Norman Mailer is sitting with his legs stretched out in front of him, sneakers on his feet. He’s a horrid little man, pugnacious and with small eyes that are sharp and mistrustful.

He has written mountainous quantities of goat food – but his greatness is upheld by the Naked and the Dead, which he published when he was 26, Armies of the Night, the Executioner’s Song and parts of Harlot’s Ghost. The latter, his latest book, is about the CIA and took him seven years to write; at 1,122 pages of anorexic type, it would take as long to digest slowly – which is what he expects.

He won fame as a boozer, brawler, foulmouth and wife thief, galvanised on drugs; is a serial spouse, married six times, nine children; stabbed his second wife, near fatally, at a party in 1960 and was briefly sent to an asylum; and was a New York mayoral candidate, beginning his address to the electorate with: ‘Fuck you!’

He has also directed and acted in films; secured the release of jailed murderer Jack Henry Abbott on literary grounds, though Abbott then murdered again; and, in this month’s Vanity Fair, he encourages Warren Beatty to run for presidency. ‘I’m serious about that,’ says Mailer.

Interviewers have found Mailer, now 68, genial. Jean Campbell, one of his former wives and Lord Beaverbrook’s granddaughter, interviewed her former husband in 1970. Waiting for the genius, she said, was like waiting to get into a helicopter on a stormy night.

How does he feel about stabbing his wife? ‘Er, regretful. My children have had to pay for it much more than I have. But far more than that, I regret it because it gets asked of me in every goddammed interview. Repetition kills the soul.’

Reports at the time said he was undergoing an ‘acute paranoid breakdown’. ‘I wasn’t (angrily). I was feeling pretty unhappy, you might say, and things were rather grim.’ What was it that motivated him? ‘Oh you’ve gotta great chance of getting that question answered. If I were to write a novel, I might be able to write a suggestion of an answer.’

As long as you use a knife/There’s some love left, he wrote in a poem. He sighs. ‘I don’t just write in my own voice. To say that that’s Mailer’s Philosophy is an example of particularly sloppy thinking.’

He has been with his wife Norris for 16 years. One wonders why he felt the need to marry so many of his women. ‘Oh, sloppiness, I guess.’ And the real answer? ‘I like marriage, obviously, or I wouldn’t be getting married.’ Has he ever tried being alone? ‘Mmm, now and again’ (pensive). And what’s that like? ‘Well, I guess that the answer is that sooner or later I get married, don’t I?’

Mailer to Warren Beatty in Vanity Fair: ‘There was a period in my life when I literally couldn’t be faithful. I mean, even if I was in love I couldn’t be faithful.’ And he once wrote, in ever-deepening debt, that ‘alimony is the curse of the writing classes’. He says now: ‘I do believe in the possibility of fidelity.’

And has he had any homosexual experience? ‘No.’ There was no point in asking. But amid the rampant heterosexuality of Harlot’s Ghost, there is a revulsion and fascination with homosexuality.

Mailer rarely discloses anything about his childhood. It is known that Mailer’s father was a gambler, a deeply unpredictable and private man of whom he was afraid. His mother was the dominating presence, strongly opinionated and easily hurt. She came close to leaving the marriage a few times. Mailer has inherited more than a few of their characteristics, though instead of gambling he took up drink and drugs.

He’s eloquent, fast, massively clever, sometimes dead funny and one can imagine him to be sensitive beneath the horny crust, perhaps easily offended even. But he comes over like a dry drunk, a man full of rage and fear who is white-knuckling his alcohol habit, trying not to need it, yearning to change his mood. And with a cruel streak – fighting, confrontational, combative – a boxer in spirit if no longer in deed. Being with him is like getting caught in the crossfire from a machine gun.

He has a big ego, but one senses an inner inferiority, that he may suffer the fear, amid all the media attention, that he’s actually second-rate. Certainly he doesn’t like criticism. One recalls New York reviewer John Simon’s words: ‘Norman Mailer dislikes me intensely and he feels that way about 98 per cent of the population.’

Is he this pugilistic in all his relationships? ‘No, but I enjoy it as you do. We’re made for each other, kid. Tell me your name again.’ Is the best form of defence attack? ‘You have to choose your strokes and select your blows. There’s no such thing as the best form of defence. Even in violence one must be flexible.’ He likes the last sentiment and can see it going down as one of the legendary sayings of the great man. He appears ill at ease with himself; his is a combativeness, spiky and defensive, that is born of fear. ‘Aren’t we finished?’ No. Is that the way he feels about himself? ‘No, I think I feel relatively comfortable with myself.’

He considers there to be 40 writers in the world who reckon themselves literary giants. ‘Possibly only three of us (he laughs) who will be thought of in that way in years to come.’ He won’t be drawn on the other names. ‘I don’t identify with anyone. Why should I?’ (aggressive, rude tone). ‘Sure I admire hordes of people, starting with Napoleon. At one time I used to identify both with Fidel Castro and General de Gaulle. I thought they were the two most exciting world leaders alive at the time.’ He expects the interviewer to be outrageously discomfited.

Does he enjoy being a great patriarchal figure? ‘Listen! Your notion of me is so loaded with cliches. Do you think I really walk around all day thinking I’m this great patriarchal figure?’ No, but he is seen in such a way. ‘People in the western world don’t know what’s going on anywhere. They believe what they read in newspapers, they perceive the world as bearing some resemblance to what they watch on television.’

Gore Vidal said Mailer’s views on women ‘are about as enlightened as a Saturday night discussion in the smoking room of a corporals’ mess at an RAF station somewhere on the wrong side of Croydon’. Women may be the nobler half of creation, says Mailer, but the evidence of their inner temperament that has been presented by Women’s Lib over the past 20 years leads him to conclude that they are the equals of men but no longer their superiors. ‘I used to think that women were nicer than men, now I think they are about the same. What leaves you discontented with most men is that they can’t think . . . now women are showing that they have the same mental attitude as men.’ It has been said that all American men hate women deeply, and take it out on them in different ways. ‘Absolute nonsense! I think American men are becoming dismayed because they are beginning to recognise how much anger women are carrying towards them.’

He sees a difference between English and American women. ‘Taking it at its simplest, English women come out of a much deeper cultural tradition. So their graces are much subtler . . . and they’re more skilled in the war between men and women. Everything is very positive in America, people make a living out of being positive, so you can read hundreds of articles any week on how to get on with your husband or wife – whereas in Europe there is a centuries-old tradition of how women can manipulate men.’

Ask him about his ambition, and he gives the same answer as Fidel Castro. ‘He said he’d just like to hang out with the boys on the block. I would like to find a way I could vegetate legitimately and honourably for a few months.

Cameras flash and the fashion world applauds while eating cheese straws and drinking Lanson champagne. These are the British Fashion Awards – the Oscars of the designer rag trade.

It is all taking place in the tented world of the Duke of York’s barracks. The audience wears black and glitter and off-the-shoulder creations and looks as if it could swap places with the catwalk folk. And then there are the proper models, the 34-22-34 ones who say they won’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 and earn up to £1,000 a minute, eclipsing their designer bosses. Naomi Campbell, Helena Christiansen, Tatjana Patiz and Linda Evangelista to be precise. This evening they appear swan-like, sometimes carrying poodles. Without them, any show would lack lustre.

At 10.30 the master of ceremonies announces: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please stand.’ Is this for Naomi, the woman they say expects to be treated like royalty? No . . . it’s Princess Michael of Kent, wearing a glamorous nun’s habit of non-English design.

Vivienne Westwood has won the British Designer of the Year title for the second year running. ‘I want to say thank you to these models, who are worth every penny,’ she says.

The women with pouting lips are seated. Their fees have quadrupled in as many years and they expect to be flown first-class while sales of clothes are falling in these recession-hit times.

Is it true models don’t speak, have no way of projecting their personalities and push lettuce leaves around their plates? And will Helena Christiansen demand a smorgasbord?

