Picture that over-sized meat abattoir, Wembley Arena. People are eating toffee popcorn instead of doing drugs.

White jean-beclad thirtysomethings are sipping beer out of plastic bottles. And nobody is smoking in the no smoking auditorium. The only sniff of something really way out here are the neon exit signs. This is the first night of sex queen Cher’s two-night stand in Wembley. Cher has 15 gold albums, has had 46 top-100 hits, and has received an Academy Award for her performance in Moonstruck.

She also has a tattoo on her left buttock and the sort of figure that could sell a Volvo to a rock star.

The arena is filled with around 8,000 fans. Tame heavy metal guys ‘with long hair and Cher clones on their arms. And corporate businessmen. Waiting for the woman who became a household name a quarter of a century ago and hasn’t been with a man of her own age or older for almost as long. The half Armenian and Cherokee Indian, born Cherilyn Sarkisian, who has recreated herself so many times.

As the star comes in at 9.10, the crowd in the centre of the amphitheatre stands up with screams and claps. Wearing Tina Turner-esque red hair, black thigh-length jacket and black drainpipes, she belts out: ‘I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.’

The woman who sometimes bares her bottom in fishnet stands in an enchanted gothic forest with a wind machine blowing her wig. ‘I’m glad to be back. Who’d have thought I’d have been back and grown lovely red hair?’ says the 46-year-old who has had surgery on her nose and breasts and looks younger every year.

The under-dressed rock siren with the wig stylist reappears for the next item in high black-leather boots, a cobweb body – another minimal creation of costumier Bob Mackie – and black leather jacket to match her now black hair.

Now it’s 9.40 and she’s in sprayed-on lace hot pants and bodice. A handful of people are standing, waggling their bodies and clapping. One Cher clone in a stars and stripes shirt dances, as if to a mirror. Cher and cher alike.

She goes for a break.

Downstairs ‘official franchise vendors’ sell £22 Love Hurts (the name of her current album) tracksuit pants and £4 Cher (in lace camisole) posters. Upstairs the audience is treated to her more celluloid version. Tearful extracts from Mask, then the Witches of Eastwick.

Now she’s in Moonstruck, and a yelp goes up.

She reappears in front of her screen persona in white Snow Queen outfit. Her mostly white audience tap their feet. Minutes later she’s in a harem outfit. The crowd behave like nuns in a brothel.

Madonna or Prince would create an atmosphere. But Cher singing this sort of motorway music to middle-of-the-road types doesn’t even get a traffic jam.

Her fans stand up towards the end. They even clap, the closest she gets to audience participation, when she sings: ‘If I could turn back time’. There are cries, whistles and screams of encore.

But you can count the people who are really jiving on one hand. And they all look like Cher.

Best-selling author Jilly Cooper has been talking ingenuously about love, jealousy, betrayal, trust, hurt, sex, toyboys, mistresses, money and affairs. ‘I always feel God is up there peeling a heavenly banana skin to throw under my feet,’ says Jilly, who once appeared to have it all and had the image of a frothy party girl.

‘Whenever I’m happy, I always get terribly excited. You might as well be excited because life’s such a bugger. But whenever I’m happy, I always start to shake waiting for something bad to happen.’ She looks around. ‘There’s probably a tiger lurking under the piano.’

She says it’s silly, because life is good for her at the moment. Her last book, Polo, has just come out in paperback, Riders is being made into a movie and work is going well on The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, about the havoc wreaked among wives by a toyboy.

However, her mother is ill, her best friend died last year, and she has been bandaging her wounds and rebuilding her marriage since publisher’s secretary Sarah Johnson went public almost two years ago about her ‘gloriously passionate’ eight-year romance with Cooper’s husband Leo. We are sitting in her beautiful Cotswold house, decorated in arty and bohemian style, filled with pictures and books. Outside, the bluebells and cowslips are out, and the bronze relief of angels in situ is on one side of the house and a totem pole of an owl sitting on a pile of books guards the front gate. ‘Never mind the dog. Beware of the owner,’ reads the wooden sign on the porch. Who’s the owner? ‘Debatable,’ says Jilly, the blockbuster earner, laughing hugely.

She says that when she goes to London now, labourers on building sites yell: ‘How’s your marriage Jilly?’

‘I scream with laughter and we have a good old giggle about that,’ she says. In reality, she is loath to talk about this painful subject and we reach an early impasse. ‘No, I can’t talk about it. I can’t.’ On election night, she was photographed at the Conrad Black party with Jack Profumo. ‘I fell on his neck and he fell on mine and I said, ‘Does it ever go away? Will the press ever leave us alone?’ And he said, ‘No.’ ‘It’s awful . . . I just think God, Christ, what hope have we got if it keeps getting raked up in the press. Leo goes berserk about it, understandably. He’s trying to rebuild his life and so am I.’ Much of the time when she is talking, she pulls her hand through the top of her hair in a gesture of distress.

How have they worked on rebuilding trust? ‘I don’t think we have. I don’t know that you can.’ Does she still feel she wants to make her marriage work? ‘Yes. But I can’t talk about this. I’m sorry.’ On being pressed, she continues to talk, trying hard to be accommodating and truthful in very tricky circumstances.

‘The play Othello says it all about jealousy. Every trifle is blown up. It gnaws. You start thinking someone is catching an earlier train to make a phone call from the station. You twist everything. Jealousy is like vomit, you can’t keep it down.’ Is that all in the past now? ‘Things get tainted by it.’

Rebuilding her marriage has been tough and her sadness is palpable. She says she’s easily cast down. ‘It’s very difficult rebuilding something at a distance.’ Leo is a small publisher, away in London three days a week. ‘I’m alone down here and the imagination goes berserk. Solitude is bad because one starts to brood and if you’ve got a writer’s imagination . . . I’m charting every emotion, writing everything down. That’s how writers save themselves. I think I’ve become more compassionate.’

She’s coped with her hurt mainly with her (self-professed) workaholism. ‘I work horrific hours, from 10am to midnight. It’s like a drug. If I’m in a bad mood, I have a fix of producing half a chapter which I’m happy with and I’m high as a kite when I come back. I don’t ever ring people up and say, ‘God I’m miserable.’ Occasionally if people ring up they get an earful.’ Sometimes she doesn’t go out for months on end. Laughingly, she says that she suffers from ‘hermititis’. ‘You lose any sense of your identity as a woman,’ she has said.

She is wearing a jumper decorated with daisies, and black jeans. At 55, she is remarkably youthful-looking and pretty, with cascading Seventies hair and the famous gap teeth. Photographs of two of the loves of her life hang from her neck in a gold pendant: Hero and Barbara, the dogs (‘the dawgs’) with whom she admits an overly symbiotic relationship.

Slight and slender, Jilly has dieted off 8lb this week and most of the time nurses her coffee mug with chilly hands. ‘When I’m very upset, I stop eating completely. Otherwise, if I’m upset I just go straight to the bread bin.’

She says she turns her setbacks into challenges. ‘I blew dandelions this morning to see whether my toyboy novel was going to be a success. The dandelion said no. That’s good because it means I’ll get back to him (the toyboy) and really look after him.’ She reacted with similar fortitude when she didn’t receive an author award she had hoped for last year. ‘I couldn’t cry my eyes out because I had to go back to a hotel with Leo and I didn’t want to keep him awake. But I suddenly looked out of the window and thought, ‘F*** it, my next book will be better’.’

How does she now see herself sexually? ‘I don’t think of myself as a wildly attractive person sexually. I haven’t got enormous confidence on that front,’ she says, then laughs and says she hasn’t yet reached that age when women cut their hair and paint furniture.

She has asserted her independence after three decades of marriage by starting to learn to drive and looking for a house in London. Would life have been easier if she hadn’t been the main provider? ‘I think it would have been easier for everybody’s sake.’

The effect of Leo’s affair on her children has been devastating, but they have stood by her and been immensely considerate. ‘They’re much nicer than I am. Much braver, not as frightened and more secure, I hope.’ She doesn’t worry about their leaving home. ‘I have a great family waiting for me in the gazebo (where she writes).’

Felix and Emily were babies when she adopted them. ‘All I feel towards their natural mothers is the most passionate gratitude. I couldn’t have produced anything better myself.’ Jilly says she has come to terms with not being able to have children. ‘I had my ectopic pregnancy, my flicker of fertility. Almost from the moment the gynie told me I couldn’t produce, I was devastated, but I started to write. That was my reward.’ She doesn’t know if her children want to look for their natural parents. ‘They haven’t told me they do. But they may want to in their hearts. I might be upset if they went looking. But if they just wanted to see what their parents looked like, I wouldn’t mind.’

Her own father, ‘a solid, honourable man’, died in 1982. ‘It was awful. It was a bad year. He died of cancer, Fortnum my dog died, we left Putney and I left The Sunday Times.’ She calls her mother ‘my joy’. And she has a ‘lovely, glamorous’ older brother.

Her own childhood was idyllic. She quotes Margaret Astor. ‘If you have been sunned as a peach on a southern facing wall all your childhood, you are very conscious of loss of warmth.’ She was ‘distraught’ when she went to boarding school, and she tries now, she says, to recreate that sunshine by being nice, sweet and polite to people.

Disarmingly, she gives me a kiss on arrival and a hug when I leave, although we have never met before. She wants to control the outcome of the interview by making you into an instant friend, and taking you into her confidence and telling you off-the-record secrets. But she is also very sensitive (both easily hurt and perceptive), extremely clever, kindly, witty and well read. Ask her to describe herself and she says she’s dotty, wet, emotional, sulky, fearful of confrontation, underconfident, shy and disorganised, adding that she’s Pisces.

She’s terrified of confrontation. ‘I’m getting better at standing up for myself. But I always feel terrible about myself afterwards and I always shake.’ She rows only occasionally with Leo and never in public. How do they communicate angry feelings? Do they sit down and talk in a grown-up way? ‘No. We don’t do that either.’ She laughs.

‘There must be an awful lot of very bumpy carpets in this house from things being swept under them. We don’t have conversations about life. It’s all very English boarding school, jokes rather than talking.’ Isn’t that lonely? ‘I think at a time like this, people tend to walk on eggshells. The very sad thing is that you get two people who are frightened of each other because they know they can hurt one another.’ She cradles herself with her arms. ‘People oughtn’t to be frightened of each other.’

Piers Jackson lies on the floor with his knees in the air and Jade Jagger sits on them. Jade, heavily pregnant, is wearing a brick dress, brick jacket with fresh daisy in the button hole, ruby cross round her neck, and bare legs.

The unmarried former wild child and daughter of Mick and Bianca Jagger has arrived to put the finishing touches to the exhibition she is having with Piers, the father of her child. But this won’t be the sort of exhibition a 20-year-old girl normally has after daubing for just three years.

Tonight 700 people have been invited to The Collection in South Kensington for the couple’s exhibition in the aeroplane hangar-sized Sir Norman Foster space, as they keep calling it, that used to house Katharine Hamnett’s clothes. Mick Jumping Jack Flash will be there and so too Nicaraguan Bianca, his sultry ex-wife from whom he parted acrimoniously. There will be the usual mix of aristos and rock stars.

Neither Jade nor Piers has had any formal art training. ‘I never wanted to go to university,’ says Jade, who was expelled from St Mary’s school in Wiltshire when she was caught cavorting with her then boyfriend Josh Astor, Lord Kagan’s illegitimate son who was convicted of drugs charges in 1989. Things are different these days. The couple work in the same room in a farmhouse in Somerset. (She is practical and methodical – ‘I just treat it like cooking’ – and he spends more time being cerebral and squinting.) They regard painting as a contemplative, meditative kind of art. ‘It’s like yoga,’ he says. ‘It gives us a stability and balance in our lives.’ Today they are each showing 10 paintings. ‘I’m a Libran, it has to be perfectly balanced,’ says Jade. But yesterday at 4pm the paintings, which should already have been hanging, hadn’t yet arrived.

‘Who put the carpet down?’ wailed Jade, looking across the sea of exhibition felt that covered the space. ‘We want it removed. Tell them it’s . . . it’s a fire hazard,’ she laughs, full of joy and jokes. Expecting her first baby in June, she bends over and pulls up a strip of carpet. The couple, who have been together for three years, met in Florence in 1988, when she was 17. They were both studying Renaissance art at the time. ‘It’s always been a dream of mine to start a family,’ she recently told Hello! magazine. ‘Motherhood is a very strong instinct within me and the primary inspiration for many women . . . One day we would like to marry.’ We sit on the floor to talk, because there is only one chair. A little later the paintings arrive. ‘Hey! That’s wild. They’re quite strange these frames,’ she says, seeing them for the first time. Mid conversation, she sets to with paint stripper. ‘The artist has to have the last word,’ she says, erupting in giggles and rubbing the frames.

Jade has striking looks, lovely legs, a high forehead and the sort of lips that people pay money to have made with collagen. Known once as an outspoken and temperamental wild child and shopaholic, she is actually serene and down to earth. Piers is the more dishevelled, cosmic and intense of the two. He has propensity for facial shadow, hiking boots, T-shirt and blue trousers. Friends say he has been a calming influence on her. So what is it like to be a wild child who has settled down into a quiet painter’s life? ‘I think my early image was one that the Press created. If there was any rebelliousness in me, it was no more than the average young person,’ says Jade. ‘Those daring headlines were just daring headlines.’ She admits she has changed since meeting Piers, becoming a painter and settling down. ‘Since becoming older. I’ve changed, of course. We put a lot of emphasis on our home life, domestic life, cooking and families,’ says Piers. He also thinks her work has changed since she became pregnant: ‘It’s got better, definitely.’

They don’t compete in the work space. ‘I’m not a competitive person at all,’ says Jade. Piers then talks about energies and a spirit inside him, saying that competition doesn’t let the right things out.

Similar in style, their figurative paintings are oils inspired by the couple’s travels in Nicaragua and India among other places. Colourful, simple and decorative, they are of landscapes and people. They took from two weeks to two months to paint. ‘They’re not named,’ says Jade, ‘so we can’t really talk about them.’ Piers, 22, says they’re inspired by Gaugin, Matisse, Vouillard and Bonnard, and they are numbered one to 20. A man walks past with a 4ft piece of primed hardboard covered with a stripe of sea, a stripe of red rock and a stripe of blue sky: a Minorcan scene. ‘The ones you want to keep, you put a big price on,’ says Piers. ‘And the ones you don’t like, you hope they sell,’ says Jade, who adds that she always felt a bit nervous about parting with her creations. They are selling for an average of £2,000, and Minorca is their most expensive painting. ‘They’re for people to enjoy, like a nice carpet,’ says Jade. ‘I don’t mean a wall-to-wall one.’

Do people pay heed to her art because of her name? Or is she talented in her own right? ‘To be honest, I think we paint attractive paintings. Obviously we get more attention because of who I am. But if people want to buy them for the wrong reasons, that’s their problem.’

But would she prefer to be recognised in her own right? ‘I don’t know. It isn’t possible to hypotheticalise (sic) about what it would be like to be someone else, because I’m not.’ She adds: ‘I’m not that keen on the attention.’

Jade’s parents encouraged her. (‘My mother was more protective, whereas my father was keen that I wasn’t too sheltered,’ she told Hello!) ‘They’ve been very helpful. Being artistic people, they have been more understanding than other parents might be. And obviously financially it was much easier to start off with support,’ says the daughter of the man who is reputedly worth £75 million.

She used to sell flowers by Portobello Road to supplement her income. Does she aim to become financially independent with her paintings? ‘Well, I’m not financially dependent on my parents.’ That laugh again. Would she like to be a famous artist? And where can she see herself in five years time? ‘We’re just country folk,’ she says, in a country bumpkin accent. ‘Yes. London’s too distracting,’ explains Piers. ‘Because a lot of our friends are young too and they don’t all have jobs.’

Another journalist arrives, stiff in navy suit. ‘I’m saturated (sic). I can’t think of another word to say,’ says Jade.

‘You haven’t said anything for 20 minutes,’ says Piers.

‘I know. I’m gawping at my work,’ she replies. With admiration? She laughs. ‘With horror and fear.’

Melia Belli is a self confessed feminist. She went to a state (‘public’) school in San Francisco and later got four A levels. She’s also vegetarian, teetotal and American. She wants to be a lawyer and is travelling in the Himalayas this summer before going to Glasgow University. Not your stereotypical debutante, in other words.

A worldly and friendly 19-year-old, she is mini-skirted, with a fake fur jacket and a self-assured air. Her mother, like those of all good debs, sits protectively nearby. ‘I think it’s a good idea to learn how to walk gracefully,’ says Melia, in her transatlantic accent. ‘I’ve been practising turns and sticking my tummy and bum in.’ (When we spoke after the Berkeley Dress Show, she was glad it was over. ‘They should give you knee pads, we were so nervous.’

She’s not the type of gel to measure her life in party invitations. So what is her view of the traditional debutante accomplishments, like wine-tasting and setting tables? ‘Well, I don’t drink and I don’t usually eat at tables. I haven’t done that for a while and the last time I did, I couldn’t quite remember where everything went. I normally eat around the kitchen, and I tend to eat in my car a lot.’

So far her impression of the other debs has been positive. ‘These girls seem pretty nice and not snobby or upper-class. To a certain extent debs are driven and know what they want,’ she says, seemingly describing herself. ‘They are elegant and maybe even opinionated and headstrong.’ And does she follow the instincts of deb mothers to seek out The Right Sort of people? ‘Not at all. I choose my own friends. If there are people here I’d like to associate with, then I will.’

She thinks the debutantes reflect women across society now. ‘Nobody is looking for a husband. We are young women, not girls any more. We are making our own choices. Most of us have decided we want to go on and have a career, to make it by ourselves and then find a husband. I don’t think we are doing this just to find men.’

Her mother, who did the Season in the States and would have been disappointed had Melia decided not to follow her, introduced her to the idea of being a debutante. ‘My father doesn’t think much of it.’ The child of a broken marriage, Melia is an only child and currently lives in San Francisco. Her mother studies business at Oxford University and her father, a lawyer, lives in the States.

She hasn’t been told much about the Season, so she doesn’t know what to expect. ‘It should be quite different from America where it was much more frivolous and didn’t have a social cause,’ she says. ‘It’s a bit archaic there.’ No problem with dancing through the recession then? ‘No, because of the events will raise money for charity.’ And she doesn’t plan to buy any new clothes.

So is she keen to meet the Debs’ Delights? ‘English men are quite different from American ones. I’ve had quite a few English boyfriends and they are nice. They’re a lot politer. You don’t get many Americans opening doors for you or paying for your dinner.’

She looks forward to the pinnacle of the Season, Queen Charlotte’s ball, when the lissome gels in white gowns curtsy to a birthday cake. ‘It seems like it should be fun. I don’t have a problem with curtsying to a cake if that’s what’s done. It’s not like bowing to an idol or sacred cow.’ She doesn’t plan to take it at all seriously. ‘At the end of the Season, I would like to have established some friendships. I’d like it to have been an experience. And I’d like to have learned to waltz.’

CAMILLA’S STORY THE Hon Camilla Astor is a reluctant debutante. One feels that she has been forced into it, although she would never say so. Her social aspirations don’t run in the direction of the Season: she’d rather be riding or taking photos. She also prefers to dress scruffily. She even dislikes the snotty name ‘debutante’. What would she rename these party girls? ‘The Social Gatherers’.

We’re talking in the Berkeley Hotel, and this is the only interview of a, er, Social Gatherer without her mother. ‘I think it’s very amusing. All the mums absolutely adore showing off their daughters,’ she says later, talking about the mothers’ lunches. ‘My mum thinks it’s quite funny too.’ Camilla has a beautiful, sometimes wistful, face and a diffident air. She is also delightful and genuine. ‘I normally wear jeans,’ she says, quietly spoken, frowning and fiddling nervously with her ring. Today she’s wearing a smart red jacket and a black chiffon mini.

Camilla is at St George’s, Ascot, doing her A-levels, so her social life ‘isn’t that good’. She thinks the heady round of cocktail parties and summer balls will be about meeting lots of people. (Her grandmother, Irene Haig, daughter of Lord Haig, did the Season.) Does she like parties? ‘I do,’ she says, sounding unsure. ‘But it was my father’s idea that I should do this. I’m not sure why.’ Why is she so unconvinced? ‘I think it’s purely because I’m shy.’

She’s the 17-year-old daughter of Lord Astor of Hever, whose father was proprietor of The Times. ‘I don’t really think I have a class. I don’t like to position myself, anyway.’ But technically she is an aristocrat. ‘I suppose I am. But it’s quite pompous thinking that way. I don’t use ‘the Hon’ if I can help it. I just stay ‘Camilla’. Dad’s just like me, he doesn’t use his title unless he has to, which is nice.’

Some estimate that the Season costs up to £30,000 a head. Does Camilla think it’s necessary to be rich? ‘Oh gosh no, not at all. I haven’t spent any money at all on it.’ So does she think the Season elitist? ‘I suppose it is, yes, oh God, I don’t know how to answer this. The answer is also ‘no’ because there are so many people doing it that you get a good variety.’ Certainly, rather than just being aristocrats, there are now meritocrats and non-Brits on the social list. But no Sharons and Kevins. ‘I enjoy meeting a broader mix,’ says Camilla, who says she’s led a sheltered life. ‘But it is quite nice meeting people you will probably be around for the rest of your life.’ So far she has greatly enjoyed the debs she has met. ‘People have expected us to be bitchy and catty, but we have been laughing a lot and having fun. It’s been really relaxed.’

We talk about her expectations. Is she looking forward to Royal Ascot and the Henley Royal Regatta? ‘None of it has struck me as particularly wonderful. I probably wouldn’t go out of my way to do things like that.’ What would she rather do by choice? ‘Go on holiday.’ She will, however, host a party during the Season. She thinks her father is planning a bash for her 18th birthday. ‘But it might be quite a disaster because it’ll be in Kent.’ And boys? She had a boyfriend until two months ago. She went out with him for four months. (She says she’d like to get married and have children, ‘eventually’.) Would she like to come out of the Season having met a new man? ‘Oh gosh, no, not at all.’ On being offered the option, she says: ‘I’d rather go out with a pop star than a Hooray Henry, that would be more exciting.’ What does she think the debs’ delights will be like? ‘I suppose they’ll be what you expect of a man – good-looking and charming.’ In conclusion, she rather fears how people will regard her now that she’s a debutante. ‘I don’t want to give the wrong impression. I don’t want to be seen as really snobbish.’

ELISABETH’S STORY Elisabeth Dermot-Walsh, 17, is keen as mustard about being a debutante. She sits like an anchorwoman and talks like a professional, with her hands placed just so on her knees. She’s self-possessed and exuberant, sophisticated and immaculate. ‘Cross your legs the other way,’ says her mother. ‘It’s always better to cross your legs upstage than downstage.’ It’s all, in Elisabeth’s words, such fun.

Elisabeth is at West Heath school, as was Princess Diana. ‘I want to go to university, ideally to Cambridge,’ she says, in slightly clipped upper-class tones. Her father was ‘a Rank movie star in the Fifties’, and she is quite tempted to launch herself into showbiz after university. She also thinks it would be ