ANGELA Rippon hides her feelings cleverly. She controls her face and emotions as if she’s on screen. She’s professionally nice, like a Tory lady at a fund-raising garden fete, talks becomingly, looks squeaky clean, drinks mint tea and smiles vocationally.

But she becomes visibly flustered about sex in her broken 22-year marriage. And laughs with thespian disregard when denying her alleged love affair with the former husband of the Princess Royal, Captain Mark Phillips. We meet in the fashionable Halcyon hotel because Angela refuses to allow journalists into the privacy of her home. She’s well known for refusing to answer questions, saying it’s personal. She introduces herself with a deliberately strong handshake, direct eye contact and green room friendliness. She’s shorter and smaller off camera, neat in pink and white check linen jacket and what she’d probably call slacks.

She looks youthful, 49 years old, with the famous arched eyebrows, square face, lovely eyes, clear complexion and sensibly fluffed up hair; an image befitting the Angel of her name. But there’s something unauthentic about her voice. Perhaps a repressed anger beneath the extreme niceness? Angela was a big celebrity in the days before Hello! made everybody one. She became the first woman BBC newsreader in 1976, revealed her legs when she danced out from behind the newsreader’s desk on Morecambe and Wise, presented television coverage of Crufts, shimmered across the ballroom floor compering Come Dancing, appeared on intellectually deep-frozen quiz shows like What’s My Line and grilled politicians on LBC.

In 1990 it was reported that she was Britain’s best-paid female media star. That she’d signed a £100,000-a-year contract with LBC. ‘I wasn’t earning anything like that,’ she says now. ‘People have always thought of a figure, doubled it and added a couple of noughts where my salary is concerned.’

Last week Angela quit her job at LBC, 24 hours after learning that she wouldn’t be required by London Radio when it takes over from franchise-loser LBC in October. (She’d already lost her morning news programme under the former LBC management.) She attributes this to her strong association with the old station and her high profile with LBC. ‘I’ve won four awards in the last four years,’ says Angela, speaking restrainedly.

Angela says that the parting was not acrimonious. Yet a London Radio spokesman was last week quoted as saying: ‘What need is there on radio for former TV personalities?’ Does she take these knocks personally? ‘You can’t,’ she replies. ‘You can’t buckle under every time someone says: ‘Thank you, we don’t want to employ you’. You’d end up destroyed and a hollow shell. You’d jump in a hole and never be seen again.’

Angela the celebrity has been toughing it out for the last 20 years. Her job loss is her third such major blow. As soon as TV-am got its licence, the BBC eased Angela out of her newsreading job. ‘I was called in on a Wednesday and told ‘don’t come in on Monday’. At the time you feel quite hurt, but you can’t make people employ you.’ Then two months after she started at TV-am, as one of the Famous Five who helped launch it, she was sacked ignominiously. ‘That was horrendous. I’d never want to live through that again.’

Her most recent demise marks the end of an era. ‘When I started in television 27 years ago, there was very little I could do without getting into the Press,’ she admits. ‘Now I’m not in that spotlight or rarefied goldfish bowl quite as often or long. Celebrity has become diluted. It takes the heat off you.’ Now she’ll continue her television series about The Entertainers – interviews with Mike Yarwood and suchlike – and finish a Remembrance Day special for Radio 2.

Angela was the only child of an engineer and china shop manageress. ‘I was a tom-boy, not at all rebellious as a teenager and being an only child made me self-sufficient, but my friends are very important.’ She was raised in a small council house (“a normal working-class family’) in the suburbs of Plymouth. She went to grammar school, gained nine O-levels and left, aged 17, a term before she was due to take A-levels. ‘There was an opportunity to work on a newspaper. The job was there, so I took it.’

She met Christopher Dare, her first serious boyfriend and a car parts dealer, when she was 17 at a YMCA dance. In 1990 their marriage ended but they’ve not yet divorced. ‘There are all sorts of complications.’ She won’t reveal them. Why did they break up? ‘Oh we just grew apart.’ What changed after 22 years? ‘Oh, lots of things.’

Christopher has a new partner, Angela doesn’t. Angela says they’re still good friends and talk weekly. ‘I still dine alone with my husband.’ She’s never met his new partner, she says, with an edge to her voice. Angela, who wears her engagement ring, is losing her composure.

Why did they never have children? ‘We just never had them.’ Because they didn’t want them? ‘Because it never happened.’ They tried and wanted them? She chokes on her tea. ‘We had a perfectly normal married life, but it just never happened.’ Did they have tests and so on? ‘No, we just compensated in other ways, by being busy and getting on with our lives.’ Did she feel unfulfilled or distressed? ‘No.’

What then of the rumour of an affair with Captain Mark Phillips? ‘It was a load of cobblers. I was simply writing his biography. He laughed it off and Princess Anne just said, ‘Oh, don’t take any notice,’ when the gossip started.’ Would she have liked to have had an affair with him? ‘It simply never crossed my mind.’

Now Angela can interview herself. ‘What is the most important question you could ask yourself?’ I ask, lamely. Angela ums and ahs. ‘Um,’ she says. ‘What makes me tick? The thing that makes me tick is that I enjoy what I do.’ I’m bored. Maybe she’s too private, too bland or too nice. ‘How would you get yourself talking about something you’ve never spoken about publicly before?’ I enquire. ‘What’s the most interesting personal question you would ask yourself?’