DIANE OSBORNE’S husband died in her arms. ‘After I’d called the ambulance, I begged Bob not to leave me,’ she says.

‘I kept saying, ‘Baby, don’t leave me. Don’t leave me now. Please don’t leave me.’ But he went purple, stopped breathing and died.’

Afterwards she went into deep shock. ‘I had terrible shakes and couldn’t even hold a cup without the liquid pouring out. I’ve been crying a lot and haven’t felt like going from day to day.

‘Each morning I wake up and remember that Bob is dead and I feel sick. I used to eat a lot, now I hardly touch a thing unless somebody forces me. I’ve had terrible nightmares, always the same dream in which Bob is dying and going blue.

‘At first when people spoke to me, the words didn’t even go through my ears to my brain. I couldn’t remember a thing for six weeks – I had to write everything down.

‘Even now I can’t recall things properly. But I can remember everything that happened that night most vividly.’

Robert Osborne, a husband and father of three, was fatally stabbed just before Christmas last year. He was 40 years old.

He was killed by Joseph Elliott, a drugged teenager whom Robert had followed with a hammer when he caught him slashing neighbours’ car tyres for fun. Yesterday an Old Bailey jury allowed the 19-year-old killer to walk free. Diane, 38, is sitting in the kitchen of their rented family home in Streatham being comforted by her sister-in-law Patricia, who lives next door. Diane wears jeans, looks wan, smokes roll-ups and drinks Liebfraumilch. ‘I’m devastated. Justice stinks,’ she says furiously. ‘Elliott admitted taking drugs, slashing tyres and stabbing my husband. But they still said he wasn’t guilty. My husband is now dead and his killer is free.’

She appears alternately distraught and numb. Nothing prepared her for the jury’s verdict. ‘I expected murder or at least manslaughter for that boy,’ she says, looking dazed. (She rarely refers to Elliott by name, generally calling him ‘that boy’.) ‘I don’t have feelings of revenge. But I want a retrial. I’m told I can’t get one because I don’t have any more evidence.’

Elliott’s miserable childhood was used as an excuse in court. ‘But my dad died of cancer when I was 15,’ says Diane. ‘I almost died when I was 12, my mother suffered from mental illness and I was brought up in three foster homes.’

She looks sadly at her two labrador-cross dogs and cat playing nearby. ‘It’s unreal to say that someone doesn’t turn out right because of their childhood.’

She recalls the events of 10 December last year when she was in her garden watching an eclipse of the moon. Robert, a musician and music tutor, was inside decorating.

‘I heard a hissing noise and went out and saw these two guys slashing tyres then trying to break into a pensioner’s house.’

She followed them but fled when they faced her and went back to ring the police. Robert said she shouldn’t bother. ‘We’d called them out before and they hadn’t come. They’re too busy. My car had been done twice before and so had Bob’s. His handbuilt car was his pride and joy.’

Robert grabbed a hammer. ‘He’d had enough of this sort of vandalism. He just wanted to demand an explanation and get their names. He would never ever have used the hammer. He picked the hammer up by its head and just took it for protection.’

He followed the unemployed youth (who was high on LSD, drink and cannabis) to a local council estate, cornered him on a balcony – and was stabbed through the heart.

Diane had followed her husband: ‘Bob ran downstairs to protect me. He collapsed. I tried to stop him kicking Bob while he was dying,’ she says heavily. (In court, Elliott denied kicking his victim as he lay dying.) ‘He punched me around the head and rib cage.’

She holds back tears as she remembers her husband. They’d been together 16 years but she’s shocked and says she cannot remember when they married.’

‘Everybody says they’ve never seen a closer couple. Now it’s been taken away.

‘He was a good father and husband and a just, quiet man. He’s the most gentle man in the world. He used to take spiders out of the bath and put them in the garden to avoid hurting them.

‘He lived for his music and family. He was very clever –and used to teach 13 to 17-year-olds. He also played guitar in pubs with a band or on his own.

‘Our house was derelict when we moved in four years ago – and he did everything from the plumbing to building a pond in the garden. He was so happy that wildlife was thriving in it.’

Diane has coped with life by ‘living for the trial, thinking it would bring justice’.

‘She kept saying her life was over when he was killed,’ explains Patricia. ‘But she kept going so she could see his killer brought to justice.’

How did Diane feel when she saw Elliott? ‘It was very hard. I kept remembering him as I saw him on the night – mad, out of his head, vicious and dangerous.’ After the verdict, Elliott whooped with delight and Diane broke down in tears.

She returned to her ‘broken family’. She has three children – Tarina, 19, Justin, 18, and Lisa, 14. (Yesterday Tarina was on holiday in Spain.) The effect on the children has been devastating. ‘Lisa has done nothing but cry her eyes out. When I told her her father was dead, she went mad.’ They also face the prospect of meeting Elliott because his council flat is 300 yards from Diane’s home. He lives in squalor on an estate littered with cars with missing wheels, syringes on the ground and graffiti. ‘If I bump into him, I don’t know what I’ll do,’ she says, quietly. ‘I suppose I’ll have to do what I did in court and walk by, bite my tongue and hide my tears.

‘I will not move from here,’ she adds, forcefully. ‘It’s my house and Bob did the decorating. If I move somewhere else where there’s no decorating by Bob, my life will be as empty as my heart is now.’

She is also terrified that Lisa will bump into Elliott on her way to school. (Lisa had, in fact, met Elliott before the tragedy. ‘He spoke to me,’ she says. ‘He’s dirty and he always looks like a tramp. I saw inside his home and it’s disgusting.’) The Osborne family is united in their horror at Elliott’s acquittal. ‘When the jury foreman stood up and read out the verdict, I thought another juror was going to stand up and say it was a joke,’ says Justin, a former store security guard.

‘It was bad enough having to go through his death and the funeral, but this really might just finish us off.’

Later, next door, Robert’s brother Mark, a builder, said: ‘How can a peaceful bloke like Robert go out of his house to protect my car, get beaten to death and his killer go free? Those 12 people who let that bastard out should be examining their consciences today.’

Previously Diane had faith in the system of justice. ‘But if I walked into the Queen’s house or didn’t pay my poll tax I’d be locked up tomorrow,’ she says now.

‘We live in a society where people are allowed to slash old ladies’ throats while they’re in bed and rape little girls and get away with it. Now you can’t even go out and protect your car without ending up dead. If that boy had robbed a bank he would have got time.’

Diane’s future is bleak. ‘I’m now trying to survive on income support. I’ve lost his teacher’s salary and have to get by on £70 a week. I’ll scrape through financially. But emotionally I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m knackered. I haven’t got any strength left and nobody can help me.’ She looks down. ‘My husband paid with his life for having a hammer. He died for nothing.’

Self-defence or not? How the judge guided the jury FOR LEGAL reasons, the judge, the prosecutor and the jury in the Robert Osborne murder trial are unable to defend themselves against the mounting tide of public concern.

But, by examining transcripts of the case, it is possible today to throw more light on the way it was handled.

This is an edited version of Mr Justice Kay’s direction to the jury: ‘The only lawful justification for this killing that arises is the question of self-defence.

‘Self-defence is lawful when it is necessary to use force to resist or defend yourself against an attack or threatened attack, and when the amount of force used is reasonable.

‘I emphasise two words: necessary and reasonable.

‘There are, thus, three matters that you have to consider. First and foremost, was the defendant acting in self-defence at all.

‘The defendant tells you he wanted no part in any fighting and if he is or may be right, then clearly his actions were entirely to defend himself. ‘If, however, you accept the evidence of Mr Osborne’s widow, for example, that the defendant shouted down a challenge to Mr Osborne, the prosecution say there is no question of him simply acting in self-defence. ‘Secondly, there is the question whether it was necessary to resort to the use of the knife at all. The defendant says that he was not intending to stab, merely to wave the knife in front of him and that it was Mr Osborne whose momentum carried him on to the knife. Thus he asserts that he was doing no more than was necessary.

