The world is mostly full of good, kind and thoughtful people. Miss X smiles as she says this, and emphasises how lucky she is. She says she loves her friends and family. She expresses her intense gratitude. And she explains how every day feels like a plus. ‘I love my life,’ she says, ‘that’s why I fought so hard for it.’

Last February Miss X was snatched off the street by a convicted killer, brutally attacked, sexually assaulted, mutilated, nearly burned alive and left for dead, trapped in a burning room. She was inflicted with 10 wounds, some near-fatal, lost half her body’s blood and needed 100 stitches. On Wednesday at the Old Bailey, her assailant, Anthony Ferrira, was jailed for 20 years. ‘He could have cancelled my life, callously hurting my friends and family. I don’t believe he deserves to live. I won’t ever forgive him,’ says this courageous and remarkable woman in her first interview.

Miss X, a 28-year-old buyer with a top London store, has a lovely and expressive face. She is beautifully turned out and well-spoken. She talks in a calm, self-assured way, maintaining eye contact as we speak. She was approached at 7.15am in the street by a stranger. He lured her into his Brixton squat by pretending his pregnant girlfriend needed help. When she resisted, he produced a knife.

‘I can’t describe the fear when I realised there was nobody else in the room and I thought he was going to kill me.’

He tried to strangle her and attacked her with a knife, cheesewire and broken bottle. ‘The sexual acts were repulsive, humiliating and degrading – but I thought I’d do anything to stay alive. Then this ncrazed violence started. I fought to try to stop him killing me.

‘I wanted to lose consciousness. I wanted it to stop, just to stop the pain, even if it meant dying. I felt this deep whirling as if I was being spun round faster and faster. Then there was this profound agony, which I presume was unconsciousness. I didn’t even know whether I was dead. ‘I tried not to breathe so that he’d think I was dead, but the fire he’d started began burning my leg, so I had to move. He began pounding my neck again.’

Eventually he left and she tried to escape the flames, but couldn’t. ‘I hoped I’d die before the flames got to me.’ She was rescued by a neighbour who heard her screams and managed to break the door down.

In hospital, fear overwhelmed her. ‘Ferrira had the contents of my bag and my name. I was scared even to go to the toilet alone. My sister and best friend slept with me every night. We were pretty rowdy and drank lots of champagne. I would never want to become morose about this. There’s so much worth laughing about.’

She has an independent, sociable, optimistic personality and a wide circle of good friends and close family. She needed plastic surgery and now has scars, but she doesn’t hide them. ‘I was shocked and horrified when I first saw myself.’ She has just regained the use of one of her hands. After hospital, she went to stay with family in Spain. ‘I couldn’t live in this country until he was behind bars.’ Now she lives with her sister. ‘I loved living alone before. I have to live out of a suitcase and have none of my belongings.’

Although she didn’t have a partner at the time of the crime, she has had boyfriends since. Has the attack traumatised her sexually? ‘I didn’t know if I was going to feel all right and if I could have a normal relationship, but I’m lucky, I don’t think of Ferrira as a man. He had nothing to do with my life. A partner in a loving relationship is very different. This hasn’t made me prejudiced against blacks either.’

Her greatest difficulty is being alone. ‘It isn’t as frightening now, but I won’t go anywhere without a mobile phone. The company gave me a car. I always check before I get in, then lock myself in. If nobody’s at home, I ring someone from the car before I get out and they talk me through going into the house.’ She is also frightened to travel on public transport. AFTER three months off work, she went back part-time. She had a happy childhood and a close family, although her mother died when she was seven and her father died three years ago.

‘I believe they were there looking after me when I was being attacked. To be honest, my father’s death was far worse than any of this. He’s gone and there’s no way I can fill that gap. But I can rebuild my life and do things he’d be proud of.’ She attributes her mental resilience to the experience of her parents’ deaths.

She has a faith, partly born of a convent education, and a belief in God. ‘I’m here for a purpose. I don’t know whether for something good. But my time obviously wasn’t up. Things happen for a reason, though I’m not quite sure why this happened. Maybe it was to make me stronger and rethink things. I’ve always thought, ‘I’ll get through this and things will be better because I’ll make them better.’

‘I think I’ve been very lucky that I haven’t been haunted with the memories. Of course I go over what happened. I had never faced physical violence before. But I don’t have nightmares. I don’t think, ‘If only…’ I’ve never taken it personally. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. You can’t stop things like this happening.

‘I’ve only had two sessions of counselling, but hadn’t felt I needed it. I don’t feel any guilt or shame about what happened. I didn’t ask for this. Now I just have to get on and deal with it. I’m not trying to put a brave face on it. If something frightens me, I’ll talk about it. I don’t think I’ve buried the experiences. I’m frightened that other people will think I’m cold-hearted and tough, but this is just my way of getting through it. ‘I actually think it’s been harder for other people. I’ve felt for a long time that people were waiting for me to break down, that there was no way I could get through this. That might still happen, but I don’t think so.’ She recites a touching credit roll of those people she feels indebted to. ‘If Ferrira’s girlfriends hadn’t been brave enough to come forward, he might never have been arrested.’ The police, ‘particularly WPc Holding who was with me right from casualty onwards,’ and the firemen were ‘superb’. ‘The firemen who rescued me are receiving counselling. I went to see them for tea and to laugh. I’ve managed to get over this, and I don’t want anyone else to be scarred.’

MISS X found the trial particularly difficult. She had to give evidence, although she just wanted her statement read out. ‘I didn’t want to bring it all back.’ Then there was ‘frightening’ discussion over whether she could be screened from Ferrira’s gaze. Fortunately she was.

‘In the end I saw him briefly and was surprised I felt nothing. He looked a pathetic character and not big, as I’d built him up to be in my mind.’ Now she doesn’t feel elated. ‘He’s behind bars, but I still have to cope.’ She knows her troubles are not over.

But she’s articulate, strong and looks well. ‘I’m so lucky. I should have died. Now I feel today is the first day of the rest of my life. I can’t explain how I’ve got off so lightly without the mental scars. Thank God I In her first interview, the victim of the brutal Brixton sexual attack and kidnapping talks about the ordeal and its effect on her life. This week, her attacker, Anthony Ferrira, was jailed for 20 years.

When Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Peter Imbert had a heart attack two years ago, he realised there was a distinct possibility he might die. Journalists were waiting outside his hospital door firming up his obituary details, which he was determined not to give anyone the opportunity to publish. ‘I’ll make a bargain with you,’ he said, post-intensive care, ‘you show me my obituary, and I’ll talk to you.’ No interviews ensued. Sir Peter, 59, retires on Sunday after a distinguished and extremely hard-working career. He imagines his obituaries might have said that he’d endeavoured to change the face of policing. But now he’s talking in a rare way about everything from his neglect of his family, to his passion for his wife and his son stealing money.

He’s sitting in his massive New Scotland Yard office in suit, white shirt and vest. His manner is charming but he appears tired and has hamster cheeks. He wears his identity card, having recently been refused admission to a police conference by a Lancashire constable.

Sir Peter is known for negotiating with the IRA terrorists cornered for a week in the Balcombe Street siege in 1975. He was also involved with the Guildford Four, who were subsequently freed in 1989. (He took a confession from Hill, in connection with the Woolwich bombing, and interviewed Conlon after his Guildford conviction.) Shortly after their release, he was quoted as saying: ‘You’re probably hoping that I’m going to say that the freeing of the Guildford Four was one of my worst moments, because I was involved. But it wasn’t. I just hope it won’t taint such reputation as I might have.’

Reputation intact, surely it was one of the lowest points of his career, I ask? ‘You could consider that or any number of things,’ he says, quickly changing the subject.

During his five and a half years as Commissioner he’s achieved a lot of his aims (‘in partnership with 44,999 others’), but not as quickly as he’d have liked. He has turned the Met from a force into a courteous ‘service’. Now he’s been offered ‘one or two’ non-executive directorships, involvement with security firms and invitations to lecture and write a book. He will also be playing bad bridge, coarse golf and ‘boring’ people with talk about his grandchildren (as his Who’s Who entry testifies). His heart attack, he says, made a vast difference to his life. ‘The stresses and strains of this job are an enormous burden if you literally take them to heart. I think I did. I care about this job. It consumes my whole being.’

He wrings his hands and comes across as gentle, but there’s a steeliness in his eyes which seems at odds with his open, friendly manner. Known for being calm and approachable, he admits: ‘My toughness is hidden beneath that genial exterior.’

Before the heart attack, he worked 16 hours a day – now it’s 13. ‘The first week off was almost a luxury, if it hadn’t been for the worry of whether I was going to get over it. I didn’t really feel frightened that I was going to die, but I was concerned about the things that I hadn’t done. ‘I haven’t really been fair to my family and owed it to them to spend more time with them. I’ve not wholly succeeded in that. I also knew I needed to learn to delegate and share responsibilities.’ Although his lifestyle might have cost him his life, he believes it has been worth it and his family has been supportive.

He met his wife Iris (they have been married for 36 years) when he was on the beat in central London. ‘I first saw her when I looked through the window of the hospital in Great Ormond Street and saw these rather good-looking nurses. Coincidentally, I then met her at a police dancing class. I thought she was very desirable.’ He used to stop the traffic to allow her to cross the road.

Iris has provided ‘great stability’ in his life. She’s worked in jobs that have allowed her to move and support her husband according to his placements. ‘It’s been,’ he says, ‘a very satisfactory, fulfilling marriage.’

Communication and understanding are the secrets of their successful relationship. ‘One is also tempted to say ‘love’, but what does that mean? At first it’s very passionate and then it becomes part of that stability, of being able to discuss things and enjoy similar interests.

‘I used to think I was passionate, but my wife may disagree. I believe I’m a romantic, but she doesn’t think so. Occasionally I buy her flowers.’ HE WAS brought up with a strong work ethic. Born the fifth of seven children into a poor working-class family, Sir Peter was the son of a bankrupt farmer.

‘From an early age I knew I had to earn my living. To achieve anything in this life, you’ve got to work.’ Aged six, he helped collect pigs’ swill; aged seven, he weeded gardens and delivered newspapers. ‘I had to finish early on Sundays to go to church three times. My parents insisted … I can’t really remember having holidays as a boy.’

He was an energetic, inventive child, and a comic and hooligan – he was once caught by the local bobby three times in one afternoon for different bike offences. (He once visited Associated Newspapers for an executive lunch. Asked whether he’d like to see anything – like the news room – he declined, requesting instead to ride up and down in the glass lifts.) His family’s size taught him to get on with people. ‘I was at constant war with my siblings. I learned that you don’t win arguments by resorting to violence or aggression.’

He left school at the age of 16. ‘My parents couldn’t afford to go on feeding an extra mouth. I remember seeing my mother crying because she hadn’t got enough money to feed the family.’ He worked for £1 a week at the local town clerk’s office ‘hoping to become the youngest town clerk in the country’.

He regrets his lack of university education. ‘I went to evening classes to learn shorthand, Russian, French and German.’ He has an orderly mind, listens attentively, and chooses his words carefully. He’s a slick and cunning communicator.

So what of his own children? He has three and says he is very proud of them – ‘not because of what they’ve achieved, but for their independence of thought’ – and seems reasonably satisfied with his role as a father. His son markets security devices, one daughter is a health visitor, and the other is a fashion graduate who helps disadvantaged youths and does cleaning two days a week.

‘I think I made a loving father. I hope so. I wasn’t there as much as I could have been in their formative years. I was spending too much time sorting out other people’s problems on the anti-terrorist squad. I know my son needed his father at that time, and I wasn’t there enough. ‘At times I was firm. I disciplined by example. I did slap them, but I was only once close to giving my son physical admonishment – pushing him up into his bedroom and giving him a jolly good hiding.

‘He’d stolen some money from us and then refused to admit it. It couldn’t have been anyone else. It wasn’t that he’d done it, but the fact that he was prepared to let someone else take the blame. I became furious with him. He’d wanted to keep up with his peer group and buy cigarettes.’

AS A child Sir Peter thought of becoming an agricultural auctioneer, selling cows and sheep in a market; he also thought of being a stage conjurer and comedian. ‘Some people say I’ve achieved one of those. I’m not going to say which.’

