’
Such as? ‘You know, from the photographs.’
She refers to her album sleeves, the ones that made her the poster girl of the jazz world — Diana in tulle by moonlight; Diana barefoot and swathed in sarape on the shoreline; Diana all sultry, blonde and puffy-lipped in a little black dress that shows off her long legs (she’s 5ft 8in) and stiletto heels.
She is a seriously talented jazz pianist. She wins Grammies. She gets asked to play at the White House. Did she worry that she might be taken less seriously because of those photographs? ‘No I never thought of that. It was my choice. The record company didn’t make me do it.  I love fashion and I love photography. But I know a lot of people who put pretty pictures of themselves on their covers and the records don’t sell. My records always sell. My tours always sell out. I think I deserve more credit for that as a live performer. I’m not saying the pictures didn’t help. But just because you have a pretty girl in a pretty dress it’s not going to change people’s mind about whether they like your music or not. I had to apologise for those record covers for a while, I won’t do that any more. Get over it, people. That’s all petty stuff.’
Now this is more like it; something approaching passion; and delivered in a torrent, with the words almost eliding one into the other. Not wanting her to lose momentum, I suggest that, anyway, the photographs complement the music. “Yeah, there is a sexuality to the music. It’s sexy.’
They complement her singing voice, too. She shrugs. ‘Yeah, the smoky voice, Scotch and cigarettes, all that crap.’ I’m beginning to feel some sympathy for her, having to endure such clichés — because the point about Diana Krall’s singing voice is that it is not clichéd. It is completely original, partly because of its androgyny and almost tenor depth, and partly to do with a crack it has. It is husky, slow-burning, breathy; almost lisping at times. And her phrasing manages to be both languid and supple: bending notes, stretching them expressively, fading to a whisper. It’s as subtle as dark chocolate, her voice. It’s like, yes, Scotch and cigarettes, all that crap. I’ll stop now.
And yet… some jazz purists talk dismissively of ‘The Diana Krall crowd’, meaning musical tourists who would shy away from John Coltrane, Charlie Mingus or Thelonious Monk. The reason she has sold millions of records, they sniff, is that her music is unchallenging. But anyone who thinks her music bland and easy just isn’t listening attentively. Part of the snobbery, I suspect, may have arisen because she made her name recording popular standards from the Great American Songbook, rather than more obscure pieces.  After all, it was not until her third album, a homage to the Nat King Cole Trio recorded in 1996, that she really hit her stride. Since then she has become a peerless interpreter of the likes of Gershwin, Cole Porter and Bacharach imbuing their slow songs with a bluesy swing, or bringing an unexpected melancholy to their more upbeat songs. ‘I never tried to copy anyone vocally,’ she says. ‘People have compared me to Peggy Lee but actually Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Louis Armstrong were much more of an influence. I was born listening to Bing Crosby, I knew all the lyrics by heart by the time I was 15. It sounds boring and nerdy but there was something about his phrasing that I loved. I felt I had a head start.’
The place she was born listening to Bing was Nanaimo, British Columbia. Her father was a chartered accountant there, but he was also a keen amateur stride pianist and something of an expert on 1920s and 1930s pianists such as Fats Waller and Earl Hines. I ask if it’s true she was playing the piano at the age of four? ‘Bout then, yeah.’ And was that because she had pushy parents? ‘No they didn’t push. I wanted to from the beginning. My piano teacher played boogie woogie piano for me after my lessons and I loved it. I can still see myself as a four year old looking forward to that. I knew already at that age that I had a feel for swing music, music that had that…’ She clicks her fingers three times.
How did she stay focused on jazz when all her peers at school were getting into rock and pop? “Well I was into that, too. I listened to bands with my friends. But I heard a jazz concert quite young, and this is boring stuff,  but I joined a jazz band at school and started improvising when I was around 13. I began studying chord structures and jazz theory. Then I heard Ray Brown play and that was it for me…’
Krall was certainly precocious. At 17 she won a scholarship to study piano at the prestigious Berklee College of Music  in Boston but left after 18 month when she was ‘discovered’ by her hero the bassist Ray Brown (once married Ella Fitzgerald). He was so impressed by her virtuosity he convinced her to move to LA and ask the legendary  jazz pianist Jimmy Rowles (who used to accompany Billie Holiday) for lessons. ‘I quit college and knocked on Jimmy Rowles door,’ Krall recalls. ‘By myself. It was quite lonely. He said he didn’t teach. I wouldn’t accept no for an answer. He said you can come over, but I don’t know what I’m going to teach you.’