‘Thirdly, was the defendant using no more force than was reasonably necessary? What is reasonable depends on all the facts, for example, the nature of the attack or anticipated attack, whether or not a weapon is used and whether or not the attacker was on his own.

HE THINKS he’s Pooh Bear. That’s who Jonathan Watts, head of history at Benenden, one of the most famous gels’ schools in the country and alma mater to the Princess Royal, identifies with in literature. This means he’s solid, reliable and vulnerable. But not, of course, a bear of little brain who is gullible and gets things wrong. Now Watts is to break a 70-year-old tradition to become the school’s first male ‘housemistress’. The 43-year-old bachelor will take charge of 50 girls aged 11 to 16.

Benenden old girls range from the Princess Royal (‘We’re pleased when old girls do well,’ giggles Watts) to the BBC’s head of radio, Liz Forgan, and Baroness Ryder. It’s a £3,910-a-term establishment where they play lacrosse, have midnight feasts and parental Range Rovers disgorge tuck boxes and well-groomed ambitious young things for the tutelage of the indefatigably cheerful headmistress Gillian duCharme. Once comprised of daughters of the Empire, it is now full of daughters of solicitors, barristers and judges. The girls who normally parade in tatty jumpers and tights with holes in them are on holiday. Watts is sitting in the engraved-wood 19th century staff room where a 17th century dandy with cake-doily collar looks down from the wall.

Watts is chunky with receding hair, the look of a royal private detective, labrador enthusiasm combined with robustness, ingenuous charm and trustworthy voice. He’s keen on school dinners (particularly puddings) and school hols. He talks a lot, as do all teachers. He also has that actorly enunciation and projection that teachers go in for.

He’s wearing a suit, white shirt, squishy-soled shoes and rebellious tie. Before he arrived at the school five years ago, a friend said to him: ‘You’d better not wear a suit or grow a moustache or you’ll be mistaken for a housemistress.’

So is it true that the girls have nicknamed him ‘Sausage’ (on account of his generous girth) as reported in The Daily Telegraph? ‘No. They made that up. The girls tend to call us by our surnames, as if we were second undergardeners,’ he jokes. When the girls read the newspaper moniker they became protective. ‘Now you mustn’t get a complex and become anorexic,’ they said.

Watts is to become mother hen at Marshall House in September. He characterises Marshall girls as ‘independent, good organisers who get on with life and don’t get very emotional about things’. When Marshall girls win a coveted trophy there is ‘desultory applause’. Macmillan’s grandchildren, Lord and Lady Stockton’s daughters, are going there. Watts hopes to enthuse his charges with his passion for the double bass. He won’t parade round the dormitories (‘If I do, I’ll send a little girl ahead of me like a miner with a canary,’ he has said) or showers. But will he become a pin-up? Will the girls fancy him? ‘Oh come off it,’ he says, sitting with one foot on top of the other. ‘A balding, overweight school teacher!’ Unfortunately the former master who was a ‘crush’, a 24-year-old Jason Donovanish tanned classics teacher, left to become a rock star. So at Benenden now, ‘crushing’ often involves younger girls swapping gifts with older ones.

And how will this surrogate father deal with girly problems like premenstrual tension and pregnancy? ‘I have a full-time matron. But I’m totally unshockable. Beryl Reid said if someone were to tell her they were having an affair with a goat, her reply would be that she hoped it had nice eyes.’ And if a pupil came to Watts to say she was having an affair with a goat? ‘I’d probably ask to meet the goat and say, ‘I hope it’s clean.’ ‘ Unlike most people, Watts is genuinely fond of teenagers. ‘I like the things that infuriate other people, the faddishness. I lose track of the acned Australian pin-ups who appear on dorm walls. Often I get a little girl to give me a lesson in what’s going on. My bedtime reading is occasionally Just 17. You have to be able to empathise at this level.

‘You should be able to devote lots of time to drinking squash and eating inordinate numbers of chocolate biscuits. Then when something goes wrong they feel they can come to you. Many girls prefer to talk to a man (30 per cent of the Benenden staff are male). It also helps to remember what it was like when you were 15.’ What was it like? ‘I can’t remember . . . Well, it was a period of great self-doubt and uncertainty.’

His own education spanned local authority grammar school, choral scholar at Oxford and research work at York University where he produced one of the world’s many unwritten doctoral theses. ‘It sits in cardboard boxes at home. I’m not sure civilisation has lost much by its lack of information on English painting between 1390 and 1450. Occasionally I look at it and can’t understand it.’

Watts is of solid academic stock. His father is a retired primary school head, and his sister a slide librarian at Exeter University. Formerly head of history at two independent boys’ schools, Watts was appointed at Benenden after a 45-minute interview and tour of the grounds, 240 acres of Kent countryside. ‘The question which floored me completely was, ‘Why in five years time will we be pleased to have employed you?’ With a naturally English sense of masculine modesty, I refused to answer.’ (On being pressed, he said something about academic excellence and enthusiasm.) He treats women in egalitarian fashion. ‘I don’t think of them as feeble creatures who should be doing flower arranging.’ But he has mostly taught in boys’ schools. ‘Female students work harder, are more cautious, keener to get things right and don’t take risks,’ he concludes. ‘They tend to see what’s bad rather than good. They’ll come out of exams saying, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t know that,’ whereas boys will say, ‘Marvellous question on Henry VII.’ When you point out that it was on Henry VIII, they’ll say, ‘Oh what’s a number between friends?’’

TALKING to the TV presenter Sarah Dunant is like speaking to her on television when you’re at home. She protects herself from questions with a glass screen, runs the show and you have the feeling that your only control is to switch her off.

The big difference is that in life she’s smaller than on television. Indeed, this self-dubbed Alan Ladd of arts programmes quips that she’s often shot standing on a box. The other difference is that when you talk to her with a cup of coffee rather than an autocue, she doesn’t wear her screen-sized strawberry-frame spectacles.

Dunant, former Kaleidoscope producer and sometime presenter of Woman’s Hour, is a presenter of the cultural magazine programme The Late Show. This week she publishes her third thriller, Fatlands. It is a snappy, Chandleresque novel which charts the further progress of Hannah Wolfe, her independent, feminist private detective from Birth Marks.

The book will be serialised on Woman’s Hour. ‘I read the last one, but didn’t do it well enough,’ says Dunant. ‘I couldn’t get a babysitter so my child was in the studio eating meringue. At the end of episode nine you can hear the crunching.’

Dunant, 42, has curly brown hair, a pinched face and talks with her hands and broadcasterly emphasis. (‘It’s quite clear,’ she says, ‘that I’m not a sex symbol and My Face is Not My Fortune.’) She wears Designer Oxfam – gold day shoes with thick black tights – like her heroine; and she lives in Tufnell Park, like her heroine. We’re talking in her garden, where organic frisee lettuces and cauliflowers grow. Her heroine, on the other hand, only dreams of an alternative lifestyle.

So how many men has she slept with? Eighteen? And mostly SLBA? (Sexual Liberation Before Aids.) That’s a question her heroine gets asked – and answers. ‘You’ll have to ask Hannah.’ Dunant dodges the question. ‘She’s a character. She ain’t me.’

But are there parallels between a female private detective and a television presenter? She laughs. ‘They both get scared. I still get frightened when the green light goes on before big discussions that I’ll let people get away with things and won’t ask the tougher questions because I won’t think quickly enough.’ Is that because she’s not clever enough? ‘No. Thinking on your feet is a different kind of intelligence.’