He leaves his job with mixed feelings. ‘I’ll miss the camaraderie and being involved in high-level decisions.’ The motto he’s going to put on his coat of arms is ‘adversity to advantage’. It’s a measure of what he’s achieved.

The plaque outside the Sixties breeze-block house in Sussex commemorates ‘The Blind Architect’. In the sitting room a notice reads: ‘No smoking. Trying to give up lung cancer.’ And the invitations displayed on the shelf are mostly for parties in 1988. This is, after all, the home of Spike Milligan, 74-year-old former Goon and manic-depressive.

Milligan has sad eyes, yellowing hair and looks old and frail as he shuffles to sit down, joking and charming, wearing slippers and jeans. Almost immediately he accuses me of wasting the world’s resources with my research notes. Yet this week sees the publication of a 213-page book, Depression and How to Survive It, a collaboration with psychiatrist Dr Anthony Clare.

Milligan first identified himself as a manic-depressive on Clare’s Radio 4 programme, In The Psychiatrist’s Chair. Nearly 10 years later, Clare has taken Milligan as a case study in this book to help fellow sufferers. Milligan, who has suffered from depression for more than 40 years, has written ‘maybe 47 books’. He’s just finished a satirical version of the Bible and is currently writing a comic adaptation of Wuthering Heights, with Heathcliff cast as a Pakistani.

I felt nervous interviewing him. He’s renowned for his passionate outbursts, possibly using his illness as an excuse for intolerance and insensitivity. He’s crazy about punctuality, taking lateness as a personal insult. He went into a tirade about overpopulation when he learned of Clare’s seven children, despite having five of his own – but they were born before he became concerned about the environment. ‘In my view,’ says Milligan of Clare, ‘he’s ill.’

Milligan was once given a conditional discharge after firing an air gun at a 15-year-old who climbed over his wall. Another time, he threatened to kill Peter Sellers with a potato peeler.

Speaking to him feels like walking on egg shells. ‘I don’t like people,’ he says. ‘They’re hateable, stupid and boring.’ His eyes blaze and his voice rises. There’s been a misunderstanding. He hadn’t intended to include his third and current wife, Shelagh, in the view that, ‘even the best people can turn out the worst. Even dearest ones can turn on you’.

The same reaction occurs when we talk about his fifth child, the product of an affair in the Seventies when Milligan was married to Pat Ridgeway. Following revelations last year by his ex-lover Margaret Maugham, Milligan met his illegitimate son, James, 17, for the first time.

He says, without emotion: ‘Meeting him was just like meeting a new person. We sat down and had tea. I asked him about his schooling, which I pay for. I asked him about religion. He’s not much into religion.’

Milligan’s illness has impinged on all aspects of his life. Clare notes a significant association between manic-depression and Milligan’s comic genius; but he’d willingly give up his fame and achievements to be free of the agonies of his illness.

‘If I had my time again, I’d like to come back as a tree.’ Then, typically quirkily, he considers dogs’ urine, and decides he would prefer to be a Greek philosopher.

Milligan, patron of The Manic-Depressive Fellowship, was in the middle of one of the worst depressions of his life while working with Clare. ‘I wanted to kill myself with pills. What stopped me was the thought of my family. I could see that haunting spectre of them standing over my coffin crying their eyes out.’

He has suffered at least a dozen breakdowns. Has he ever feared going mad? ‘I’m too intelligent for that,’ he says, fiercely.

What is his current state of mind? ‘Like an aeroplane. I don’t fly too high and I don’t go too near the ground.’ He’s on drugs to stabilise his condition. ‘Nobody knows the side-effects. I might go purple and one leg drop off.’

Six months ago he had ECT (electroconvulsive therapy). ‘When the nazis did this it was seen as cruelty. I used to wake up and not know who I was and didn’t care.’ His eyes light up when he says he’d like a portable ECT machine to put himself to sleep immediately when people’s conversations bore him.

He has had no ongoing relationship with a psychiatrist, possibly because, in Clare’s words, he’s a great ‘faller out’. ‘I haven’t fallen out with anyone,’ he refutes. ‘I’ve had people fall out with me.’

Milligan believes he inherited his hypersensitivity. ‘My mother was highly strung. I remember seeing my grandfather in a rage, striking a servant.’ Clare considers Milligan’s temperamental parents, absent soldier father and domineering mother, as causal and aggravating factors. He thinks his illness began after being shelled during the Second World War. ‘My life was like an egg in a shell, just waiting for someone to crack me open and fry me. A bomb dropped right near my head. I got battle fatigue. The war fried me.’

For six years during the Fifties he churned out 26 scripts a year for The Goon Show. ‘It was driving me mad. I had a nervous breakdown. It’s like a roaring pain. The loudest pain you’ll ever get.’ The photo-grapher’s camera winds on. ‘What’s that, for God’s sake?’ he snaps, literally driven mad by noise.

His latest depression was brought on by his mother’s death. Among her last words were: ‘‘We’re not like other people.’ I think it’s true,’ he says. ‘I just don’t get on with them. People don’t write the comedy or poems that I write.’

He is now in the winter of his life, an Irish Roman Catholic who ‘no longer’ believes in God. How does he regard death? ‘Hugel’s Gewurztraminer is as far as I go towards heaven!’

Is he frightened of dying? ‘I used to be terrified of it. Now it’s getting closer, I don’t really know. I know it’s going to happen one day – the one day I’m trying to avoid! In 100 years I’ll be forgotten, except for my overdraft at the Midland.’

He shows flashes of kindness and plays at being gentle. I felt sorry for him, although he’s also rude and unforgiving. Clare describes him as sensitive, easily hurt, vulnerable, a perfectionist who is profoundly nostalgic and actively charitable.

‘He’s difficult because he can be persistently demanding,’ says Clare. ‘He’s ‘for’ and ‘against’ things very fiercely, which I’m not. That caused tension. But it was compensated for by his anarchic sense of humour.’ Clare’s analysis of him in the book is, says Milligan, accurate as far as it goes. ‘But it’s difficult to get to the inside of someone. All of us keep a secret we don’t want anyone to know until we die. I have something I won’t tell anybody because I’m ashamed of it. It’s something moral, something physical.’ He may be teasing, of course.