A cassoulet of wild mushrooms and asparagus appears. Linda Evangelista, with pimento hair, lights up a Marlboro. And the divine Vivienne Westwood, in a dress printed with Fragonard cherubs, tells me the girls are super. ‘Naomi is charming,’ she says. ‘They’re all professionals, always on time, not prima donnas. They’ve got a marvellous theatrical sense. It costs £5,000 to advertise in a glossy magazine, but with a show you get all this free publicity. When I saw Linda wearing my pink, my heart was beating. To see your clothes on this dream, this dishiest of dishes . . . but if I saw any of them in jeans, I wouldn’t think them that great.’

Princess Michael holds court, later on little clusters of beau monde gather around her. Many of the models weren’t keen on meeting the Royal. ‘Just not interested. They wanted to go back to their hotel,’ said one of their entourage.

Boy George whirls around. His comment? ‘Beauty fades, but talent lives on.’

I meet a supermodel in a Rifat dress. Naomi Campbell, serene and incandescently beautiful, is enjoying a successful evening and a cigarette. Nearby Linda Evangelista looks bored. She smokes cigarettes. When you look like that, you don’t have to do anything. She thaws. ‘I came as a favour for British Vogue and to support British designers. My services were free,’ she tells me. ‘”And what is she wearing? She gives the frostiest of frosty looks. ‘Armani’.

It’s 12.30. People are starting to leave. — And, suddenly, the supermodels have gone. Do they need beauty sleep?

Gentle, genteel, benevolent and tolerant bon viveur cum Literary Review editor and author of Will This Do? Or snarling, snobbish, splenetic, racist, sexist, sadistic erstwhile Private Eye and current Telegraph columnist? Bron, Brontosaurus and Auberon Waugh are sitting in the same armchair in his Academy Club in Soho, to which members serving prison sentences don’t have to pay their subscriptions and wherein he hopes to provide refuge from insufferable bores.

He has given up smoking because he couldn’t get up the stairs; so now he has a buck’s fizz in his hand and a review of his book, which elicits a great sigh.

He’s portly with a sticking-out tummy, one odd eye and gingery hair that is thinning. It has been said that he was born looking middle-aged. Now, aged 51, he says he jolly well is middle-aged. (Having re-read the letters he wrote when he was 14, he says they sound like those of an affected 40-year-old. ‘So it could just be part of my character.’) ‘My self-image has gone through a total change since I saw myself on this bloody television programme yesterday,’ says this man who lost one lung, spleen, forefingers and various ribs in the Army, trying to unblock a machine gun. ‘I had the shock of watching this great monster waddling across the screen for an hour and suddenly realised how grotesquely fat I am.’ He later talks about his health in a low, slightly worried voice. Psychologically, does he have a sense of well-being? ‘Yes, I do. Gross self-satisfaction I think you’d call it.’

Does he think he’s good-looking? ‘Well, I used to – but I’m beginning to think not. I don’t think it matters if you are famous enough and rich enough, you can get by without being an Adonis.’

This man with the abrupt telephone manner speaks with clipped, confident pre-war radio tones; the voice of a nice old buffer. ‘I was rather horrified to hear myself on this television programme. I sounded slightly affected, slightly camp and too upper class to be acceptable.’

He’s wearing a spotty tie, suit, tassel shoes and grey socks. ‘I dress very unexcitingly, always have, always will. In London, nearly always in suits, dark ones. And in the country, a change of jacket and either sponge-bag (checked or striped) or grey trousers. Don’t try to make any interesting statements with my dress on the whole, just proclaiming a rich, conservative sort of fellow.’

He sits deep in his chair, like some donnish Mr Toad, staring at the ceiling almost throughout the interview and with his finger under his chin. He gives little flicks of his other hand from time to time, holding court, clever and terribly funny, wanting to be entertaining and entertained. He’s intimidating, courteous, arrogant, you don’t get a jot more out of him than he wants to give, and he guards his feelings carefully.

What attracts women to him? ‘Lots of different things.’ He coughs throatily. ‘It’s eye contact as much as anything,’ he says, continuing to look at the ceiling.

‘I like delicate limbs and thin wrists and delicate hands.’ Yes, but what makes him alluring? ‘Oddly enough, I think it may be smell.’ He laughs, a socially infectious laugh. ‘I suppose it’s also people who like a particular joke or attitude to life.’

It has been oft said that he has no confidence in his powers of attraction, and envies men who do. ‘As I get older and more physically hideous, I’m more confident in my powers of attraction.’

He has written rapturously about Thai massage-parlour sandwiches. Will he tell me about them? ‘No.’ He once said he wouldn’t give honest answers to questions about sex or money. ‘Simple prudence.’

One wonders what was the single most important thing he learned in childhood? That which most affected his adulthood. ‘Hopeless question. How could I possibly answer that.’ He says he doesn’t have his father’s brooding, melancholic side. ‘I have a contemplative side, but nothing like his gloom.’

So how would he describe himself? ‘I’m affectionate, equable, good-natured on the whole, and try not to be boring.’ (His greatest fear in life is of being boring, ‘of having a stroke and mumbling and not being able to communicate.’) ‘I’m quite positive. I’d go for my character more than my body.’ He chortles.

What does he most dislike in his character? ‘Hmm, let’s think. There must be something. I don’t know, er, greedy – can’t ever deny myself a treat of any description.’ He reckons he most lacks Christian humility and forgiveness. ‘But not colossally. Though I sound conceited at the moment, I’m not. I just can’t see anything particularly unlikeable.’ He chortles again. ‘Oh dear oh dear, you are going to have fun with this. ‘I’m quite humorous, reasonably generous. I’m surprisingly tolerant of most things except horrible noises and bad smells. I run from bores and I don’t really like ugly people. I don’t take a real interest in politics or social justice or any of that rubbish.’ Private chuckle.

He suspects that ‘moronic dead-eyed usually female Guardian readers’ probably think him seriously ghastly and cruel. With justification? ‘To the extent that I don’t care a fig for equality or anything like that.’ Is there a discrepancy between the private Bron and public Waugh? ‘I don’t think my writing is all that different. I actually think it’s quite genial.’ (‘Like hitting someone with a blown-up bladder, buffoonery,’ he says later.) ‘A lot of it radiates benevolence. When I say that, people think I’m a lunatic or fool.’ He thinks he too radiates benevolence. In Will This Do? he writes: ‘All I needed was someone to attack, and Fantoni (an employee of the Eye) seemed as good as anyone else.’ Does he think he’s spiteful? ‘Sometimes – but at the Eye one just had to have enemies.’

He works prodigiously. ‘It’s an illness. I enjoy working more than almost anything else.’ This doesn’t say much about the rest of his life. ‘I know’ – weary voice – ‘I enjoy work, eating, croquet, drinking and that’s really about it.’

Is he a liar motivated by malice? ‘An honest opinion. I can’t say, ‘Ooh no, I’m better than that’.’ A nice old buffer or spiteful cynic? ‘A nice old cynical buffer.’

Lazy, ingratiating, clumsy, sly and with a defective sense of honour, as Evelyn wrote of him in his Diaries and Letters? ‘Physically I’m quite lazy. Ingratiating? I hope so; clumsy, certainly; less sly than when I was young; and not totally defective in honour – but I wouldn’t put myself up for the chivalry stakes.’ He giggles profusely.

Is he a weak and seedy sort of man who desperately wants to please? ‘No – but all journalists have to please in some way or other.’ Insecure and awkward? ‘I don’t think insecurity is – or ever was – a major feature. Sometimes I’m awkward, and sometimes I’m incredibly smooth.’ And arrogant? ‘I suppose so. The art of being arrogant is to hide it.’ He hides everything a bit.

Kylie Minogue has a very determined handshake. The pocket sex bomb – 5ft 1in and one of Australia’s biggest exports – stands up with out-of-bed hair and exerts a surprising pressure on the hand. Surprising in view of the fact that she is just about to talk about her nervous breakdowns. She has had two, the first in 1988, the second shortly after – both at the height of her popularity.

‘I don’t normally talk about them. When I think about it, it was quite amazing that I was just 20, and to have had so much stress and to have been in that kind of position, it angers me. There were so many people just thinking about themselves and really only thinking of me as a product, not a person. They’d forgotten that I had to go home to sleep and eat and to be able to think properly.’