Dunant is dubbed bossy, brainy, the new Joan Bakewell, the thinking man’s crumpet. She is compared to Cliff Richard and called Brains, after the Thunderbirds character. ‘In the supermarket I’m never mistaken for Cliff. Cliff, however, is always being approached . . .’

She has an acerbic wit but is not a warm personality and comes across as tough, slightly arch and self-satisfied. ‘Occasionally I get over-confident and have a loss of perspective and humility,’ she admits.

She used to drop out. Post-Cambridge University she went to Japan and worked as a hostess in a nightclub. ‘It was severely innocent. But it’s not very nice to sell your company.’

In 1978 she left Kaleidoscope and went to Bogota where she got involved in a drug trafficking network. ‘I met and hung out with a lot of people who were in the cocaine trade. It was the time before the Mafia and Columbian cartels moved in, when there were a lot of independent American operators.’ Did she take drugs? ‘We all did, though many of my generation wouldn’t admit it now. I’ve had very happy times on drugs. I don’t mean ‘happy’ as in ‘out of my skull’, but interesting, creative times.’ She says she wouldn’t take dope nowadays. ‘It doesn’t fit into my lifestyle any more.’ The last time she dropped out was when she went to India, aged 31. A colleague says she was a driven personality when she went, but returned transformed. Was it a life-changing experience? ‘I’ve now been there seven times, including with my kids,’ she replies. ‘But I didn’t turn into John Lennon.’

She gained a sense of perspective. ‘This, the centre of the universe, felt like a very small part. Things other than money are important there . . . But I’ve had more penetrating existential discussions with my five-year-old about God than I’ve had time to have with myself over the last decade.’

Dunant has lived with her ‘partner’, Ian Willcox, for 10 years. ‘I refuse to talk about my private life.’ Why did they never marry? ‘No reason to. It’s never been an issue.’ Willcox runs an independent radio production company. Do they compete professionally or otherwise? ‘No, we do different things. He’s one of those rare men who gets tremendous satisfaction from the home, children and cooking.’ Willcox does the cooking.

Dunant is earnest about women’s issues. She has, to her chagrin, been called a trendy feminist. ‘That’s a lazy insult. It presupposes opportunism and that you only feel those things because everybody else does.’ She is a committed feminist who fights for equality between the sexes in all areas, particularly since Zoe (five) and Georgia (two) were born. ‘I keep wondering whether because they’re little girls some things will be closed to them.’

SIR Nicholas Fairbairn would once have liked 24,000 wives, like a man he heard of in Saudi Arabia. The flamboyant politician is back from his deathbed with a vengeance, firing off letters to the newspapers about our parlous times and talking about sex, his marital infidelities, the deaths of two of his children, and the ghosts in his castle.

While almost everyone welcomes the recovery of the former Solicitor-General for Scotland, it may prove unfortunate for his parliamentary colleagues that Fairbairn is devoting his new-found energies to completing the second volume of his autobiography. ‘There will be lots of descriptions of Members of Parliament,’ he says. ‘Like that stuck-up little prick with pin eyes . . .’

This week he returns to work after a month off with a serious bout of viral hepatitis, for which he was hospitalised for 10 days. He has lost one and a half stone and won’t be able to drink alcohol again.

‘I suppose I’ve had enough in the first part of my life for the whole of it,’ he says, in a frail voice. ‘I have drunk a bottle of whisky or vodka in a day. But I wouldn’t say that was regular manifestation.’

He’s wearing a tartan suit he designed, has mad tufts of hair, looks much older than his 59 years and rolls his eyes and scratches his head when he talks. He is brilliant, provocative, contrived and self-admiring. Sir Nicholas has conquered trauma in his life. Two of his five children died in infancy, one in 1964 and the other just a year later. ‘I was driving to see my mother-in-law with Elizabeth, my first wife,’ he says, clasping his hands tightly and talking heavily. ‘The twins, Charlotte and Micheline, were asleep in their carry cots in the back. They were four months old. ‘Leakage from the exhaust was drawn into the back of the mini van. Maybe there was a draught or the back doors didn’t really fit. Micheline was on the exhaust side and when Elizabeth went to get her, she was dead. She’d died of carbon monoxide poisoning. She’d just been christened the week before.’

Edward, his only son, died the following year of cardiac problems. He was just two days old.

What effect did these deaths have on him? ‘They gave me a fundamental emotional shock and depth and insight into the transience of life,’ replies Sir Nicholas, the son of the famed psychoanalyst William Fairbairn. ‘But I didn’t need bloody counselling! The idea that there is a safety net and 64 nannies to dust you down every time the sun goes behind a cloud is ridiculous. I just drew on reserve strengths to get over it. I also think religion is absolute bunk.’

He’s talking in the magnificent 13th century Fordell Castle in Fife, which he bought as a ruin for £100 in 1960. It has a trick staircase for shooting enemies into the downstairs loo, a chapel, ice house and ghosts. Lady Petrodie, who was hanged as a witch, ‘pulls the bed clothes off any female sleeping in the Rose Room’. The other ghost is a monk whom Sir Nicholas hears walking on the gravel at night. Sam, or Owl, as he calls his wife Suzanne, pops her head round the door.

Sir Nicholas’s favourite topics are women and sex. He married Elizabeth, daughter of the 13th Baron Reay, in 1962.

‘She hated gardens and resented my spending money on the garden or house. So there was constant friction . . . I had innumerable lovers. God knows how many.’ He believes that sexual fidelity is rare and monogamy in marriage a facile rule.

He met his second wife, Suzanne, when she came to him to get a recommendation for a divorce lawyer. ‘A friend said, ‘I have a friend who is in trouble, would you see what you can do?’ And that was it!’ He married her in 1983 in the chapel in his baronial home, wearing oyster-coloured Indian tunics that he’d designed. He describes the marriage as ‘buzzing bliss. We do absolutely everything together. She has blossomed since she came 10 years ago. She gardens, paints, arranges flowers – not that she arranged any of these. I do the flowers’.

Did they choose not to have children? ‘Well I would have made a positive decision not to, but Sam was already snicked. Her fallopian tubes, you know. It’s not death that is the problem in the world but birth.’

And what of his marital indiscretions? ‘That is not a matter that matters, nor a matter I want discussed,’ he says, raising his voice. But he has in the past talked about being unfaithful. ‘I’m not saying that.’ He also denies the story of a former girlfriend who allegedly tried to hang herself from the lamppost outside his London home. ‘It was a complete fabrication by that shit . . .’ he says, naming a past Cabinet minister. ‘I caught him out in a bit of lechery and adultery, double crossing his wife and mistress and offering to marry someone he had no intention of marrying.’

Sir Nicholas first became aware of his incredible sex appeal at seven, lost his virginity at 16 and thinks his sexual energy will burn ‘for ever’. He holds that the release of tension which comes from orgasm and sneezing is essential to sanity. So what makes him sexually attractive to women? ‘I think because I’m interesting.’

What makes him a good lover? ‘Well, I’ve never seen anybody else making love, but it appears that I give ecstatic satisfaction, which is the point of the exercise.’

Sir Nicholas was himself the unwanted result of an unintended conception. His parents were spectacularly ill-matched and his mother, a painter and musician, was lonely and rejected. He was deprived of emotional closeness. ‘My parents were very distant figures. I felt very isolated, but learned independence, developed my own thinking and read a lot.’ He was brought up by his ‘beloved’ nanny. Did he love her more than his mother? ‘Oh yes,’ he says, emphatically.

He was dumped in boarding school at seven and was beaten consistently. Did he feel unlovable? ‘I don’t feel in the least unlovable. I knew I was unloved. Perhaps that was why I unconsciously developed humour, wit and intelligence to get attention.’ (He says his own children are ‘happy little women’. Charlotte, 29, is ‘married to the conductor of the LSO’; Anna-Karina, 27, is ‘a secretary who designs jewellery’; and Francesca, 25, ‘a nomad’.) Sir Nicholas fears the destruction of individuality. But he need not worry. He is expressive, eccentric, creative and convinced of his enormous talent.He loves reading, painting, gardening and writing poetry. His paintings are reasonably accomplished, his limericks hilarious and his poems are of the ‘Oh there is a time in May/When hearts are free/And night is day’ variety.

Is he superior to the run of mankind? ‘I’m different. I’m a one-off and special.’

This is the story of three Londoners who have decided to take on the West End musical mafia to prove there are living alternatives to Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber; to fight the recession with one of the great palliatives, escapist entertainment; and to spend the money of one of them in so doing. The unlikely trio are Alan Davies, ex-docker turned auctioneer, John Asquith, spiritual healer and breathing teacher, and Jesse Carr-Martindale, former infantry officer and erstwhile owner of London’s first floating nightclub.

It all started in 1989 with John and Jesse writing a musical called Convention and peforming it a deux in the sitting room of Richard Branson’s former house in Spain. John then performed it in its entirety to Alan in the back of his car on the way back from Maidstone, and Alan decided he had a hit on his backseat. So Alan, who had never done anything like this before and cannot afford to indulge in a spot of financial ruin, emptied his pockets in the pursuit of fame, fortune and a West End transfer. It will cost £2 million to put on the full musical, and he’s met all the costs of his dream to date. ‘How much have I put into it?’ says Alan. ‘‘There’s ‘no stopping. It’s all ‘going now.’

Extraordinarily, he has paid £30,000 to hire The Bloomsbury Theatre tonight and tomorrow to do a showcase when they look for angels. (It has capacity for 600 people which he’s nearly filled.) But he has met other costs inventively. Having received a quote of £19,000 for scenery, they decided to make their own. ‘It’s all hands ‘to the pump,’ says Alan. ‘Before you go can you help us paint a car for the stage?’ Meanwhile John has enticed a cast of 35 ‘mostly West End’ professionals (including P.P Arnold, who sang formerly with Tina Turner) and 15 helpers to offer their skills free for a month. And they have been rehearsing small scenes in the flats of the cast, scattered round London. ‘Mobile rehearsals, a moving studio,’ says Jesse, pucker voiced.

What’s it about? Convention is a love story which takes place during the sales meeting convention for a multi-national life assurance company. ‘A romance with complications,’ adds Jesse, who wrote Dempsey and Makepeace and much of The Bill, and created the story.

John, who breathlessly describes himself as a dancer, stage technician and voice trainer who has written 19 pieces for the stage, produced, choreographed, directed shows and worked in cabaret, wrote the music and lyrics.

He is also a chairman of the National Federation of Spiritual Healers. ‘The healer becomes attuned to a higher energy source. You can call it white light, healing energy or God’s love,’ he says. ‘It’s like putting a jump lead on a car so that the patient gets a boost.’

Still, it’s a tricky business producing a hit musical. Why do they think they are in with a big chance? ‘Because it’s better than anything I’ve seen in the West End,’ says Alan. The others nod vigorously.

Janet Reger, the Queen of Knickers cum Maureen Lipman of the underwear world, is commenting on the storm in a B-cup caused by the Kate Moss underwear pictures in this month’s Vogue. Entitled Under-exposure, the grunge model looks like a 13-year-old. Are the pictures disgusting? Hideous? Tragic? Paedophile?

Kate Moss happened to be wearing a Janet Reger pink lace bra (£100) in the pictures, but it is not a look that Queen Janet usually encourages. ‘We don’t subscribe to that look or find it attractive. I like women to look like women and girls to look like girls.’ Her daughter Aliza, Princess of Knickers, nods approvingly.

Janet Reger has been making slinky bras – and briefs, basques, nightdresses and nightgowns – for the past 26 years, and there is nothing she does not know about what men want.

So what sort of underwear should you wear to get your man? ‘Clean,’ replies Princess Aliza perfunctorily.

‘By the time he gets to your underwear, it’s a question of holding your man, not getting your man,’ interjects the Queen. ‘Men appreciate women who look good. If a woman looks like a slut, men won’t fancy her however kind and loving she is. All men are into black lace and black silk satin.’ Raine Spencer, she of the legendary libido, is a customer and mainly buys silk nightwear. La Contessa is, apparently, not ideally proportioned for mass production. How did she catch her Count? ‘She’s charming and we make her lots of silk nightwear and underwear specially. Sometimes she wants it cut a little higher or slit a little lower. She’s quite tall, of small build and hippy.’ La Contessa netted her Count with couture lingerie, natch. Lord Bath, the Loins of Longleat, visits regularly to kit out his 54 wifelets. ‘He spends lots and lots, and buys outrageous amounts,’ says the Princess, contentedly. ‘Since Christmas, he’s been in three times. He usually buys silk and is well in for a few hundred pounds each time.’ Four sisters from a Saudi royal family spent £53,000 on nightwear and promptly sent it all to the dry cleaners. Fergie always bags a big bag of lingerie. And then there’s Princess Michael of Kent and Princess Diana . . .

Eric Clapton ran up a ‘horrifying’ bill over Christmas. Rod Stewart shops with Rachel. ‘She does a help yourself and goes through all the drawers like a self-service,’ says the Princess. And singing star cum Bosnian relief worker Cher spends £1,000 on each of her visits.

Her business was born in the Sixties in a flurry of silk and lace, spawned a million high street copies and went into voluntary liquidation in 1983. She bounced back and now operates from her Beauchamp Place shop and sells by mail order.

Janet Reger sells a black bra trimmed with marabou feathers (with which you can fish) and glitter for £111; snakeskin Lycra stretch bra and briefs for £122; a beautiful housecoat with hand-appliqued French lace for £499; eau-de-nil chiffon frilly bra, brief and suspenders; a Chinese bustier with brocade and toggles.

‘Men don’t buy that sort of thing,’ she says, twanging a Chinese toggle, ‘because they don’t feel safe with it.’ Currently the most fashionable garment is a Lycra peasant-style body in chenille finish with front lacing. Silk satin bras, briefs and suspender belts with lace are perennially the most popular items with men. They simply don’t buy bodies. And women opt for a greater variety of lingerie, from bodies to camisoles. A standard array of transvestites buy camiknickers and lots of nightwear. ‘One comes in here and spends £800 on his sister,’ intones Queen Janet. So whither Nineties underwear? ‘It’s going stretchy and corsetted,’ she says.

All is not quiet on the lingerie front. There have been strange stirrings amid the famous boned and underpinned negligees, lace G-strings and frothy pink bras. Recently they had a woman in the shop who broke off her engagement because her fiance bought her some Reger underwear. She stormed Beauchamp Place with her ivory silk bra. ‘I presume she was militantly women’s lib,’ says the Queen, drawing dedicatedly on her Silk Cut. ‘She came marching into the shop and screamed, ‘Take this back. I don’t know what he was thinking of. I’ve never been so insulted in my life. What sort of woman do you think I am?’ ‘ Another storm in a B-cup?

The philosopher proposes marriage publicly to the masseuse he met 24 hours previously. Amanda, a creative soul on the dole, cries with anguish in front of near-strangers then recites John Donne. And Adrian, a venture capitalist and closet harmonica player, sings a sentimental Swedish song. The course leader says you can have whatever you can imagine. So we scream, sing and improvise.

This is The Mastery, an Actors’ Institute weekend course where you learn to express your creativity. Most of the aspiring poets and musicians (chartered accountants to travel agents) haven’t performed before. But we’ve all learned a two-minute piece.

We wear name laqels in true self-development seminar style and go into the hall where fruit and fruit teas are laid out next to the notice board with a card saying: ‘Wanted. New home for 2 terrapins.’

Veronica ‘Ronnie’ Roberts, actress and management trainer, is the course leader and turns out to be insightful and brave. (The course is confidential, so the other names have been changed.) This is not the National Theatre, she says, but a place to take risks.

Seventeen participants and 10 helpers listen attentively, with recycled notebooks on their knees. Why are we here? One person is ‘here to change’, another to ‘gain confidence’ and another to ‘be a better performer’. The helpers introduce themselves. Marco, an actor and Buddhist; Cynthia, who interprets sign language . . .

Now it’s our turn to tell the group about ourselves. Fear of humiliation rears its head. ‘Breathe and dare to make eye contact,’ Ronnie implores, for the first of five million times. The atmosphere becomes confessional. Andrew, a former surveyor, reveals that he had an affair while he was married. When he’s through, the audience claps acknowledgement. Clarissa is shy and a senior civil servant. She recently did a leadership course – potholing, climbing rocks – and feels born again. More clapping. Clive, the philosopher, doesn’t like telling the truth and is a compulsive smiler and yawner. Clap, clap. There are tears and laughter until 1.30am. Homework is to write three goals for the weekend and spend five minutes looking in the mirror. Next morning, participants say they haven’t slept. Too excited. Up drinking tea and coffee and chatting. They feel energised, I feel tired.

Now it’s time to relate what happened while looking in the mirror. ‘I looked in my eyes and saw all the pain,’ says one. ‘I looked at my mouth and saw a hard line.’

‘The first thing I noticed,’ says another, ‘was that I assumed I was going to look very ugly.’

A management consultant says her goal is to make a speech in front of 400 people. A girl in apres-ski boots and flowery shirt says she’d like to learn to cope with her emotions. And John is ‘up for a row with anyone who wants one’.

Next we take one corner and call it Love, another Anger and another Need. Participants stand in each and express the feeling of that corner to participants in the other two. In the Anger corner you see contorted faces, screaming and stomping. ‘I L-O-V-E you,’ responds the man, down on his knee in the Love corner, crying. ‘I need more love in my life.’

‘Why don’t you listen to me. I neeeeeed you,’ a woman shrieks to him from the Need corner. Ronnie encourages and motivates. Which results in more happy-clappy people. More tears. And more recycled Kleenex.

‘Keith, I feel you’re dead inside,’ says Ronnie, kindly. He agrees. Ronnie works with him, coaxing and challenging like a shrink on holiday. Later Keith, a Jesus Christ lookalike, looks as if he’s been born again. ‘A minor miracle,’ he says.

Now what do we want to communicate in the two-minute pieces we have prepared? Someone wants to express her sensuality; another her lovability. What does Adam want to do? ‘Two poems. One God one. Another lust and gutter job.’ He farts creatively.

A girl in purple leggings and political T-shirt recites Jack Kerouac. ‘Doing this is very scary,’ she says, trembling. Next Susie, resonant and powerful and in platform shoes and green jeans, sings an aria from La Boheme, in Italian.

The venture capitalist is on the floor expressing the defiance of someone on skid row. Carl recites Louis MacNeice: ‘I’m not yet born . . .’ And the gay guy curtsies after his performance. The pieces these amateurs produce are heartfelt and inspiring.

On Sunday, the room is filled with beaming faces. Ronnie has drawn out of people what didn’t seem possible. Strangers have gelled and there is a feeling of possibilities.

So it’s time to get physical with Gary . . . with Marilyn Monroe exercises, Bette Davis muscular stretches and exercises other classes don’t reach – including a crotch exercise. They once had a nun in a tracksuit on the course who laughed so much that she wet herself.

Then we do improvisations: one group enacts being a pizza, others act out their goals. Someone says he loves shouting. Another enjoys being a fool. The participants agree to meet again in three weeks, stating what they want to achieve before then. Andrew holds a magic wand and says he wants to book a flight to Swaziland to see his aunt. Sebastian wants to become a garden designer and recite his poems publicly: ‘Thank you for helping me believe in myself.’

It’s an intensive, personal workshop. Participants talk about having changed their lives. Faces show relief. It’s emotionally draining, moving, poignant and supportive. Like a marathon therapy session crossed with an improvisation workshop. Very Me Generation. Very New York. Very good. Oh, and I sang Blue Moon to 30 people. Next stop the Royal Albert Hall. * The Mastery takes place approximately every three weeks and costs £195. Telephone 071 251 8178.

Whether you want to improve your improvisation techniques or unleash the exhibitionist within, The Mastery encourages shameless self-expression. drops her inhibitions and opens her heart, lungs, mind and wallet.

Victor Edelstein, one of Princess Diana’s favourite designers, is having a mid-life crisis. He’s 46 years old, has worked in fashion for 32 years and has clients from the Duchess of Kent to Princess Yasmin Aga Khan. Now he’s closing his couture house and starting his second life. ‘I’m going to be very poor for a long time,’ he says. ‘But I don’t mind. I want to be free.’ In 1967, aged 21, Victor was assistant to Barbara Hulanicki at Biba. Next he was assistant designer at Christian Dior. Then in 1977 he started on his own, but went bankrupt. Instead of slinking away and becoming a pattern cutter, he salvaged something out of his liquidation and moved into couture.

At its height in 1989, the turnover was £1 million a year. (His dresses – flattering, elegant and heavenly – start at £2,500.) Now he refuses even to look at his accounts. Couture, he says, is no longer fashionable and he doesn’t have the resources to wait for a revival. ‘I don’t want to get deeper and deeper into debt.’ He intends to spend his time painting watercolours, writing travel articles, illustrating a Cinderella book and designing for the stage.

Victor has an unconventional marriage and lives alone in a one-bedroom flat. He stopped living with Annamaria, his Catholic wife and dealer in old master drawings, 12 years ago after eight years of marriage. They never divorced, remain good friends, still go on holiday, spend four nights a week together when she is in London, and divide their time between four properties in Paris, Spain and London.

‘Now we’re together for more than half the year. A lot of people envy our marriage,’ he says. ‘We both have flats in London. Sometimes we entertain or spend the weekend in the other’s flat. It works marvellously.’ He doesn’t always include Annamaria when he’s entertaining, and isn’t offended if she doesn’t involve him. ‘I don’t feel insecure. She’s like a second self.’ He first met Annamaria at a friend’s party. ‘I saw her and in some weird way just knew that we were going to get married.’ She had a boyfriend at the time, but they met again six months later when she didn’t – and married in 1973.

Why did they break up? ‘She had this job buying works of art and was away half the time. We were apart too much and the whole thing went sour.’ They split but never stopped seeing one another. ‘We’re together now more than ever.’

Are they sexually loyal? ‘It’s not discussed. We do what we like. There are no rules. Whatever happens happens. But what we like is to be together. Whoever we meet, there is a kind of inevitability that we’re going to remain together.’ He says he doesn’t feel sexual jealousy or possessiveness. ‘The way you keep the love of your life is by making that person feel absolutely free.’

They don’t have children. ‘It wasn’t a decision not to. But nothing happened and she felt there was no point investigating and going through hell trying to have them. She felt if it was meant to be we would have them. I’m sorry we didn’t. But it’s too late now.’

Victor is wearing a Ralph Lauren paisley tie and Prince of Wales suit, and has the looks of a Sir Ralph Halpern crossed with a sartorially equipped daddy-longlegs – he’s 6ft 4in with long face, long hands and long legs. He speaks in a mannered way and is charming and courteous. He’s Mr Nice Guy: ‘I’ve never lost my temper in my whole life. I wish I were more confrontational.’

He is a ‘lapsed’ Jew of Russian Polish extraction. (‘I do have a faith. I believe in God.’) His father and grandfather were dressmakers, and his family was close. As a child, he read a lot and played with a toy theatre. ‘School was hell until the last couple of years because one was artistic, sensitive and taller than everybody else.’ He was already more than six foot at the age of 12.

‘I was quite weedy and used to get knocked about. Thank God I didn’t go to boarding school. I’d have been one of the children who hung themselves in the first week.’ He went to the local grammar school and gained six O-levels.

His father died when he was 19. ‘It was horrible. He was a heavy smoker and died of lung cancer.’ His mother then worked as a secretary. ‘Six years of father being ill depleted what money there was.’ Victor was fired from his first job, and then sacked from the following six. ‘I was too dreamy. You imagine yourself throwing lengths of silk over beautiful models and then find yourself chained to a pattern-cutting table.’

He works very hard but is moderate elsewhere in his life. At the age of 21 he got drunk at a Biba party – and has never done so again. Nor has he ever touched a cigarette. And drugs? ‘Well, one’s had the odd joint. But one’s getting old.’

He’s excited to be entering a new era where he’ll be rid of hemlines and deadlines. ‘Lots of people are stuck in jobs and think, ‘God, if only I could do something else’. Well, I can.’ The official reason for the closure is his financial problems. But that is only part of the story. ‘Balenciaga said before he died that a couturier’s life is a dog’s life. It is in many ways. I’ve spent 11 years being polite and constantly watching what I say. I hold an awful lot back. I look at something that’s tight and instead of saying, ‘We’ll let that out’, I have to say, ‘We’ll ease that over the hips’.’ Doesn’t he feel like crawling up the wall? ‘Why do you think I’m stopping?

‘I’m certainly not retiring. I can’t imagine myself staring at the walls or the television from now until the Big Day.’ He thinks of himself as lazy. ‘Like most lazy people I work twice as hard to fight it off. I’ve always had this suspicion that left to my own devices I’d do nothing. Now we’ll see.’ What is he going to live on? ‘That’s my business. Not a lot.’ He’s not materialistic or avaricious. ‘Most of the time I’ve had so little that I count myself as very happy when I know I can pay my bills.’

We return to the subject of his sexuality. Are his inclinations exclusively towards women? He pauses. ‘How are yours?’ he says curtly, before replying in the affirmative. In an industry where many designers are homosexual, he admits he has a feminine side. ‘Maybe she is just getting out in those dresses,’ he says, hamming it up. ‘But I’ve certainly never felt tempted to put them on!’

I am dining with Jonathan Meades. The restaurant critic, presenter of Abroad in Britain, and now author of Pompey – the fattest and most scatological novel in recent memory – has a fearsome reputation. ‘He’s detached from the human race and would be just as happy to meet Dennis Nilsen at a dinner party as Mother Teresa,’ says a rival food critic. ‘He enjoys poking about in the nasty bits of pigs’ guts and people’s lives,’ comments another. ‘He borrows an intimidatory technique from Brando, of staring and pretending to be deaf.’

Meades, 46, is known for wearing black, a fedora hat and National Health tinted spectacles. But he arrives in purple tie and suede shoes with accommodating manner. He’s also renowned for his arcane vocabulary (it’s likely that the OED takes its lead from him) and uses words like eldritch, mansarded, naphthalic and salchows.

He’s currently making a film about vertigo for a new series, Further Abroad. ‘I suffered so badly from vertigo once that I had to crawl back along Clifton suspension bridge.’ And one about pigs. ‘The good thing about pigs is that they can be your best friend and you can eat them as well.’ His book, Pompey, is populated with people like a loopy paraplegic ex-comedian, a firework-maker and his four children by different mothers: one sees his father eaten by a crocodile in the Congo, one is a porn star, another brings an Aids-like disease to Europe as a result of eating a pygmy.

Does Meades aim to shock and repulse? ‘These things don’t seem that abnormal to me. I revel in them. Maybe it’s a question of the ancient truism that your subject chooses you . . .’ Does that make him a revolting person? ‘No. I’m absolutely charming, like a little old lady out of Muriel Spark.’ Not a psychopath? ‘I regard myself as an absolute paragon of normality. One does, doesn’t one?’

He’s renowned for his prodigious appetite. It is said that when he dines, the waiters queue up on the pavement to serve him. And he ‘probably’ drinks too much, becoming boorish. So will he eat black pudding or entrails en croute? He belies his offal reputation, choosing only a little goose liver and guinea fowl and mineral water. ‘I quite like dead guinea fowl.’ Would he eat people? The pianist tinkles in the background. ‘I don’t know. I wouldn’t eat dog. I loathe dogs. To eat something is a way of cherishing it. Of keeping it inside and paying it some sort of posthumous compliment.’ He laughs. ‘My idea of a good dog is one that’s just been run over.’

A lot of things prompt anger in Meades. ‘Traffic, Esther Rantzen, dog shit, Michael Parkinson. Normal things which any sentient civilised person would be provoked to anger by.’ He hates conformity, ditherers, pseuds, the stupid and drab. ‘I hate provincial GPs. I hate the provincial professional classes. I can’t say I hate the working classes in toto but . . .’ He toys with his puree of peas, goose liver, tagliatelle and truffles. ‘I enjoy hating. It gives me pleasure. It’s like a carousel of misanthropy which is fuelled by new hates all the time.’

Meades lives in Kilburn, where he reads eclectically. Twice married, he has four daughters, including 12-year-old twins. He doesn’t want any boys. ‘They’re extremely aggressive and very alarming. Backward compared to girls and very unsubtle.’

His first marriage lasted three years. ‘I don’t have any comments about relationships. They either come off or they don’t,’ he says camply. He remarks that his campness is a form of irony.

He was brought up in Wiltshire and went to Salisbury Cathedral School and various crammers. ‘I walked out of school at 16. It was too illiberal. I had to go to chapel all the time.’

An only child, his father was a Crawford biscuits salesman and his mother a teacher. ‘Most of my friends had parents who were much younger. I envied them quite a lot.’ His mother was 37 when he was born. ‘My childhood wasn’t particularly happy or unhappy. I was very much left to my own devices. I was at quite a loose end most of the time.’

He was trained at Rada in the Sixties. Naturally he landed a role as a deaf-mute child murderer in a film that never got made. He liked acting but despised the luvvies. ‘I dislike theatre because it’s so boring.’ What sort of actor would he have made? ‘I was good at simpletons and psychopaths. I dare say I could have broadened my range to include upper-class bastards.’ This, he says, has nothing to do with identification.

Meades doesn’t expect anything from life. ‘I’m completely nihilistic and don’t believe in anything. I don’t even expect a certain degree of material well-being.’ The death of his father and split with his long-standing girlfriend when he was 32 affected his attitudes profoundly. ‘You become brutally insensitive.’ He’s taken the line from Joe Orton and doesn’t really believe it of himself.

‘I think it’s mad to expect happiness,’ he continues, in lachrymose tone. ‘It’s nice when it happens, but counting on it is a ludicrous presumption. I remember when I was 17 and cycled from school with two litres of cider to Cothay, a medieval house in Somerset. I was happy that particular day. That’s 29 years ago,’ he says, deadpan. ‘One’s been happy since for brief moments.’

In his writing, he refuses to give moral assurances. ‘I don’t have any great hope for the future. I don’t think things get better.’ He puffs on his Marlboro. ‘I think we’re in a state of original sin. We’re born imperfect and remain that way.’ He doesn’t believe in redemption for anything except perhaps overeating.

He’s heavy-weight, very clever and with a timidity hidden beneath the act. Perhaps the Meades beneath the fedora and scatological misanthropy is just a nice middle-class boy?

Imagine the sound of Approaching Menace music, the inquisitorial spotlight, the camera zooming in, the terrified man sitting in the famous black leather chair, the nervous flinching and twitch of the mouth . . . this afternoon we have polymath Magnus Magnusson in the hot seat with 45 minutes on The Life and Reign of Magnus Magnusson, Mastermind quizmaster.

This is the beginning of the first, nail-biting round. ‘How about a bottle of medium white wine?’ asks Magnus, showing his virtues as questionmaster. ‘Oh, do we have to?’ squeaks his producer. They then do battle for the title (of ‘dry’ or ‘medium’). ‘Medium dry!’ says Magnus, showing a talent for compromise. Beep beep beep. That brings us to the end of this fast, furious and high-scoring round.

Magnus, you’re a writer, broadcaster, scholar and chairman of the Scottish National Heritage Board. You have an honorary knighthood for your service to National Heritage, but as an Icelander you can’t be called ‘Sir’. You’re not allowed questions on orthopaedic bone cement in hip replacements or routes to anywhere in mainland Britain from Letchworth by road, but you can be quizzed on anything from notable British poisoners to the life cycle of the honey bee. Your chosen specialist subject? ‘Icelandic sagas or the history of Lindisfarne.’

Right. You’re 63. Are you going to retire as Mastermind quizmaster? ‘Mastermind has lasted 21 years. I see no reason why it shouldn’t last until 25.’ He clears his throat defensively. ‘The game depends on speed. If I did get slower, I think I’d like to be put mercifully out to pasture.’ Correct. How long have you been married to Mamie? ‘Thirty-eight years, 10 months.’ That’s astonishing and unusual, isn’t it? ‘It’s not unusual,’ he says, frostily. ‘More people remain married than don’t get married.’ What’s the secret of marital longevity? ‘Marrying someone nice.’ What else? Pass. What has he learned from his marriage? ‘That it would be much too tedious to separate.’ What else? Pass.

He’s a kind, soft man with gravitas and dignity. But he’s initially prickly and shirty if a question is any more intrusive than ‘What’s the monetary unit of Japan?’. He’s also pedagogic.

He sports a blue/green jacket, green tie with an otter on it (‘from the island of Isla which I visit quite a lot because we have a goose problem . . .’) and blue eyes. His hair is silver and he trims his eyebrows. ‘It’s genetic. My father needed a topiarist to deal with his.’ He sticks a pencil in his pipe, rakes the tobacco, lights it, never smokes it and looks like a pre-Socratic philosopher.

Back to the quiz. Tell us some funny stories about Mastermind, about a contestant passing on all the questions, for instance. ‘That’s not funny. That’s tragic,’ he says, stormy-faced with frightening intensity. ‘Our job is to bring out the best in people. There was one woman who sang her last answer.’ Correct.

You missed out the laboratory technician who was disqualified because she entered twice, first as Mrs Denyer, her first husband’s name. ‘Oh yes,’ says Magnus, nodding. ‘She didn’t think she was doing anything wrong. She felt she was a different person having had a bad marriage, remarried, changed her hair and reconstructed herself.’ Correct.

Instead of the crisp tones and fast delivery seen on television, he speaks in a soothing broadcasterly Scottish burr. He’s also the sort to pronounce correctly any Japanese, Swahili or Gujarati words. Why is the programme so popular? ‘We’re trying to celebrate what the human noddle can do . . . and at home you compete, shout answers at the screen and think, I got one quicker than those brilliant little bastards! I always think that when I watch University Challenge and see those hideously, formidably brilliant little sods!’ Correct.

How would you define Mastermind contestants? ‘They’re people who like taking part in quizzes. I also think they’re crazy. You’ve got to be a wee bit potty to go in for Mastermind. I wouldn’t for all the tea in China.’ Why? ‘You’re putting your pride on the block. By applying, you’re implying you have a certain good conceit of yourself and there’s a danger that you’ll come a cropper.’ Correct.

Who is the questionmaster’s questionmaster? ‘My ideal quizmaster is Bamber Gascoigne, the king, the best ever,’ he answers with conviction. ‘If I were as good as him, I’d reckon I’d done a pretty good job with Mastermind.’ Are you not as good as him? ‘Of course not. Nobody is. He’s miles above everyone.’ Do you know your subjects? ‘On the night,’ he laughs. ‘Then I know all the possible answers to all the questions.’ Correct. If you were given six months to live, what would you do? ‘I’d carry on doing what I’m doing now. I hope I wouldn’t be thrown into a flat spin by it. I think I would cultivate my garden a bit more.’ Do you want that quote in French? ‘Ah, you know your Voltaire.’

How would you describe yourself? ‘As an ordinary guy who got notoriety through doing parlour games on television.’ Beep beep beep. Let us glance at the scores. Magnus, you’ve scored 50 points and several marital passes. It’s easy to play games. But Magnus has had tragedy in his life. Siggie, his 11-year-old son, was killed in 1973 as he jumped off a bus on his way home from school. ‘It’s curious,’ he says, softly, ‘but in a perverse way his death brought us all closer together and made us even stronger as a family. We’d taken for granted that we were all immortal and happy, and that things only happened to other people. You realise then you can’t take happiness for granted. That you have to work at it and help create it. His loss was a grievous and shattering blow.

‘I remember him a bit like Keats’s Grecian Urn. He was just on the threshold of puberty. He’d started worrying about whether he should kiss a girl in his class. The night before he died, he came and sat on my knee and said, ‘Dad, do you think it’s OK if I kiss her?’ I said, ‘Of course’, and he ran off to play.

‘We often wonder what path he would have taken. He’d have been 31 now. He’d probably have gone into broadcasting.’ His four children are in broadcasting. Magnus smiles and shrugs his shoulders. One is left with the impression of a gentle gentleman with great intellectual curiosity. * The Mastermind final is on 16 May.

My chauffeur is a homosexual with spiky hair and red-framed glasses who speeds me on a Yamaha XJ900 motorbike to meet the lesbian couple. He is Peter Brunnen, the gay rights activist and Labour councillor. And they are the businesswoman and former nurse who this week won a three-year battle to become foster parents. They fear exposure and refuse to be named, photographed or visited at home. So we meet in Brunnen’s office, where he greets a waiting lad with a kiss on the lips.

Hampshire councillors this week overturned their earlier ban which rejected the couple as potential carers because of their sexuality, thereby entitling them to foster children under the age of six for short periods. Jane, 35, and Susan, 36, (not their real names) have been together for 10 years. Susan, an ex-nurse turned part-time A-level student, was once married and has two children: a boy, 13, and girl, 12.

Are the couple open about their lesbian relationship? ‘We don’t go around waving flags, but our friends and neighbours know,’ says Susan. Her children’s classmates also know. ‘The smallest lad picked on my son who just laughed at him and locked him in his locker,’ she laughs.

‘Then let him out,’ Jane adds, hastily.

They aren’t overtly demonstrative in front of the children. ‘We hold hands or hug,’ says Jane. ‘That’s all I consider appropriate for any child to see . . . I think people make too much of sex.’ Their son (as they both call him) stopped telling people he had ‘two mummies’ when he was seven. They maintain firmly that their children don’t receive a distorted view of the world – and they don’t actively promote homosexuality. ‘Quite the opposite,’ says Jane. ‘You don’t say, ‘This is us and this is how it should be.’ ‘ Jane has sincere eyes, ponytail and teacherish clothes, and Susan wears short hair and jeans. They wear wedding rings to symbolise their mutual attachment.

Susan was married for six years and Jane had ‘lots’ of heterosexual relationships. They’re not men-haters. (Susan lusts after Lovejoy.) And they’re not militant feminists, just common-sensical about women’s rights. Susan wants to foster because she has valuable nursing skills to offer. ‘When I worked in hospitals, I saw the state of these children and know how difficult it is for them to find foster parents.’

And Jane? ‘I want to give something back. Something to people who are less happy. I’ve had a pretty good life and have a stable relationship.’ Most fostering reflects the norms of society and they don’t dismiss the traditional Happy Family model. (‘It can be good or awful.’) But they see nothing unsuitable for children about their home. ‘Single-sex families are not that different from ordinary families,’ maintains Jane.

They don’t deem the lack of a male role model a problem. ‘It’s important to have both points of view, but not vital to have both available within the household. You make sure the children have contact with positive, successful males,’ says Jane.

‘Anyway, it’s mostly the mother who takes over the care in a normal family,’ adds Susan. They would never enact male/female roles, considering such behaviour ludicrous.

They will only foster short-term, so cannot understand the press interest. They only want a young child, so as not to compete with Susan’s offspring, and don’t mind about the child’s sex. They’ll happily care for the mentally or physically disabled – ‘to give their parents a break’ – and different races.

It’s likely they’ll be given children who are neglected and unwanted. ‘That’s the point of doing the job,’ says Susan. But aren’t they putting them at a further disadvantage? ‘All that matters is that the child goes to someone who is going to listen, provide for all his needs, food, warmth and security.’

Wouldn’t it be harder for such children to grow up with a positive image of men? ‘I don’t think that living with two women means that you won’t trust men,’ says Susan. ‘You can have your father in the house and discover that men are untrustworthy.’

They think abused children would actively benefit in a single-sex family of the opposite gender to the abuser. And a teenager questioning his sexual identity might be helped. ‘It would give him the space to come to terms with whether or not he’s gay,’ says Jane.

Susan’s father was a sheet-metal worker and Jane’s a plant operator. They say they had happy childhoods and that their parents’ marriages were ‘fine’. Both women are agnostic (nominally Church of England). They weren’t exposed to lesbianism as children. ‘I didn’t know it existed until I was 19. Stupid me!’ says Jane. Surprisingly they say their parents weren’t upset by their relationship.

Jane considers Susan an excellent parent: ‘I know the children come before me.’ She would have liked her own children and would have had artificial insemination. ‘I don’t feel sad though. I’ve done my share of parenting.’ But she applauds their arrangement. ‘We probably go more out of our way than most to make sure our children grow up without prejudice and treat them as individuals. Ours is a happy, nurturing and stable family.’ They are loving and patient and there is no reason to disbelieve them. They’re not interested in political correctness, just in a child having the most appropriate placement for his needs. There is little research on children brought up by lesbian couples and no evidence that it harms them. I start to ask whether they’d prefer . . .

‘Yes,’ interrupts Susan. ‘I would prefer my children to get married and have children. They both talk about doing it. That’s what they want and it’ll make life a lot easier for them.’

Hello, good afternoon and welcome back, as someone might say. Welcome to Sir David Frost OBE returning after more than 20 years to a live studio audience with The Frost Programme. But Frost off the box is a hard man to penetrate. He seems to be stage-managed.

Unusually for a newspaper photograph, he insists on being made up and appears with puffed-up hair, foundation and lip-liner. Even the management of that time-warp restaurant Odin’s protests there is only one table he’ll sit at.

This is the 54-year-old co-creator of That Was The Week That Was – television producer, author, joint founder of LWT and TV-am, and famed interviewer of Richard Nixon, the late Shah of Iran, five prime ministers, six American presidents and assorted royals. The one-man conglomerate, as he was once described, has ink on his fingers, teeth that look like they need a dentist and television screen spectacles that magnify his eyes so that it is hard to gauge his responses.

How would Frost interview Frost?

‘Aahhhaa,’ he says, as if pricked with a pin. ‘I’d be . . . interested to quiz . . . myself (cavernous pauses) . . . about why I get such a buzz from doing a lot of work. Getting to the roots, which I suspect are partly to do with my parents and Methodist upbringing, and that magical quantity, adrenaline.’

What technique would he use to make himself reveal the real David Frost? ‘Make myself forget I was interviewing myself and just have a conversation. That’s the key to a good interview.’

Frost should also ask Frost why his trousers are frayed. ‘Aahhhaa. Very observant of you. They were made a fraction too long.’

Whether he’s sold out and gone soft by accepting a knighthood and doing Hello!-style interviews. ‘I don’t know whether there is an Establishment any more, or whether the Establishment has joined me!’

About his salary. ‘Before not answering your question, you could guess $1 million a year or some nice meaningless figure.’

Whether he still has the stomach for confrontational Sixties-style interviews. ‘Yes.’

Why his friends are all movers and shakers and famous. ‘Dunno. Why not?’ (Laughs.) Why he works so hard at being liked. ‘Dunno that I work particularly hard.’

What he dislikes about himself. ‘As Ned Sherrin said, ‘David always learns from his mistakes without admitting he’s made any’.’

Why he’s driven so frenzied by the pursuit of fame and work. ‘People talk about the terrible pressures of fame. The pressures of failure would be a bloody sight worse.’

Then he should move on to romance. He is happily married to the former Lady Carina Fitzalan Howard, daughter of the Duke of Norfolk. Before their 1983 wedding, was he unlucky in love?

‘I rarely talk about my private life.’ He had high-profile affairs – and was twice dumped virtually at the altar – and a 17-month marriage to Peter Sellers’s widow, Lynne Frederick.

‘Jeanette Scott was my first really serious girlfriend. I was 15 when I saw her first screen kiss in Now And Forever. I leched after her like mad. When our relationship came to an end in 1965, it was a real shock to the system.’ But all his girlfriends were ‘terrific’ and ‘wonderful’. And Lynne?

‘We ought to have kept it as a terrific affair.’ What went wrong? ‘We got married.’ And marriage now? ‘I’m incredibly lucky to have played the field and then to have fallen in love more than I’d ever fallen in love and to have three children.’ He became a father at the age of 44 and now rates family and work a ‘joint priority’.

Next Frost should ask Frost that age-old Frost question of whether he believes in God or knows there’s a God. ‘I’m nearly in the second category,’ he replies. ‘I’ve never varied from being in the first.’ He says grace before meals, goes to church once a week and prays almost daily. What does he pray for? ‘To be at my best, most thoughtful, caring, cheerful and awake to the potentialities of any situation for the best.’

Frost is more relaxed live on television than live in person. But he still talks in the famous inebriated voice with moist lips, flickering ironic smile and head thrown back for that car engine warming-up laugh. He fiddles, rubs his hands, crunches paper, moves back, moves forward, holds on to the chair.

‘I don’t think it’s nerves. I’m waiting for the photographer to go so that I can have a cigar.’ He thinks Lew Grade has copyright on that shot. Jack (as in Frost), as he was known, had an ordinary, secure childhood, although money was tight. His Methodist minister father earned £350 a year. ‘My parents wrought financial miracles. We had a joint, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, every week.’ He was 14 years junior to his youngest sister and thus effectively bought up as an only child. He has never confessed any unpleasant childhood memories. What would he tell a shrink? ‘I’d bore him to death with how happy my parents were, and he’d despair!’ Ask Frost to press Frost and he recalls his woodwork master punishing him with a steel ruler. He whacks his hands in a graphic demonstration and winces. ‘I can still feel the agony.’

We’re now sitting in a taxi, Frost famously clock crunching, en route to a board meeting. He flatters, asks questions, expatiates, is unthreatening, solid and jocular; the sort of person you would want as an uncle. Does he believe in Heaven? ‘Yes. One day we will all be submitted to the ultimate interview. Goodness knows what the interviewing style will be.’ Like his? ‘I don’t know. I think it will be a no-nonsense interview.’ Before then Frost should inform Frost that what you see is what you get.