The female bricklayer Tracie Simpson knew she was going to be in trouble from the start. The first day she arrived at the depot to begin work, 150 male workmates downed tools and stood watching her. Immediately someone commented on her bottom. ‘Is it a lesbian, ain’t it a lesbian?’ asked someone else from this territorial and testosterone-pumping group.

Simpson, now 28, joined Greenwich council as a trainee bricklayer in 1986. She was intimidated with violence and all talk was abusive. ‘I felt so threatened. I used to think the men might rape me.’ Male colleagues asked her whether she shaved her pubic hair and whether her spirit level fitted her vagina. Another time, she was in a hut with eight men and one lay on the bench thrusting, fornicating style, and talking explicitly.

‘I used to just sit there and read my book.’ She sounds upset when she talks, sometimes holding back tears.

Simpson endured this cruel sexual and racial harassment for an astonishing four and a half years. She became ill from the stress and in May 1991 was unfairly dismissed while she was off sick, allegedly having been made redundant.

Last week she won £15,000 compensation from Greenwich council, one of the highest recorded payments for sexual and racial harassment at work. This ‘breakthrough’ out-of-court settlement followed an industrial tribunal in which she was represented by the builders’ union Ucatt.

Simpson wears a thick sweater, biker’s boots, Afro dreadlocks, cat scratches all over her hand and she has a muscular body. ‘I could haul mortar or bricks up 60 foot and build a chimney stack on my own. I can pick up what men can pick up,’ she says defiantly in a cockney accent. ‘I was good at my job and I worked harder than the men.’ She doesn’t think she has female physical limitations.

She was paid equally and was only once unable to do something the men could when her back gave out as she worked on a brick wall. She received a credit for her practical work in her City and Guilds exam and believes she should have the right to do a traditionally male job at which she is competent.

Simpson felt humiliated by the catalogue of abuse she endured at work and went often to the women’s unit at Greenwich council for support. She complained frequently to her managers but, she says, they did nothing to help and some contributed to the abuse. Without success, she repeatedly begged the supposedly right-on council with its two female directors to sort out the problem.

She felt isolated and spent most of her weekends crying until she became ill with anxiety in October 1990. Eventually she was off work on full sick pay for seven months.

‘I couldn’t leave the house. I couldn’t socialise. I’d had enough. My insides felt drained.’ Her doctor recommended she quit her job and prescribed tranquillisers, which she took initially. Then she started having counselling. ‘I feel as if someone’s stolen something from me they have no right to.’

During her illness, her rare forays outside proved daunting. ‘A council guy kept coming to my house, harassing me and slagging me off,’ she says, smoking. ‘If I went out and bumped into someone from the council, I started to shake all over. I went to Safeway’s one day and this council bloke came up behind me and pinched my arse.’

Simpson (whose mother works as a DSS supervisor) is illegitimate and of mixed race. She thinks she’s part Afro-Caribbean and has a black grandmother. She was the only one in her family who wasn’t white. ‘I don’t know my real father,’ she says. ‘I thought the father I had was my father until my mother divorced him when I was 13. Then a neighbour told me he wasn’t my proper dad.’

Her surrogate father had a nasty temper. ‘He thumped and beat me with his fists. He used to hit me for being a minute late from school, to stop me chewing my nails or because I walked with my feet turned out a bit.’ She left home at the age of 16.

Simpson was educated at Mottingham girls’ school – where she was ‘a little rebel’ – and left with no qualifications. She wanted to be a nursery nurse, but was unqualified, so went to work in a meat factory for three years. ‘I got sacked because I didn’t bother to go in.’ She was unemployed for a year, then got into community programme gardening, started doing some bricklaying and proved a natural. Next she applied to become a trainee bricklayer with Greenwich council.

‘I got into it by accident, but it was really important for me to do this job. For the first time in my life, I’d found something I was good at and wanted to do.’

What of her relationships? For seven years, until she was 24, Simpson went out with a white, male biker. But does she like men? (‘The builders,’ she had said earlier, ‘were gutless.’) ‘Yeah, I’m fine around them … I actually believe everyone is bisexual.’ She now lives alone in a flat in Deptford with two cats and a dog.

She received £1,000 redundancy pay and is going to live off her £15,000 compensation money. ‘I just see it as an acknowledgement that the council was abusive. Because of it I’m not eligible for unemployment benefit.’ She is unemployed but does voluntary youth work, looking after an 18-year-old. ‘I’m there to support him. If he needs, for example, to go to a job interview and feels nervous, I accompany him.’ She doesn’t plan to look for a more traditionally female job. ‘I think people should be able to mix.’

She hopes her experience will encourage other women to fight harassment. The supposedly politically correct Greenwich council took on six other women in Simpson’s intake as trainee carpenters, bricklayers and plumbers. But they all left within two years because of harassment.

Of its 523 building section employees, only 45 are women. ‘The council said it was going to employ more women, but never did,’ says Simpson. ‘That’s what really finished me off.’

The council says it has introduced a new complaints procedure for harassment, victimisation and discrimination. No one has been disciplined over Simpson’s complaints.

Simpson talks assertively. She doesn’t see herself as a victim and calls herself a feminist. ‘I was bought up on the streets, so I’m quite hard-wearing.’

She admits she was a threat to the men she worked with. Was she in any way responsible for what happened? Surely there was something in her attitude that upset the male brickies?

‘No way, no, no, no!’ she says. She feels ‘entirely blameless’. That’s why she carried on working. ‘I liked my job and wasn’t going to have any idiot take it away from me.’ She has no plans to return to bricklaying. ‘Not unless they gave me a job to sack all those beasts.’

He has highlighted ageing-rock-star hair, discoloured teeth, a jazzy tie, green suit and a dangling silver earring engraved with the initials of a pop song. He looks wrecked and talks in a heavy way, man. This is Dr Mike Fitzgerald, 41, Britain’s youngest vice-chancellor and top dude at Thames Valley University, London.

TVU (as he calls it) is one of the new universities established last June. Formerly the Polytechnic of West London, it is in Ealing and was created from the merger of four establishments, including the London College of Music. It is unique. ‘We’re a very unusual kind of university, and trying to be very different,’ affirms Fitzgerald, in his Liverpudlian accent with Havana smoking chestiness.

Appearances are deceptive. Fitzgerald came to TVU a year ago, having been dean of social sciences at the Open University for 12 years then deputy director of Coventry Polytechnic for four, and is responsible for the university academically and for its annual £45 million budget. He has 20,000 students, employs 1,600 people, and is paid £67,000.

But first let’s talk about appearances. ‘I’ve looked like this for years. I’m actually terribly old-fashioned,’ he laughs. ‘I wear my hair like this because I’ve got a big nose. I highlight it and spend a fortune on it.’ He recently gained weight, so gave his Armani suit to the chauffeur who drives his Volvo. ‘I used to be a mod. Now I wear Boss clothes.’

He looks unhealthy. Does he do drugs? ‘Never’ – emphatically – ‘It would be wrong, with a lot of young people here. But I’m not a moral entrepreneur about it.’ He looks earnest and swigs part of his daily intake of two litres of decaffeinated coffee. ‘I’ve never even had a sip of alcohol in my life. I just look naturally wasted and always look wrecked. I don’t sleep enough.’ Sex then. Does he sleep with students? ‘Never! There are codes of behaviour people in my position should uphold,’ he says, with conviction. ‘It would be inappropriate because in any relationship there’s a power element.’

TVU is an unconventional university. Thirty five per cent of his students don’t take degrees, but do things like City and Guilds in crafts or hospitality and catering. ‘We’re not just a higher education institution, we do further education as well. We’re much more like an American state university.’

Instead of three terms a year, TVU has American-style semesters with modular courses; this enables students to drop out and rejoin and study full or part time, interchangeably. ‘We also have the highest proportion of women of any university, about 54 per cent.’

Fitzgerald also believes strongly that, unlike many universities, TVU can’t exist in isolation. So it has a series of partnerships. ‘A computing firm runs the computing section, providing the infrastructure and running the teaching.’ He’s also working towards a fully electronic campus (his ‘model university’) allowing distance learning on computer terminals. FITZGERALD was the third of eight children, including two adopted black sisters. He grew up in Ainsdale, ‘by the beach in a ramshackle barn of a place’. His parents were uneducated. ‘They both left school at 14. Mum got a scholarship to school, but they couldn’t afford the uniform so she didn’t go.’

His father managed the Liverpool labour exchange. ‘He wasn’t particularly highly paid, but we had a regular income. A lot of locals were unemployed…At Christmas my parents didn’t spend much on us, and gave charitable contributions instead. You’d go back to school and your mates all had lots of new things and you didn’t. That was difficult.’ He started newspaper rounds aged 11.

Fitzgerald went to a direct grant grammar school run by the Christian brothers in Crosby, then Cambridge where he read social sciences, gaining a 2:1. ‘I thought people who had cars were rich, because we didn’t have one. But when I arrived at Cambridge, all these students had cars. I felt intimidated and uncomfortable. I’d never before met people who felt they owned the world and saw it as perfectly natural that they would get good jobs and lead people. Where I’d come from people had always struggled to get jobs and education.’

Educationally, it was an inspiration. It encouraged him to take responsibility for his learning and offered unbelieveable resources and facilities. ‘I learned that what matters about education is not knowledge per se, but that you’re curious about the world and not frightened to ask questions.’

He married in his second year and had a son, now 19, just before finals. ‘My professional success is inversely related to my personal success.’ He never married the mother of his subsequent child, now nine, but lived with her for 12 years.

But back to TVU. Applicants for universities have increased three-fold over the last five years. ‘We have massive overcrowding here, 8,000 people in accommodation for 2,500.’ (Fitzgerald discusses this difficulty and staffing and student problems with his chauffeur. ‘He’s more my minder than my driver.’) MANY come to TVU without formal qualifications. ‘I don’t think A-level grades are an appropriate way of judging people’s future performance. What matters is the value that you add to people while they’re here. ‘People don’t have to get degrees. They might come to us because they lack confidence in themselves, having been through a system that has rejected them. They may become more secure and may get jobs. Others may not finish the programme, which doesn’t fuss me much. What’s important is that we help create people who are confident and curious about the world. I believe in helping people realise their potential.

‘My parents’ generation struggled to let people like me go to university. They had a fire in their belly about it. That’s what I’ve inherited,’ says this Labour Party member. ‘I have a fire in my belly about picking up the torch and running with it. About giving people the opportunity for education as a basic democratic right.’

TVU has just built the most modern recording studio in Western Europe. Fitzgerald’s face suddenly resumes the look of an old rock ‘n’ roller. ‘I go to a lot of rock concerts. I think the Stones are the most wonderful band in the world. One of the great thrills of being here is that there was an art college here before and Ronnie Wood was a student.’ He beams. ‘I often think about Ronnie Wood walking these corridors. That really pleases me.’

If you haven’t heard of him, you should have. The Kinnocks, John Updike, Ben Elton, Eric Clapton, Luke Rittner, Molly Parkin and Anne Robinson are fans. And he performed this week for Prince Charles. ‘Good evening culture vultures,’ he said to HRH and company, in his best Dylan Thomas voice. Meet Bob Kingdom, whose solo tour de force, Dylan Thomas Return Journey, is directed by Anthony Hopkins. ‘Tony said to me ‘Don’t try to please the audience, they don’t want that’.’ For years Hopkins wanted to play Thomas and identified closely with the role. ‘He’s healthily obsessed as well.’ Kingdom, 48, is a reformed alcoholic. ‘I got drunk and fell under a train in Cardiff once,’ he says. That was 25 years ago. ‘I also got sick of waking up and not knowing where I was.’ Kingdom becomes Thomas when he plays the notorious romantic hellraiser during one of his recitals (at the Lyric Studio until 2 January). Thomas died of chronic alcohol poisoning when he was just 39.

‘If I were still drinking, I’d be continuing the romantic myth about Thomas the creative genius dying young and tragically because he knew he was burnt out – rather than saying he died because he drank. Anyone who dies that young has to be a bit of a mug.’

Sensitive, thoughtful and very funny, Kingdom wears a fedora hat over a rumpled cherubic face that bears an uncanny resemblance to Thomas’s. He’s written poetry, done voice-overs, radio comedy and been an advertising copywriter. (‘Mild but not meek,’ for cigarettes in the Seventies.) He’s also a brilliant mimic: one minute you’re with Neil Kinnock, then Alec Guinness, Quentin Crisp or Truman Capote.

He’s just written a new show, on Truman Capote, another compulsive, obsessive and alcoholic. ‘Thomas and Capote were both people for whom life was not enough.’

The prisoner of Zenda, currently in rehearsal at Greenwich, marks a double first for sloe-eyed siren Leonie Mellinger. ‘I’ve never done a stage play at Christmas and I’ve never played a princess before,’ she says during a pause in the technical run. ‘I desperately wanted a fight but the princess doesn’t get to fight. I am very jealous of the boys.’

Anthony Hope’s swashbuckling novel reaches the stage in a new adaptation by Green-wich director Matthew Francis on Monday night (previewing now). The 32-year-old actress was inspired to engage in the mix of romance and high drama by watching Walt Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.

‘It had a great heroine. It made me want to do something similar. So it’s nice to play a feisty princess. I don’t want to shy away from the proper romantic princess. But that doesn’t mean she’s got to be wet. I don’t think there is anything wet about love.’

Previously known for her performances that combined a dangerous sexuality with a feminine toughness, popping up on television in The New Statesman and Small World, besides gracing the stages of Chichester Festival Theatre and the RSC, Mellinger will also be seen on television on Boxing Day in a feature-length episode of Lovejoy.

Recent publicity, however, has inclined towards her personal life. With the separation from her husband, Robin Askwith, who continues to live, work and sunbathe in Australia, Mellinger has fallen in love with Anthony Burton, one of the country’s leading criminal lawyers.

Beyond citing the usual reasons for the break-up – like the 9,000-mile distance between them and conflicting career interests – Mellinger discreetly refuses to be drawn deeper on her personal life. ‘Let’s just say it is jolly nice to be with someone who isn’t an actor.’

It’s being billed as ‘the dance event of the century’, the first big arena ballet. The largest stage in Europe for leaping to music will be erected. For the Royal Albert Hall is to hold one of the most ambitious dance events when 160 Bolshoi artists pirouette into Kensington in January for a five-week £3 million season.

Behind it is the chief executive of the Royal Albert Hall, Patrick Deuchar. ‘It’s never been done before,’ he says. ‘But I’m convinced dance can be presented in arena format. As certain as Harvey Goldsmith was that it could be done for opera.’

He’s sitting in his office in the hall, a building that boasts five ghosts and a bedroom on the premises for him. ‘It’s the first ever ballet season hosted in the hall, choreographed specially,’ he resumes, peering through his arena-sized spectacles and pouring tea. He’s been wanting to do dance ever since he started at the hall three years ago. ‘It’ll be very accessible to people who don’t normally consider ballet.’

He’s been married twice, has two children by his first wife and a baby by his current girlfriend. She’s actress Liz Robertson, widow (eighth wife) of composer Alan Jay Lerner.

Deuchar came to the Albert Hall via school at Christ’s Hospital in Sussex, agricultural college, agricultural journalism, and promoting professional tennis tournaments around the world.

‘The Royal Opera House is the only place where ballet can be performed properly. Outrageously, it has to share its space with another art form.’ He doesn’t want to turn the RAH into London’s dance house. But he does want to see annual dance seasons there. Luckily he has another 895 years’ lease on the building.

‘My youngest child called me the other day, crying hysterically that his older brothers were saying he was a mistake. I said he wasn’t a mistake, none of my precious babies were … their father was.’ Black American comedienne Thea Vidale shrieks defiantly and slurps her drink.

She wowed audiences at the Edinburgh Festival and answered back Clive Anderson this week, rat a tat a tat, shooting from the hip. Risque, all consuming, car-sized and sitting with her legs apart, she won the audience over brilliantly with her armour-plated bra, ferocious, honest humour and force 10 personality. Her largely unrepeatable act encompasses everything from oral sex to the royal family and she has a rage about racism. What makes her funny? ‘My honesty. The sexually explicit jokes just show how imaginative I am,’ she says, in a lazy drawl. She finds British audiences more ‘re-zeeeerved’ than American ones and she’s harder on us: ‘Americans have a strong, strong aversion to the truth.’

We’re sitting in a West End hotel (‘London is cute but too goddamned cold and the Queen is ugly’), other guests are navy besuited while she’s resplendent in see-through crochet top with rose-covered bra screaming from 44D breasts, scarlet acrylic nails so long they curl, spiky Rod Stewart wig and a stud in her nose. She gestures magnificently and grunts. SHE HAS a loving face and sunny smile; a face that looks surprisingly innocent and doesn’t show the suffering she’s endured. ‘I’d say I’m a big sexy woman.’ (Paroxysms of giggles.) Laugh she may, but, 36 now, she was a battered wife for 10 years. She waitressed in a redneck Texas restaurant, taught at nursery school, started comedy, got some money and in 1984 left her husband and their four children. They’re only 13 (the twins), 11 and 9 now.

‘My husband was an evil man with a black heart. Once he hit me with a chair when I was breast-feeding. Another time I was pregnant and he went to throw the TV at me. He had a machete to cut me up with. I said, ‘If you cause me to lose this child, they’re gonna see you in Trinidad in a box, nigger, ‘cos I’m gonna kill you’,’ she hisses. Oddly, she says all this as if she’s on stage performing.

She stayed married ‘because of her children’ – jokingly she calls them Hell Fire, Damnation, Pestilence and Scurvy – but when she got the courage and money to go, saw ‘nothing wrong’ with leaving them with their father. ‘He was a great father. He did love them,’ she says, surprisingly. Doesn’t she fear he’ll turn on the children? ‘I’ll kill him if he does. I carry a handgun.’