There was a stage, she says, when she couldn’t turn on the radio or TV without hearing about or seeing herself. ‘And none of it was nice. As much as the people closest to you can say, ‘I understand’, they never can unless they’ve been in that position themselves.

‘I felt very lonely and I thought no one would understand what I was talking about. I got to a point where I couldn’t make sense of it any more. I was so mixed up and jumbled, I couldn’t even work out why I was angry.’ She says she didn’t take medication or seek psychiatric help. ‘I relied on family and friends. Normally I work and work until I fall over, and I needed someone to say, ‘You can let these people down’.’ And later: ‘For people who think that it’s easy and that I click my fingers and something happens, I would love them to to spend just a month with me and see what they think.’

It is easy to see why she feels so confused. In 1990, BBC/Smash Hits Awards voted her Worst Singer, Worst Dressed Person and Second Most Horrible Thing In The World.

How did that feel? ‘I wonder what was the first most horrible thing! Sometimes I’m voted best – sometimes worst. Oh, I don’t really know what to think.’

Can this really be the confident Charlene from Neighbours? The child-woman who made it into the Guinness Book of Records as the youngest female soloist to have had a No 1 British album; the singer who is about to release Let’s Get To It and has already sold out the first night of her October Wembley Arena tour?

Yes, indeed, but this Kylie is a woman in transition. A couple of years ago her audience would have been composed mainly of 10-12-year-olds. Now her fans have changed. She attracts more of the teenagers to mid-thirties, plus a big gay following.

The Kylie I met was getting over flu. ‘Today I feel old,’ she groans. She doesn’t really like interviews. ‘Because you’re meant to have an opinion on everything and to know yourself and be able to tell someone what you think in five seconds.’

She is vulnerable and indecisive. Ask about her character and she admits to being ‘very changeable and quite insecure’. In some ways – in terms of responsibilities – she seemed far older than her 23 years, and in others she seemed a child. Initially I found her really hard going and then I warmed to her. She’s a professional, and she really wants to be liked. She says: ‘I may not be secure or appear to be that strong, which may be partly to do with the way I am built . . . but to have lasted this long . . . If I were wimpish I would have stopped four years ago, as soon as I was getting criticism, or as soon as the workload became too much. I do have an inner confidence.’

She can’t be as stupid as her image – nobody could. Listening again to my recording of what she has said, she’s not dim-witted. Yet she presents herself as unfocused and unintelligent.

A few years back, the Press were wondering whether she was anorexic. Newspapers watched her food habits closely. One day she stood up at a Press conference, leaving behind a loaded plate of food. ‘What about all the starving Africans?’ yelled an oik from a tabloid. ‘Name two,’ she reposted. That was smart and snarly.

Today she wears black tights, a scooped T-shirt and a mauve skirt with a hem somewhere up by her knickers. She has the perfect bubblegum pop, reedy, flutey voice and a fairly enduring, dancing around, ‘showbizzy’ personality. She’s not a material girl. More of a guileless girl.

For most of the interview she reacts as if she is being interviewed by a male – all those smouldering looks and sexy body language. Now she’s putting her finger in her mouth. Now she’s cupping her head in her hand, exhaling orgasmically, and talking really slowly like some bimbo on Mogadon, with gaps between her words that are big enough to make a bed in. The whole sexy bit is an act, and she hasn’t yet learned when to switch it off. What was her childhood like? ‘Very normal,’ she says, and then goes on to say that she moved ‘about five times throughout my schooling years. Once I got so distressed and didn’t want to leave’. She says she didn’t have pushy showbiz parents – her father was an accountant. Yet she started her acting career aged 11. ‘When I was 16, I was working on TV and had a tutor on set.’ She regrets not having gone to university. What would she have read? ‘Read?’ she says, quizzically. ‘Read?’

She is the eldest of three children. Dannii, her sister, is over here singing too. One imagines sibling rivalry. ‘Not really, we are very helpful to each other. We are very different. If we were similar, that would cause a lot of problems. What she likes in clothes is probably not what I would like, so we are different enough to retain our separate identities.’ In terms of character, Kylie is most like her mother. ‘I find myself doing or saying things, and a split second later thinking, ‘My God, that was so much like my mother.’ I don’t know whether I like that or not.’ She says she feels ‘mushy’ saying it, but her family are so important to her. Who is she closest to? ‘I would say I’m Dad’s girl,’ and there’s a touch of Marilyn Monroe in the way she says it.

She is quite down to earth and wary of her superstar status. ‘I don’t like the judgments and preconceived ideas that people have. They expect you to be larger than life and live up to their every fantasy.’ She’s proud that she has forged her own identity. ‘People can only manufacture you to a point.’

Does she think she deserves to be a superstar? ‘There’s a bit of accident and luck. For every superstar – I don’t really like calling myself that – there are probably 1,000, I mean 100, well maybe 20 people who could do the job just as well.’

She finds it ‘a bit frightening’ – the idea that there are millions of homes playing her voice. She says she doesn’t know what it is that makes her famous. ‘I prefer not to know – if I were aware of it, there’s a good chance I would mess it up.

‘It’s scary that you’re only as good as your next single or video. And you feel insecure because you’re not sure whether you’re impressing this person or that. I’m certainly not my ideal physically. I won’t say what I’d like to be. Part of my job is about trying to cover up those insecurities.’ Trying to be someone she’s not, perhaps. And is she sexy? ‘I’m sexual. I’ve never said – thank God – that I’m sexy or raunchy or anything.’ The love affair is over with INXS singer Michael Hutchence, the man who has gone on record saying he’d taken drugs, experimented with heroin, and would like to have sex all day. The tabloid common sense is that he inspired all the changes in her life, turning Ms Clean into Ms Raunchy. ‘It annoys me that people think that it was just because of him.’

She has a new boyfriend but is reluctant to talk about him. ‘It’s nice and old fashioned.’ Does she have problems with intimacy and maintaining a long-term relationship? ‘I think relationships are difficult, because you have to work at them. And I’m travelling so much. But I’m not bad at them.’ Her ideal man – ‘I hate this question’ – would have to be ‘sincere, intelligent, compassionate, artistic and romantic’.

‘The only certainty about my future is that I want to have a family.’ Ask her about her ambition, and she says when she’s no longer performing, she will be doing some sort of business. She doesn’t know what. ‘I definitely wouldn’t do nothing. That would drive me insane.’ But she could do nothing? ‘I could do nothing – but I couldn’t do nothing and live it up. Maybe if I worked a bit longer I could do nothing and anything I wanted.’ She’s not short of a bob or two. Quite rightly, she says the amount is none of my business. But she admits she’s fairly comfortable for a 23-year-old. ‘Sometimes I would like to be quite frivolous with money, but it’s not really in me. I prefer to be sensible and realise this could end at any time. Money means security to me.

‘In some ways, the more you have the more difficult it gets. Sometimes I’m really envious of friends of mine who have a very simple life.’ What sort of simple life does she yearn? ‘Ooh, er, travelling around the world with a back-pack. Responsibilities drive me crazy sometimes. I guess my decisions can affect a lot of people. It’s like the top of a pyramid and all these people don’t exactly rely on me but want me to make decisions that are best for them, probably more so than what is best for me. I just don’t like having to make decisions. I’m very indecisive.’

Witty and self-mocking man who is married to Dawn French and started on New Faces. Affectionate and straightforward comedian who stars in True Identity and came from a West Midlands Jamaican family.

This is Lenworth George Henry, more commonly known as Lenny Henry. ‘Teachers called me Lenworth when they were cheesed off with me,’ he shrieks, in Roquefort tone. ‘I just think of myself as Len, the ordinary bloke.’

He’s wearing kecks (northern slang for trousers), a shirt by Betty Jackson and Italian shoes. ‘I’m not usually Mr Labels,’ he says, his voice rich and resonant. He used to wear corduroy trousers so massive that he looked like a ship coming down the street. ‘So huge you couldn’t get anybody else on the pavement.’

He stretches his legs out, and they seem to reach the other side of London. What sort of clothes does he like to wear? ‘I like to wear things that fit,’ he replies, hooting with a laugh that reaches the provinces. When he stands up, he seems to reach the ceiling. He’s 6ft 3in. ‘It’s cool being tall. You can always get into pubs without people wondering whether you’re underage.’ He’s 33.

‘When you see yourself on a big screen, suddenly you’re 20 times bigger than you normally are. If you have a big face, you suddenly look like a hippopotamus in Levis.’

So he got into shape for True Identity. ‘I’m big now, but not as big as I used to be.’ He grew up being fed meals so heaped that he says he could only just see over the plate.

He has a genial and lovely face which he pulls into theatrical contortions. He also has big eyes – they are very gentle, honest and alive – and close-cropped hair. ‘Laid-back flat top,’ he dubs his hair style. ‘Sometimes I’m vain. On stage I do lots of posing. I try to be a sex god on stage. But I’m usually a sex god with a shirt that is hanging out.’ In True Identity, he changes the colour of his skin to white to escape the mob. How does he feel about being black? He looks down, with serious expression.

‘I’ve always been aware of where I’m from. I wouldn’t want to be white.’ He sounds cross and defensive, then appears sultry and defiant, fleetingly. Ask him how he rates himself sexually – and he looks gobsmacked. There’s a pause big enough to build a pyramid.

‘Dunno. You’d better ask someone else. Ooh God, this is a cracker. Well, I think it’s got a lot to do with my sense of humour. It can’t be my looks that people like because they’re so odd.’

He is mostly easy going, uncomplicated – one couldn’t imagine him being devious – polite, endearing, genuine and amusing.

How does he see himself? ‘I’m a bit grumpy sometimes. I’m quite a disorganised person. I like to look good, but sometimes I can’t be bothered to be Mr Celeb in a suit.

‘I’m a very good audience, love to hear a joke, am quite gregarious and have quite a lot of friends.’ His friends range from printers to social workers.

He doesn’t know what makes him funny, but thinks it might be something to do with ‘knowing when to go bonkers’. He adopts lots of funny voices and roles throughout the interview. He also laughs at himself. ‘I hope that I’m quite self-deprecating most of the time. I don’t think I take myself that seriously.’

He says he doesn’t feel professional rivalry towards his wife. ‘It’s about being there for each other, not saying, ‘Sorry love, I’ve got a television series to do’.’

Anyone in showbiz must be egotistical. ‘Oh yeah, anyone in this line of business is, whether or not they throw up before they go stage. But I have to believe in what I do because I can’t plumb and I can’t mend cars.’ Does he think he’s gifted? ‘I think I’m jammy, very lucky indeed.’ He comes over as self-confident, balanced and determined. ‘Quite confident, yeah. Actually, I think you have something inside you that nobody else knows about. Deep in your heart, you know that you can do it.’ Later he says: ‘I’m tenacious. But I have my moments of self-doubt, anyone does. But I think you caught me on a good day.’

He was bought up a Pentecostalist and went to church every Sunday from the age of five to 15. ‘I used to be very good in Bible class. I believe there’s a God. And I think He’s like everyone’s psychiatrist. For most people, God’s someone you talk to when you’re in the crap.’

What does Lenny talk to God about? ‘I say, ‘Please make this gag work’.’ His childhood was tough and there is something in his make-up that suggests he is exorcising it by being a workaholic and getting it out on stage.

‘There’s an element of truth in that. It was a very working-class and hard-working home, with both Mum and Dad being at work. There wasn’t any money flying around and we didn’t have day trips to Blackpool. Posh kids could afford to have parents, but we just had a Mum and Dad.’ He went to work at 16. ‘Like being thrown into the deep end of a volcano. I once went to Sunderland and there were three people in the audience and two of them were staff.’

So what is the single most important thing about the character of Lenworth George Henry? Huge laugh. ‘I can’t tell you.’ Another howl. ‘I’m a bit of a groover on the quiet.’

My own sex education was scant. My mother presented me with a leaflet on how banana flies do or don’t copulate. Later, on asking: ‘Mummy, what’s an erection?’ the reply came: ‘It’s when they put a building up.’ Most of my useful sex education took place in the playground.

However, explicit sex education lessons can be tricky both for teacher and pupil. So videos such as The Lover’s Guide and Seeds of Love could serve a useful purpose at school and beyond.

After watching these two videos, I do not believe they will make any valuable contribution to sex education. The Lover’s Guide is the longer of the two. Dr Andrew Stanway, looking like some suburban dentist with a peculiar hairline, dodgy teeth and badly dubbed words, introduces it. He says he wants to try to get people talking about sex, to banish a little ignorance, guilt and fear. It opens with hairspray-ad couples bouncing through the fields with tinny music.

The tone is naive, the voice-over condescending. The video ranges from boring to truly dreadful with its unintelligent commentary.

We’re served everything from explicit oral sex to intercourse with tinkling background harp – the elevator music is relentless – and commentary that sounds as if it comes from a management training video of How to Get the Best Out of Your Department. All under headings like Arousal, and Fantasy.

Seeds of Love comes as a welcome relief, not least in its mellifluous voice-over. It is much more like a traditional biology lesson. ‘Ignorance of our sexuality is a major contributor to sexual difficulties in later life,’ says Dr Russell Reid, a consultant psychiatrist who wears a white coat and treats psycho-sexual disorders.

His video covers the spectrum of pre-marital sex, promising to look at homosexuality, gender issues and so on in future films. It starts with shots of multiracial kiddies and moves on to five-year-olds playing doctors and nurses; a look at the developing stages of sexuality, mostly in what would appear to be well-dressed middle-class kids who grow up to live in Docklands flats and frolic only with their clothes on until they’ve gone up the aisle.

Whether a video is helpful for sex education must be disputable, but at least this one is more tasteful, gentler, more considered and intelligent, more sympathetic and without all the ghastly music.

Passionate, proselytising, innovative and controversial managing director of the Body Shop who has just written a manifesto of an autobiography called Body and Soul, which is printed on recycled paper and signed ‘Anita X’. Former teacher turned role model with financial acumen and vision. Enter, powered by very fast and lead-free feet, Anita Roddick – also known as Miss Mega-Mouth.

She’s sitting among her caring products wearing an Against Animal Testing T-shirt and Workers for Freedom trousers, plus Brazilian Indian bangle from a people who now gather nuts for her products – the sort of garb she says she wears for an important meeting.

She exudes enormous energy – she’s constantly picking and fiddling; she finds it hard to sit still – and a fan is stirring everything else up so that the entire room seems to be agitated.

‘I’m manic about comfort. So trousers, flat shoes, never comfortable with high heels’ – she abbreviates to get more ideas into a sentence faster. (Curiously when I see her later at her book launch, she’s wearing an A-line skirt and clumpy high heels.) ‘So what do I tend to do?’ She asks her own question, then answers it. She also often interrupts and starts to reply to a question before I’ve finished asking it.

She has appealing looks: wonderful wild hair, a strong face and deep-brown eyes. (Beauty, according to her tome, comes from an inner energy.) ‘I’m short, with untamed hair and quite good bones. I’ve inherited my mother’s skin. I’m Italian-shaped, dumpy’ – she doesn’t appear to be – ‘low-waisted and with an incredibly mobile mouth.’

At 5ft 2in, she’s yearning to be 5ft 6in. ‘God, wouldn’t you? I mean just being in a crowd for a start, I’m talking to people’s belly buttons the whole time,’ says this mini powerhouse, in an enthusiastic voice born of Littlehampton Italian stock with added American intonations. She speaks lucidly, with a wide-ranging vocabulary and histrionic emphasis; an almost forced energy in her voice.

She is a love child who’s said she is the greatest snogger in the world and that in the Sixties she bonked her brains out. ‘It’s ironic that the more successful I become, the less I’m perceived as sexy. But I’m so sensual,’ she has said.

‘You’re not flirted with and any sexual frisson has gone because you’re in a so-called leadership role,’ she says. ‘I’m constantly told I’m a role model. And when you’re a role model you can’t fart in company and you can’t scratch your bloody nose.’ She doesn’t think she’s sexy. ‘Oooh, absolutely not.’

She says she’s into her husband rather than ‘flesh, flesh, flesh . . . And when you’re told constantly that the world loves you, which I am by my staff, you end up wondering who really does’.