What did he teach her? ‘Everything musically, but it’s important to hang out with people like that and absorb the atmosphere and listen to the stories; listen to their struggles. Same thing when I hung out with Oscar Peterson last year. We told stories and listened to  his records. He asked me to play with him and I thought: “Try not to freak out, enjoy the moment.” We ended up singing Nat Cole songs together and it was one of the highlights of my life. What can I say? I wanted to tell my grandkids I’d played with Oscar Peterson.’
Did he rate her as a pianist? ‘Yeah.’ For he first time in the interview she smiles. Hers is a lip curling smile, like Elvis Presley’s. It exposes white, white teeth.
We talk about her new album ‘From This Moment On’. I tell her I liked the way she slowed down the tempo of one of the tracks, Irving Berlin’s ‘Isn’t this a Lovely Day’, so that it was as if hearing the words for the first time. ‘Thank you,’ she says. She’s good at breathing new life into familiar songs, I add.  ‘So I’m told.’
Actually, it is unfair to characterise Krall merely as a interpreter of standards. In 2004 she moved into darker, more introspective territory with the release of her album ‘The Girl In The Other Room’. There was no photograph of her smouldering on the cover. In tone it seemed to be influenced by her fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell, indeed it included a cover of Joni Mitchell’s Black Crow. But for the most part Krall co-wrote the  songs herself, with her husband Elvis Costello. They had married in December 2003 —  a first marriage for her, a third for him —the wedding taking place on the estate of their friend Sir Elton John.
When I ask if she had tried to reinvent herself with that album she shakes her head. ‘It wasn’t a conscious effort. I couldn’t do anything else. I’d lost my mother.’ Her mother had died of cancer of the plasma cells in 2002. ‘I’d also lost my mentor Ray Brown and my friend Rosemary Clooney. It was the loss of a parent followed weeks later by the loss of a father and mother figure. I was devastated. I was not feeling  like singing ‘Deed I do’ [one of her more upbeat songs].’
Does she find it painful to listen to that album now? ‘I don’t listen to any of my records again, ever. It’s cathartic finishing them, then I don’t want to hear them again. There are some songs I never play live because it would feel false, because if I’m not in the mood, I can’t lie that I am. I can’t be forced to do something I don’t want to do.’
No kidding. Perhaps her reluctance to enter into the spirit of this interview is just that, an inability to lie. As such it could be seen as a measure of her integrity. And yet she’s a performer. You would imagine she could fake being nice and polite for the sake of PR. Apparently not. ‘There’s this big joke about ‘Peel me a Grape’,’ she continues, referring to one of her more flirtatious songs. ‘My tour manager has never heard me sing it, yet people always shout it out, requesting it. I haven’t heard that song in six years. I just can’t do it. Not feeling that. A lot of The Girl in the Other Room songs I’ve put to one side, too.’
Working with her husband; what was that like? ‘It was fun writing with him. It worked well.’ She stifles a yawn.
Had she listened to Elvis Costello’s songs as a teenager? ‘I remember hearing Watching the Detectives on the radio.’
Her husband is someone who has transcended genres, I note: punk, folk, country and western, classical, jazz. ‘Uh-huh.’
I guess being pigeon-holed is the curse of the artist? ‘Uh-huh.’
Does she feel frustrated when fans want her to keep covering the standards? ‘Uh-huh.’
It occurs to me that her feisty manner might be a compensation for those lazy accusations that her music is bland. This may explain the way she constantly dismisses herself as boring, as a topic of conversation at least. But it could also be that she finds the concept of press interviews hypocritical, especially after the annoying time she had with the media a few years ago when her name was linked to Clint Eastwood, Hollywood’s biggest jazz fan. Both denied there was anything going on. When she is not in the mood, she is not in the mood, it seems. But what about when she is due to give a performance? “I’m never not in the mood when I’m performing. Ever. I might feel tired but as soon as I hit the first note I’m in the mood. I never feel negative about performing, unless I have to perform at a loud car show. That is excruciating. When people are talking. I don’t feel comfortable about that.’