How has she resolved her feelings about abandoning her offspring? ‘What feelings should I have?’ she says, heatedly. ‘I didn’t give them away, I gave them to their father. I did what I had to do. I had no one to take care of them and I refused welfare. I can’t have four children on the road with me, they have to get an education. I’m doing this for the bigger picture, so I’ll be able to afford things and good colleges for them.’ She has seen them six times this year.

Vidale handles many of her emotions by eating. ‘I know I’m fat. I’ve seen myself naked several times,’ she laughs. She is actually sensitive about it. ‘But I don’t let it become my whole focus. If you love somebody, you love them for themselves, not the size of their body. A size three body doesn’t make you a better person.’

She doesn’t have a man at the moment (‘I don’t want to share my money with anybody!’) and she hasn’t been helped emotionally by therapy. ‘I went to shrinks on and off from when I was seven years old through to high school. I was a very hyper kid and was expelled in second grade (aged seven).’

She shuns shrinks now. ‘I’m not spinning $80 an hour for some motherf***** to tell me some s*** I already know. I’d say I have a lot of aggression which I find hard to let go. But when I do, I can be a bit of a bitch.

‘I also love and miss my children,’ she says quietly. ‘I see myself in them and when that happens, you can see the good and the bad. When youzze not always bin seen as a good child, you revel in the fact that your children love you unconditionally.’

Vidale is showbizzy, angry and warm. She seems to be in emotional pain and I think there’s sometimes a fantasy element in what she says. She sees herself as ‘righteous, loving and a wild crazy woman and homebody’. And funny. We’re talking about London waiters, and suddenly she says: ‘Caroline, do you scream when you f*** or something? You seem so reserved. You do f*** don’t you?’

Later she grabs my notes and reads them. ‘Boy, that’s really clever. Oooh I wouldn’t have bothered about that myself.’ She’d like a late-night talk show (‘If I was interviewing Madonna, I’d make her feel really small. I can make people really squirm’) to record songs, do a lot of movies and appear in The Bill. ‘I’d like to play a villainous character, like Fu Manchu with hair.’

Thea Vidale appears at the Hackney Empire from today until 13 December and 17-20 December.

There have been two murder attempts on Irish writer and director Jim Sheridan. The first was by robbers in Chicago in 1972 – his friends saved him – and the second in Baltimore in 1981: ‘I met two black guys after a party. I felt they were going to attack me so I tried to get away. Then somebody – I don’t know who – told me they wanted to kill me,’ says Sheridan, famed for the Oscar-winning movie My Left Foot.

His assailants chased him into a taxi, where one of them brandished a knife. Sheridan escaped. But what of his saviour? ‘He was a white man who said, ‘If you want to stay alive, run now’. He was crying.’ Then he says intently: ‘Must have been a guardian angel, mustn’t it?’

There’s also ‘a protective spirit’ in Sheridan’s latest film, Into The West. Starring Gabriel Byrne and Ellen Barkin, it’s a delightful and touching movie about a horse and two Irish tinker boys whose mother died in childbirth.

‘It’s about a kid who dwells in the land of eternal youth and will always do so unless he comes to terms with his mother’s death,’

says Sheridan, in his Dublin accent. ‘The horse is the emissary to make him face death.’ Sheridan, 43, stocky in denim shirt and jeans, has a dishevelled professorial air and that Woganish need to please. He ‘tinks’ quickly and ‘rabbits on’ genially, sometimes impenetrably. ‘I can talk for hours. ‘Fil-ems’ are about trying to stop yourself talking.’ He wrote Into The West in 1985, abandoned it to work on The Field and let it gather dust until 1989 when he got his ‘break’ with My Left Foot. ‘Before then, we couldn’t get it made.’ He shows no rancour for this or the fact that he’d already signed the contract, so received only $140,000 (£92,000) – studios now offer him $1 million a script. The genesis of the story is personal: ‘I’ve always lived on the fringe of society. In 1981 I went with my wife Fran and two kids to the States with $39 to my name. I was an illegal alien, earning $200 a week – answering phones in a theatre, washing floors and cleaning toilets. I didn’t get my teeth done for seven years. So when I look at the tinkers, I don’t think ‘there’s a poor tinker and I’m different’, I think ‘this is me’.

‘When Tess, our baby, was born premature and had to go into the incubator, I didn’t have the money to pay the $1,500 a day. When Fran went into hospital, I began thinking about single parenthood. My grandmother died during my mother’s birth, so I’d always been fascinated by this idea.’ His background is in fringe theatre and he still runs the Irish Arts Centre in New York, although he now lives in Dublin again. He wrote and directed tough, socially realistic plays in his pre-fame days, but was contractually unable to direct Into The West.

Has sudden success affected him? ‘People get fame heaped on them and they no longer feel vulnerable, so they’re out strutting the world. But after pride comes the fall … You also think ‘I was always good’ and blame other people that it’s taken such a long time to get there, and you’re dismissive.’ If he suffers thus, it’s not apparent.

My Left Foot yielded $35 million worldwide so the pressure to come up with something extraordinary is also a problem. ‘You fear doing anything else because you don’t know why you were successful,’ he laughs. ‘You try to reproduce the formula, but fear failing.’

He doesn’t find film easy. ‘A play is like a long bungalow. But a screenplay is like a hut built on long bamboo shoots that go through mud to an insubstantial foundation. The least movement in any scene is likely to wreck the whole house.’

When he’s writing a screenplay, he first gathers his material. ‘Then I keep telling the story to friends and I bore people in pubs and on trains. I watch their faces and fashion it accordingly. Then I write as fast as I can. Into The West took two weeks and I wrote most of My Left Foot on a flight from New York to Dublin.’

He looks pensive. ‘After the Oscar nominations were announced, I performed a two-hour play to a friend, acting all the parts myself. At the end, I realised all I wanted was to be an actor.’

HARLEY Street psychoanalyst and phobia expert Michael Whitenburgh, 41, a neat and smallish man with watery eyes and a rubicund face, arrived an hour late. He’d called after we should have started and said in a measured voice: ‘I’m going to be half an hour late, my sister has just died.’ He didn’t want to reschedule.

‘Some people choose the most inconvenient time to die,’ he said, surprisingly flippantly in his Liverpudlian accent, as he arrived. He sat cosily beside me rather than at the desk in his monumental consulting room. It was only 11.30am and he smelled of alcohol. (He said he’d been drinking the night before, but I had my doubts. Later on the phone he said: ‘Well, I had a brandy that morning.’) And as the interview progressed, something in his manner and what he said rang alarm bells. I actually had this creepy feeling that maybe his sister hadn’t died at all. Whitenburgh is promoting this as national Phobia Awareness Week. Today he will be at London’s St Giles Hotel as part of his countrywide campaign to educate the public on phobias and let them know that permanent help is available.

You might chuckle about retrophobia (the fear of returning to work after a holiday), erythrophobia (fear of blushing) or alektorophobia (fear of chickens), but phobias are serious things. He believes that 90 per cent of the population has a phobia, and he claims to have ‘cured 12,000 people’ in 15 years. But there’s nothing on earth that scares him. ‘I can honestly say I am frightened of nothing.’

Whitenburgh, who also runs the private School of Stress Counselling clinic in Liverpool, has recently had spectacular media coverage which has, so far, generated 1,700 phone calls. He is booked solid for the next month with eight new patients a day (at £65 for a 45-minute session). His team of five in Liverpool has monitored all calls and identified 200 different phobias. ‘Astonishingly, the most common fear is monophobia (fear of loneliness), closely followed by claustrophobia. The most ridiculous phobias are a fear of buttons (button phobics have to replace their buttons with Velcro fastenings), bagpipes, toilet ball cocks and dwarfs,’ he recites, alarmingly.

Phobias are a result of an outward expression of inner emotional turmoil, he says. The person can’t justify these feelings, so he externalises the internal stress as a phobia. ‘If someone has a powerful emotional experience and sees a spider at the same time, then the spider will be blamed for the experience.’

The effects of phobias are dire. ‘They bring on palpitations, dizziness, cold sweats, panic and depression. They isolate the person, making him lonely. They affect the auto-immune system and lead to heart disease as the emotions pull on the heart strings. It can be devastating. The lady who is frightened of ball cocks can only go to her own toilet. Her life is totally restricted.’

Whitenburgh says he cures phobias in anything from one to six sessions. He gets his subjects to relax by visualising country scenes. Then he makes the patient regress to the time of the original cause of the phobia, bringing out the emotion. This is known as abreacting.

‘Eventually all hell breaks out,’ is the way he puts it. ‘There are emotions and tears. I have never failed, and there is a technical word for this, to bring the person to catharsis in 12 sessions maximum.’ He claims a 100 per cent success rate. ‘I ask anybody who is not satisfied to come back for free treatment. Nobody ever has.’ Symptoms, he says, will never reappear in another form.

He glosses over his ‘hotchpotch’ training, which took place from Liverpool Polytechnic to Switzerland (‘under Professor Doctor Max Lucher’ of Basle University. ‘I’d prefer you didn’t mention that,’ he says, without elaborating) and the Vienna School of Psychoanalysis.

I called him later to query his qualifications. He admitted that he’d only spent a month in Basle and six weeks in Vienna. His real training was for 18 months with the Psychoanalytical Institute of Bournemouth. Subsequent enquiries found no trace of such an establishment. When I called again, he remembered that he’d actually trained with the International Association of Hypnoanalysts – a correspondence course supplemented with four one-day seminars.

Whitenburgh did undergo psychoanalysis himself. The son of a building manager, he has (‘had, I mean,’) six sisters, a ‘very happy’ childhood, is married to a trainee counsellor and has two children, one of whom has cerebral palsy.

‘When you go through analysis, you become very content within yourself.’ He is controlled as he speaks, giving nothing away with his body. ‘I was in analysis for 10 to 12 weeks, once a week’ – a short time for someone training professionally. The British Psycho-analytical Institute says that its analysts undergo analysis five times a week for at least four years. ‘It doesn’t have to be complicated,’ said Whitenburgh, dismissively. He considers lengthy analysis for trainee therapists outmoded. In fact, in his work as a general psychoanalyst, he tends ‘to keep people for treatment for a maximum of three months’.

Amazingly, anybody can call himself a psychoanalyst: there is nothing illegal in doing so. But Dr Richard Lucas, consultant psychiatrist and external relations officer for the British Psychoanalytical Institute, says: ‘You can’t be a bona fide psychoanalyst (trained in Britain) unless you have received the British Psychoanalytical Society’s intensive training.’

FRINGE therapists might disagree with this and Whitenburgh certainly does. ‘I have permission from the Minister of Health to call my centre a clinic, and I’ve done plenty of training.’

Is he for real? ‘I’ve had 15 years of experience and work to a code of ethics, which includes no sex with the patient and treating him in the shortest possible time. We have professional indemnity, but no one has ever claimed.’

But Dr Lucas says: ‘I wouldn’t recommend this treatment. It might be dangerous. Patients can become very disturbed with unpredictable results, like harming themselves or even contemplating suicide, if they are not treated in a responsible way by someone who has been trained rigorously.’ Whitenburgh demurs. ‘There’s nothing whatsoever dangerous in what I do. My patients are not vulnerable. They’ve tried everything, the pills, the potions. They want my help. I am the catalyst. Once a person abreacts, his life will improve.’

So what then of Whitenburgh’s dead sister? When I called him five days after the interview, he was cagey. He even had trouble remembering her name, only reluctantly disclosing where she’d died and saying he didn’t want her mentioned in the article. Subsequent calls to the registrars and coroners of Liverpool uncovered no record of her death.

Whitenburgh rang later the same day. ‘I’m shaking with aggression. I wasn’t thinking straight on the phone earlier,’ he said. ‘But my sister is not dead. It’s been a practical joke and I only found out this morning. I was on tour when a man who said he was a friend of a friend called to tell me that she’d died. I’ve been away ever since and didn’t want to phone her home. Somebody is really sick. They’ve also sent round the black vans to my home twice to collect my body. We’ve told the police, but they say, ‘What can we do?”

I don’t know what to believe. But one thing I know for sure is that Whitenburgh does have a phobia. ‘Maybe I’m phobic about journalists,’ he said, when we last spoke. ‘I don’t like them.’