She reckons she bonds better with women and this seems to be a key. She says she feels more mellow and at ease with females, and less judged. ‘I’m getting increasingly less comfortable with men. And I have much more admiration for women.’

And what of her image? ‘I think I’m gentler than I’m seen to be. Every time I read an article about myself, I think I sound so strident. My great sense of humour doesn’t come out. You know, it’s like I want to say, ‘Get off the bloody bandwagon’, sometimes.’

She is not warm, though from the caring image one might have expected her to be, and she is very earnest. She has a single-mindedness – here’s a woman who knows what she wants and how to get it – and a driven quality born perhaps of a sense of loss when her father died when she was a child. She also comes over as rehearsed – she doesn’t really connect, she’s just doing her publicity. But she can laugh at herself, and she’s attractively directed and exuberant.

‘I’m incredibly passionate about some issues. I have a nine-year-old’s enthusiasm and curiosity’ – she has two girls, aged 20 and 22. ‘I don’t think I’m brave. I’m not elegant and certainly not mature. I dislike my impatience. I’m kind, caring, empathetic. I’m beyond self-aggrandisement. I sleep well at night. I’m proud of what I’ve done.’

She’s also Italian. What does that mean to her? Does she feel different? ‘Oh yeah.’ She feels very comfortable with loudness, passion, extended families and colour. ‘I also use it as a guise to get my own way. People excuse you because they say, ‘Oh, she’s Italian’. I use it as an excuse for getting incredibly emotional. And in business, to get your own way, you have to use as many guiles and tricks as you can.’

Is she manipulative? ‘I think I’d do anything to get what I want in terms of my vision for the company.’

She climbs on soap boxes to sell soap. ‘Abso-bloody-lutely right. If anyone thought I’d be doing anything else, they’d be living on another planet. The shops are arenas for social change.’ She is perhaps too earnest. ‘No, I don’t think I’m serious enough.’

She experienced her dark side during the Gulf War. ‘I felt a real abject loneliness then. I felt so isolated. This belief that we’re on the edge of great social change seemed just puffery.’

Why does she interpret nearly all her strong feelings in this sort of global manner? ‘Isn’t there a you that you experience separate and unrelated to these world issues?’ I ask.

‘What separates you is what you do,’ she replies, launching into a dissertation on the difficulties of galvanising support for the unexotic North Sea problems.

Yes, yes, but who is Anita Roddick separate from the Great Causes? ‘When I was 10 years old I was marching for CND. That is the character.’ So what’s the psychological reason for this need to be out there marching and so on? This need for Sixties activism.

‘Maybe it is emotional, I think, I mean . . .’ This is the first time she stumbles in the interview, as if something inside her is touched. ‘At 10 years old, it’s such a raw age anyway, my father died. He was such a wondrous person to me. And I know that the catalyst happened then. ‘I also got hold of a book on the Holocaust. So there was a loss and a shock. These two areas actually combined, emotionally triggering off that enormous anger. A kick-start into wanting to right wrongs.’

She fears death, but says that she no longer feels turbulent. ‘There used to be this sort of panic that went on, this frenetic ‘I’ve got to see more, I’ve got to do more’ feeling.’

And is she dictatorial? (One imagines she might be.) She walks off jokingly, as if to consult her staff. ‘I’m incredibly acquiescent on some things. But in the areas that are to do with the image of the company, I’m a screaming harridan.’ She delivers the line with a conspiratorial hiss to her audience.

And does she like herself? ‘Yeah,’ she says with a dismissive tone. ‘I love myself.’

There’s a police car outside the hospital tonight. In front of it, an alcoholic sits on a plastic chair, can of Special Brew in hand. His friend – a man with a savaged face – goes into the hospital, pushing through the transparent plastic swing doors.

This is the scene in casualty at King’s College Hospital in Camberwell one recent weekend night. It is one of the busiest accident and emergency departments in London.

It’s a deprived hospital in a deprived area, but is known for its excellent nursing and medical care. And it was here that they just had the Walworth Bell pub shootings – six shootings – six acute emergencies in one hour, and with new doctors who had been in the job for only three days. It’s 9.30 pm and already there is a queue of walking wounded that will take at least a couple of hours to deal with. A sign on the cream walls says: ‘There is a . . . hour wait to see the doctor. Emergencies seen first.’ The empty space has been covered with blank card.

The recent record time for someone waiting in casualty for a bed was 26 hours – with a fractured leg. But at the moment, things aren’t too bad. And people seem resigned to long waits.

The casualty patients – anyone who is not acute – queue on benches in front of a partition. A blurred and soundless TV is set up high and on the floor are cigarette stubs, drink cans and litter. A baby is crying: staff say they try to see children in half the waiting time. Alongside the infant, a cardiac case, with deathly face, is wheeled down the corridor. Just inches behind the casualty queue, the other side of the screen, are six patients lined up on stretcher trollies. One woman writhes in agony with renal stones. She has an ochre-yellow face.

Next to the trollies, in this smaller than small casualty area, people are examined in one of three curtained cubicles – discussing their problems with the corridor – or one of the three cubicles. Nearby is the emergency room, where they take the unconscious, diabetic, cardiac, asthmatic and ‘trauma’ victims – for example stabbings and shootings – who need to go to theatre.

There’s room for five here, but in the last few months they’ve been accommodating eight – more than 100 beds were closed last year due to financial restraint. If someone dies in casualty, it is here (with perhaps an asthmatic child to the left and a chap with stab wounds to the right) that the relatives come to view the body behind curtains.

The nurses take calls on the emergency red phone – one RTA (road traffic accident) and a young man who has been critically beaten up. Yet tonight they say it’s really quiet.

Behind the reception area, out of the view of patients’ eyes, there is a blacklist on the wall of regular hospital abusers. And on the door there is a memo concerning a bogus female doctor who is operating in the area. An Asian man with a public school voice and what looks to have been a bottle smashed over his head comes to reception. His ear hangs off. ‘Human bite,’ the receptionist writes on his form. His boyfriend bit him. They refused even to be admitted to the same accident and emergency, so his lover has gone to Guy’s.

It’s 10.30 and the tramps have started to arrive for the night. Two dossers are fast asleep on the cushioned bench in the hallway. The nurses sometimes let them sleep off their drink on the trollies behind the screen: rather that than the men go out and injure themselves.

Wiflred is a regular and this is his second home (whether his first home is a fixed address is unclear.) He doesn’t come to be seen by a doctor, and brings his dog and squirrel and bottle of meths. If a fight is going on, he protects the staff.

Now they’re bleeping security. A man with a shaved head and a tracksuit, late forties, is punching fisticuffs in the air. He’s drunk and with a face full of aggro. His friend got beaten up, so he wants to bash up the nurses. Someone calms him down. Then he proceeds to stand in front of every trolley that they try to wheel through. He tells the nurse that he’s come to the hospital because he wants to become a Christian. Then he lies on the floor, head down on the red tiles, in front of reception.

‘Come on, go and sit in the corridor,’ says one of the ambulancemen. The aggressive man paces, threatens to beat up the staff, lolls his tongue out at the nurse, red eyes rolling, and hits his head. (It later turns out he has a psychiatric history – as do many of the patients who make their way across the road from the Maudsley.) At 2.30am, a staff nurse attempts to discharge him, medically fit. Her voice is rising – and he is jerking himself off through his tracksuit while she talks to him.

The nurses rush around and despite the stressed working conditions, there’s an amazing feeling of dedication and supportiveness. Morale may waver according to the bed situation, but the nurses are in reasonable spirits. To alleviate the problems, the hospital opened an emergency admissions ward with 20 beds in August, which cuts down emergency queuing. They are also planning a rehabilitation centre, which will free up even more beds.

At 11.35 three undertakers, grim faced and charcoal suited, come in to pick up a body. A boy pushes up against the reception glass. ‘I’ve got bad sunburn,’ he says. A woman arrives: ‘I think I’ve sprained my wrist.’ In emergency casualty, a policewoman emerges from a cubicle. She’s wearing a plastic apron. The staff are pressurised and she used to work in A and E – an unusual occurence, this – so she’s helping clean up the body of a young boy battered to death. The sister says she sees about one serious assault a week. Back in the reception office, a policeman is on the phone. ‘We’ve managed to identify the body, it’s Mark . . .’

Outside, a teenager keeps getting up from a trolley. He has overdosed on heroin. ‘I want to go ‘ome.’ The security guard keeps bringing him back. They’ve admitted one overdose each night this week. ‘Fackin’ ‘ell,’ he says. ‘You take too long to see me around ‘ere.’ Later on he walks out, on his fifth attempt. ‘Oh let him go,’ says the nurse. ‘We can’t keep on watching him.’

An ambulance has just knocked down a pedestrian. They bemoan the fact that the vehicle is now going to be off the road for three hours. The 999 calls are stacking up. They’re legally allowed only one patient in an ambulance – but a nurse says she saw seven getting out of one vehicle after a fight on New Year’s Eve.

Sid is one of the community of regulars. He has duly medicated himself before arriving. ‘Me and me mate was taking all sorts of pills.’ He has a cross tatooed on his forehead and a look of permanent mourning. He perks up to tell about the time he came to have his spleen taken out. That was when someone ‘who used to be a friend’ beat him up. Sid tells his war story with relish. He appears really to enjoy life – and its attendant attention – only when he’s ill. Tonight he’s in because he rode his pedal bike into a stationary vehicle when cycling around a corner .

His apparent enthusiasm is matched by that of Mr and Mrs Blidi, an Algerian couple, with their 22-month-old daughter Hannia. She wears Moslem head dress. ‘We all been here regularly,’ says Mr Blidi. ‘We go here, Guy’s or Westminster.’ Hannia fell down when she was in an aeroplane. She sleeps through her parents’ concern. One family bought their child in because she was having nightmares. The trouble is, GPs won’t go out in this area at night.

Nearby, a dear old lady – 90-plus with hennaed hair – lies wrapped in a red blanket. She looks spirited and her feet – bare and gnarled – protrude. She’s fallen over. The air smells deeply dank, of feet and the strong and acrid smell of anxiety sweat. There is no air conditioning. ‘Damn fool thing to do,’ her daughter, who lives with her, bellows. ‘What were you doing? Playing football?’ The daughter, wearing brick-coloured shorts and a vindictive expression, paces up and down. ‘People will think you’re loopy. They won’t be far wrong.’

It’s 3.45am. A lady who was mugged and has no money sits waiting for some coins from petty cash before she can go home. Inside, the nurses who work a nine-hour 23 minute shift remain. Outside, the police car has gone and three empty wheelchairs stand discarded.

Hip, controversial and publicity-keen priest who keeps beehives on his roof. Radical, blunt and flamboyant rector with the New Age Disneyland and counselling caravan in his church yard. Passionate man of rousing sermons and woolly sweaters.

Such is the image of the Rev Donald Reeves, the ‘Red Vicar’ and rector of St James’s Church, Piccadilly. He closes the curtains fully against the sun in his rectory study – a room lined with books, most of which he’s read – and asks me to sit in the Bishop’s chair.

He was going to dress specially for this occasion – and then he forgot. So he’s wearing a faded lumberjack-style shirt with missing button, grey trousers and 12-year-old shoes (polished by this former second lieutenant). He also wears a gold chain.

‘I have a problem with clothes because I live in three different places. I often find myself in the wrong place with the wrong clothes.’ He looks massively perplexed and speaks quickly, often emphasising the last word in the sentence. ‘I like to dress casually.’

When the photographer arrives, he changes into priest’s grey shirt and dog collar, ‘otherwise people will think I’m some worn-out headmaster or failed film star’. He reckons people ‘patronise, ignore or disdain’ him in such garb. ‘And I get sick of tourists asking me the way to Stratford-upon-Avon when I’m standing in Piccadilly. (He says: ‘Just turn left at the top.’) They think I’m some sort of unofficial guide.’ Does he like wearing dresses? He looks pensive, raising his eyes to Him Upstairs. ‘I do enjoy wearing a dress, which is what the cassock is. A cassock alb – which is like a white nightdress – covers a multitude of sins. And you don’t have to wear anything under it!’ He laughs. ‘It’s quite an impersonal garment, which is good when you’re taking a service.’ He has a voice that needs no microphone whether in church or cathedral. ‘I’m an actor, really.’ He later admits that preaching sometimes becomes an ego trip; and he loves doing television.

‘My voice is clear, passionate, not parsonical. I hope you wouldn’t think I was a priest by my voice.’ What else would he like people to think he is? ‘Ooh, the editor of the Observer.’ He actually fancies he looks a bit like an exhausted newspaper editor.

He has the face of a haunted ghost, with loads of M shapes engraved on his forehead and dark eyes with circles underneath to match. He appears tired and grey.

‘People always say my face is quite interesting. I eat all the wrong foods all the time, and I don’t exercise enough – but I don’t smoke or drink. (He used to smoke a pipe for effect. ‘That was a dead loss.’) I like my face. My body’s not too bad – I had a good look at it this morning, knowing you were coming to see me.’

He considers his eyes the windows to his soul. ‘Mine look troubled and quite deep.’ And why does he look so anxious? ‘Well, I’ve been through it a bit in my life. Also because of the hidden work I do with people, supporting and encouraging.

‘Of course, the Press always love this thing about my unhappy childhood – so I’ve changed the story now: I had the most marvellous, blissful childhood.’ He had psychotherapy for five years, to help him come to terms with his ‘desultory’ relationship with his family and to develop his vocation as a priest. He’s 57 and proud of it. ‘I feel I’m approaching the prime of my life. That’ll be when I’m about 80 if God allows me to live that long.’ Does he fear dying? ‘I think I’m frightened of a long illness, but I’m not frightened of the actual dying. Not at the moment, anyway.’ He’s a strong character with a delightful sense of humour and seriousness. He comes over initially as rather impatient, with a defensive crustiness that belies his obviously caring nature. (It’s almost as if he overcompensates to protect himself from being ridiculed or patronised.) He has a brusque, angry manner that hides his nervousness. He listens well, being very open to suggestions. And as the interview progresses, he softens – risking his vulnerable, gentle side.

He’s keen to dispel his trendy image. ‘It suggests one’s flippant at a deep level. But I am a passionate, serious man -probably too serious, but not solemn. I care for and bother about the truth the whole time.’ He’s also at pains to change the perception of vicars as those ineffectual, nice-to-everybody people who dodder through television programmes.

‘I’m not a do gooder or a sensitive, caring wimp – but I am thoughtful about people who are in a mess.’ Indeed, he’s doing a dedicated job, lots of good works, and has boosted his ailing congregation and placed his church on the map.

Is he the Red Vicar? ‘That’s absurd. I’m more to the Left than the Right – but there’s not much difference between the two now.’ The image, he says, came about because Ken Livingstone and Tony Benn spoke at St James’s. ‘But so did Norman Tebbit.’

And is he controversial? ‘I don’t seek it, but it is inevitable if you do the sort of things I do. Occasionally, I go over the top.’ And is he the loony vicar? ‘Well, they thought Jesus was pretty loony.’

So how would he describe himself? ‘I like my clarity about issues, my passion for people, my generosity and my imagination. I’m not in the least jealous of other people’s success – that’s a God-given thing. The more they prosper, the more pleased I am. I also regard it as a deep privilege to be of use to people who want to share their lives with me in some way. ‘My weakness is that my judge of character is sometimes questionable. I always see the best in people, even the rascals. And I’m also very impatient about meetings – there’s an ecclesiastical disease where people seem to need to have meetings about everything from collecting harmoniums to dead cats.’ Is he impatient? ‘What!’ he says, yet again. (Is he deaf? Certainly there’s an abruptness there.) ‘No, I’m not deaf. It’s just that I’m having to think on my feet. But I do suffer from tinnitus. I have a sort of impatience. I get very fed up with busybodies who criticise my work here. And I get really angry with rich, mean people.

‘I also get very angry about the lies that go on in religious circles and about the lack of truth in politics.’ Is he a hypocrite? ‘Oh, all the time. I think religious people are. I always say to people ‘do as I say, not as I do’.’ For example, he disapproves of private property. ‘But I have a house.’

Curiously, he comes over as rather hard. ‘I know I can be intimidating. People are frightened of me. I don’t like that. But it’s my armour. I’m strong, articulate and clear, but there is also a very private side of me that hardly anyone sees.

‘Inside, I think I have a longing to be comforted, to be held physically and emotionally.’ His face changes extraordinarily as he says this, becoming vulnerable and boyish. ‘There is a little boy inside me and I want to safeguard that inner child and prevent him from being squashed.’ He never married. How does he regard himself sexually? ‘I don’t’ – he stutters -‘think about this subject much. Because there’s not much to say about it. I’d call myself celibate, but I’m not a grim, ascetic, dismal person. I don’t want to talk about my sexuality . . .

‘Well, yes, there have been times when I’ve been lonely, but they grow less as I get older. I know a lot about friendship. But I think we go on too much about sexuality and personal relations. It’s one of the idolatries of our society.’

How long has he been celibate? His voice goes low. ‘Twenty-something years – I don’t know. No, it’s not for religious reasons. It’s really to do with my personality. Maybe it’s a sort of fear. I’ve often been quite frightened of a close relationship like that. I had them when I was much younger, but I’m fearful of them.’

People used to call him Agony Reeves. ‘I’m always agonising about things, worrying about them. But I’m not unhappy. I think I’m an integrated person.’

She’s the woman with flair and ability who flags down dustcarts when she can’t find a taxi. The lady who founded the Open Space Theatre, ran the Roundhouse and reckons she looks as old as God. And the guile-filled former thesp and erstwhile parachutist who is bringing the Ninagawa-directed play Tango at the End of Winter to London.

Enter top producer Miss Thelma Holt, the only female theatre producer in the West End at the moment.

We’re sitting in Ivor Novello’s bedroom, next door to Thelma’s office – wherein sits her assistant, Sweet Pea. She has her feet upon the bed. She’s wearing what she calls a pale brick sack – a Thirties dress that she didn’t pay for. ‘I prefer to barter. I swapped it for my two black lace ones with a friend who used to be a costume lady in the theatre,’ she says, nicely spoken. It’s the voice of a former actress – confident and convincing sounding.

She wears an artfully arranged flowery and glittery scarf – ‘it’s to cover hair that is filthy and scrunched up’ – perfect make-up and feet that are au naturel. Urban gipsy gear. What do her clothes reveal about her? ‘That I’m a slut’ – she giggles and slits her eyes. ‘But seriously, that I like Thirties stuff.’ In the Sixties she wore men’s suits; in the Seventies she was into junk clothes.

The initiated can tell a lot about her from her bohemian garnet earrings. They’re her birthstone. ‘I’m a goat – which means I’m tenacious and hardworking. They’re also ambitious and bad tempered – which I’m not.’ She moves into position number four – legs curled under her – in as many minutes.

She’s 5ft 4in with a pixie face, feline eyes and thin lips. ‘I’m small and dumpy,’ she says. ‘And I have very nice hands and feet.’ She says – 59 at Christmas – that she’s got used to her looks over a long time. ‘I like my hair, it’s very thick. And I’ve got good bones, don’t you think?’ She played a naked Lady Macbeth in the Sixties. ‘I was two stone lighter – I wouldn’t want to play one now. Yes, I enjoyed it. I didn’t mind being naked on stage. It wasn’t the first time – I was always naked. Everyone was naked in the Sixties.’ She simply imagined she was 12, felt vulnerable, and had no feelings of discomfort.

She moves her body again, leaning back deep and relaxed. ‘I move a lot. I’m only ever still in theatres. Normally it’s an expression of my anxiety that there’s something else I should be doing. You might find in 10 minutes that I lie down!’

She comes over as educated, strong, very clear, decisive and with incredible poise. She’s also rather daunting, very hard and tough, not at all the engaging eccentric I’d imagined. She seems an angry person, certainly today. And she’s very much the one in control – probably very manipulative and with eyes that flash challenges.

How does she see her character? ‘I’d like to be more tolerant – I don’t suffer fools gladly. I’m not resentful and have never experienced envy in my life . . . so I like helping people. I have a deep deep fear of mediocrity. ‘I feel terribly misunderstood – what I am and what I appear to be are very different.’ She reckons she’s not easily read. ‘I think people think I’m a lot tougher than I am. They misjudge my seeming confidence. But the truth of my real personality not being like the one I project is that I have an ulcer.’

And what of the slightly dotty, eccentric image? She says that hitching a dustcart late at night – when there was no other available transport – was nothing but practical. ‘But I suppose I do have my little eccentricities – like I have no doors in the flat, just curtains. The cat prefers it that way.’

And is she like her cat? ‘Ooh yes, I’m very cat-like. I look a bit like a cat. I walk alone the way they do. I don’t know if I’ve become like my cat – or my cat like me . . . but we’re both affectionate and tactile.’ They differ on the excitability stakes. ‘She’s excitable – but I never am in a crisis. I tend to think that where I’m not, chaos is.’

Toughness and confidence show in her face. ‘Nooo . . .’ (little girlie voice) ‘I think I look rather anxious and like a worried mouse – but you’re proving what other people also say to me. My assistants sometimes say, ‘It’s time to bring on the Big Gun’. For me to turn rough with someone. It amuses them ‘cos they think I’ll carve someone up – but it always amazes me that I can do that. I don’t think I do at all. I mean I never shout and I don’t think I’ve got a particularly nasty tongue.’

And is she as strong as she appears? ‘Yes, I am strong. You can rely on me – I won’t let you down.’ She says one shouldn’t be responsible for other people’s well-being if one’s not strong. ‘The weak may inherit the earth, but they won’t run the theatre.’ And mischievous? ‘I suppose so’ (little girlie voice again). And cunning? ‘Yes,’ she says, definitely. And what does she do with her anger? ‘I’m like the Jewish grandad. When people make me really angry, I just make them disappear from my memory.’ And what of her weaknesses? ‘My greatest failing is to expect from other people the same depth of commitment as I give. If I don’t get it, I get hurt – and I’m not nice then. I’m bitchy. But I never look for revenge. I expect God to do it for me – and he usually does.’

She wanted to be a priest as a child, for the frocks and ritual rather than because she was a good Catholic. But she still lights a candle for every new play. ‘I pray every night and morning.’ She also believes in the power of positive thought. ‘I think negative thought is harmful, dangerous.’

She has been thrice married. She loves getting wed, but finds it harder staying thus. After one wedding, she ended up in the bath with her gay brother-in-law. ‘Oh, he was only a brother-in-law – and he was only a baby,’ she says, in mock affronted fashion (he was 26). She has also said she wed her last husband ‘for his legs’. The marriage lasted six weeks. What’s her problem with staying married? ‘Because I keep going away. I have tunnel vision. When I’m working, nothing else matters. And I’m not at all domesticated.’

She also finds it hard when the time comes for the relationship to change. ‘The man has always been the more mature one, even though my last husband was a lot younger than I. They expect the love affair to grow into a mature relationship – and I expect it to go on being in a play-pen. And when it ceases to be playful, I go off.’

How important is sex to her? ‘Well, have you ever met an unsexy goat? They’re terribly sexy, goats – awful, oversexed. I like sex. My generation was enormously promiscuous. Certainly I enjoyed promiscuity. And if I hadn’t, I would have said I did! I like to conform a bit.’

Maverick and inspirational fashion designer who is a byword for the avant-garde and once jumped on a policeman’s back during a punch-up. Fervent and shy woman who is not afraid to shock and put punk, bondage and conical external bras on the catwalk. Humorous and scholarly lass who wore a fig leaf on her body suit on television and wants people to appreciate the intellectual curiosity behind her designs.

Enter, often on platform shoes, the weird and wonderful Vivienne Westwood; the erstwhile Punk Prophetess and Queen of Street Cred who is fed up with being dubbed a rebel.

‘I’m a bit tough looking today because I’m on my bike,’ she says in her soft northern accent. (Her intonation used to embarrass her, but now she’s more interested in what she says than how she says it.) For best, she currently wears her eponymous black velvet dress with Boulle – 18th century French furniture designer – print on it.

Right now she’s wearing polka-dot jeans – ‘how could I say I invented the polka dot? But I never saw a giant one until I started doing them’ – Azedine Alaia cap, rock-climbing boots, masculine ribbed camera and a leather thong around her waist, ‘which looks a bit like a whip’. She looks a mess. She’s wearing none of these in the picture because she didn’t want to be photographed. ‘It’s such a bore – I’d have to do my make-up and hair, which takes about one-and-a-half hours.’

The first impression is of a dizzy, gentle woman who is warm and friendly. She has an ageless face, marvellous cheek bones, pencilled eyebrows and pins in her hair. At the age of 35 she changed her blonde and spiky punk hairstyle and went reddish brown; now she has just gone blonde again. ‘So half of it is the colour of cabbage leaves with this other colour over it.’ Her eyes light with humour and she fiddles with her hairpin. ‘I like myself physically. I probably see all kinds of things in my face that other people don’t see – I think it’s very nice with all kinds of secrets and depth to it.’ She later says: ‘I know I’ve got these horrible saggy things around my chin – but I wouldn’t dream of having a face-lift or anything because I know I wouldn’t look like me.’

She rests her head on her hand, fingers across her brow. ‘I’ve amazing confidence in my looks – I think any man is either mad or stupid who wouldn’t prefer me to every other woman in the room, wherever I go!’ And how does she feel about her body? ‘That’s fine as well. I’ve always taken pleasure in it.’

She’s 50 years old, with a disco soul. ‘I don’t care about my age. If I were advertising in a lonely hearts column I’d say, ‘I have all the intellectual and sexual advantages of being a 50-year-old’.’ She’s a gorgeous woman: slightly dotty, warm, soft and unconventional with an extraordinary imagination. She sits relaxed, with open body language, and talks non stop – darting around in conversation seamlessly while she puffs on a Gauloise.

I ask if she could be a little briefer in her answers. ‘As Aldous Huxley said, ‘Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it can be the very body of untruth’.’ She laughs. ‘I prefer to tell the truth about everything,’ she says later. She thinks she’s very direct and honest.

How would she describe herself? ‘More than anything, I’m prepared to work for the future. I know it’s stupid to talk about horoscopes, but I’m a snake in the Chinese ones and I identify with that very long-term plotting sort of person.’

She says she wouldn’t want people to think she had an interest in matters mystical or religious. ‘The greatest function humans have is to be as critical as possible. That’s my function – but I wouldn’t say purpose because I don’t think we have a purpose apart from the ones we invent for ourselves,’ says the former teacher.

‘What am I meant to talk about? My virtues? My vices?’ She goes off to get a cigarette, claiming that it bores her to think about herself. I kept thinking she might be a prima donna, that she might throw a wobbly – but nothing like that happened and she remained scrupulously polite. ‘I think I’m kind. I’ve got a good sense of humour – I take pleasure in amusing myself and knowing that what amuses me will amuse others.’ She clearly enjoys making fun of herself. ‘More than anything at all really really really I am unorthodox. It’s like completely instinctive – I’m never satisfied to do things the way other people do them, never was.’ She’s also concerned about genius and style and being an artist.

Although pedagogic and serious, she seems light and content with herself. ‘I’m sorry if you think I’m complacent.’ I don’t, just content. ‘I suppose that’s because I had a sane mother who loved me and thought me wonderful.’ Her mother was a cotton mill worker, her father a grocer. ‘The other reason is that I really don’t care about myself – and also because I’m doing what I want.’

Is she an anarchist? ‘I’ve been asked that – but it was such a long time ago that I’ve forgotten what I’m meant to say . . . I think I’m a civilised woman. I can’t imagine myself killing anyone – and you have to ask yourself that sort of question if you say you’re an anarchist.’

And is she eccentric? ‘Yes, undoubtedly – and proud to be so in such an age of conformity.’ Shy? ‘Well, funnily enough, I am shy until I get in front of people. I hardly ever use the telephone.’ Vulnerable? She appears to be so – and friends have described her as a marshmallow. ‘I don’t feel at all vulnerable – I never get upset about injustices to myself. I don’t care if I do get knocks, because I have faith in what I’m doing.’ She’s not rich. ‘But I think I’m going to be quite rich, possibly very rich. Oscar Wilde said, I never waste money, I spend it . . . My ambition is to have a salon, a base in the middle of town where you invite intellectuals to talk.’

And what about her relationships? She married dance hall manager Derek Westwood when she was 21; and she has a son by her erstwhile lover, former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren. She gives brain stimulation priority over that of the body. ‘I don’t mind if I don’t have a relationship because I love to be on my own so much. But I’m a very loving person.’ She lives alone in Clapham, in the flat she’s had for 20 years. She’s choosy about men and often finds relationships too much of a compromise.

‘I’m quite happy not to have sex again until the day I die. I can manage without it.’ Don’t you like sex? ‘Oooh, I think it’s brilliant.’ She wants an uncomplicated relationship, but doesn’t have the time to look for one. ‘I wish men would proposition women more and that I could proposition men. I’ve tried, unsuccessfully, a little recently on somebody – but I’ve given up.’ (Little laugh.) ‘They say art and creativity are a sublimation of sexual drives – and maybe that satisfies me. You know, what do you call this thing where you do it yourself, you’ll have to give me the technical word, ah yes, masturbation – I find that very satisfactory.’

The release of John McCarthy may signal a sea change in the Middle East hostage saga but the kidnappers’ bottom line demand is still as intractable as ever.

The twisted logic for hostage-taking by pro-Iranian militants in Beirut has always been demands for the release of Moslems in Israeli captivity including Sheikh Obeid who was abducted by Israeli commandos from the Lebanon in July 1989.

Although the Israelis are willing to make a deal, they want the seven Israeli servicemen missing in Lebanon, or their bodies if any have died in captivity, returned.

The clear drawback is that the Israelis were seized by different groups, some with no connections with pro-Iranian Hizbollah (Party of God). Iran’s original support for hostage-taking – to prove to the United States and the West that however powerful it could do nothing to save its citizens in the Lebanon, and also to pressurise the US to return billions of dollars of Iranian assets frozen in American banks since 1979 – has been dropped.

The release of Mr McCarthy indicates that Syria and Iran now recognise that the hostage issue remains a barrier to normal relations with the Western powers and see the United Nations, acting as an honest broker, as the only hope.

But with the crucial Middle Eastern conference expected to start in October new momentum has been given to efforts to remove any obstacle by releasing all the hostages.

Mr McCarthy, with a message for UN general-secretary Perez de Cuellar, will be used as another means to pressurise Israel.

Syrian Foreign Minister Farouq al-Shara said today that Mr McCarthy’s release was a test to see whether the West would now bring pressure on Israel.

He said the release by the pro-Iranian Islamic Jihad (Holy War) group was ‘good news’ and claimed Syria had exerted tremendous pressure to try to prevent the kidnappers linking the release of Western hostages with that of Lebanese and Palestinians held in Israel.

However, he said the kidnappers were insisting on ‘the release of their relatives and friends (held) in prisons inside Israel’.

Islamic Jihad first surfaced in 1983 when it launched two suicide attacks on bases of US and French soldiers in Beirut, killing about 300 servicemen. It has claimed responsibility for a string of other bombings and several assassinations in Lebanon and the Middle East as well as the abduction of more than a dozen Westerners in Beirut.

Wife’s anguish after no news of Jackie WHILE John McCarthy had the rest of his life to look forward to today, the wife of one of the other hostages still held captive was dreading the next 24 hours.

Sunny Mann, wife of the eldest hostage Jackie, said she was pleased for Mr McCarthy but heartbroken that his release confirmed her husband’s continued captivity.

She said: ‘I don’t know how I will cope. I don’t know how I got through yesterday. ‘I can’t tell you how I will get through the rest of today.’ Mr Mann, 77, a retired airline pilot ,disappeared in West Beirut on 12 May, 1989.

Mrs Mann added: ‘I’m very, very happy for John and his family and friends, but I’m very upset naturally that it’s not my own husband.

‘Nobody has heard anything about Jackie at all. I’m at the end of my wits. ”I have spent two days with my bags packed waiting by the phone to go to Damascus – everyone thought it would be Jackie and it’s John.’