I tell her I once came to see a concert she gave at the Royal Albert Hall when she had a bad cold, and yet she struggled gamely on. In fact, I suggest, when sandpapered by a cold, her voice had an even huskier and more attractive texture than normal. Did she see it that way? “Not really.’
She starts doodling on a notepad. ‘You know,’ she says without looking up, picking up the thread of an earlier conversation. ‘I never got bored re-interpreting jazz standards. Something like My Funny Valentine you can pull apart and put back a million different ways. You can take any song and improvise.’
In terms of improvisation, I say, drugs have always played a significant role in jazz. ‘Well that applies to the history of anything, art, literature anything.’
Yes but especially with jazz improvisation in the 1950s and 60s… ‘Well whatever worked for you.’ Has that ever worked for her? ‘Whatever works, as long as you get what you want in the end and don’t die in the process…’ She sighs impatiently, her lightening mood swinging back to darkness. ‘It’s kind of an old stereotype,’ she says peevishly. ‘I’m not having to deal with a lot of the things those artists had to deal with.’ Long pause. ‘I don’t think it’s an interesting conversation.’
I guess she has more of a safety net than the jazz stars of the 50s and 60s had. Managers, advisers, assistants. Presumably, she has an entourage with her? ‘I don’t travel with personal trainers and personal chefs, if that’s what you mean. I have a crew and I have a hair and make-up person. Don’t have her with me at the moment, as you can probably tell. [Her hair is gathered and she doesn’t appear to be wearing make up]. I buy my own clothes. But I do have people who look after me, yeah. People who make sure I’m not getting stressed out.’
Her quartet is far too distinguished to come under the heading ‘entourage’, by the way: drummer Jeff Hamilton, bass player John Clayton, and guitarist Anthony Wilson all being legends in their own right. Do they bow to her fame? “No they keep me in my line. They are my big bothers. They’ve known me for years. I don’t have people around me who don’t tell the truth. There’s no attitude or ego. I was never a big ego. I was always more on the insecure side.’
Insecure in what way? Presumably she doesn’t have insecurities about her looks? ‘Of course. Of course I do. Everyone does. There will be times when I wake up and look like shit.’
So she isn’t a narcissist? Long pause. ‘I don’t know.’
It would be understandable, being photographed all the time. ‘I’m not being photographed all the time. I’m not being photographed all the time. My photo shoots are one day.’
So she’s what? Well adjusted? ‘I’m fairly grounded, but always less neurotic when I’m playing. If I don’t play I end up internalising things… It has nowhere to go.’
If she was in a prison cell without a piano would she go mad? ‘Probably.’
What about if she were deprived of her pretty dresses? ‘I rarely dress up. I usually dress up if I go out to dinner with my husband but I don’t let it run my life. If I was going to a big party I’d get nervous about my gown…’ She trails off. ‘This is a crap conversation.’ Silence.
I ask if her husband has travelled over with her for this tour. ‘He and I just played in Aspen together. I played a show one night and he played a show the next night so we saw each other for two days then. Now I wont see him for a month… But we love what we’re doing. We love our tours. It’s hard being apart but… we get it. We struggle with missing each other but we talk on the phone every day, even when there is an eight hour time difference.’
Is her husband going to be there for the birth? ‘I certainly hope so!’
Well some fathers are squeamish. ‘Oh I see. I thought you meant in the same town.’ She rubs her arms and shivers. ‘This air con… I’m a bit chilly.’
She plans to tour again this time next year, but what, I ask, if  motherhood has made her too happy by then to sing her melancholy songs. ‘You never know.’
Again. No kidding. We have been talking for an hour and a half and it is time to say goodbye. One bone-crushing handshake later I sit back down and reflect ruefully on the old adage: never meet your heroes. I make some notes and get up to leave. It is then I notice the pad she had been doodling on. It is only a bit of cross hatching and a few loops but — hey — disillusion be damned — it is Diana Krall’s cross hatching, Diana Krall’s loops. I tear off the top sheet and slip it in my pocket.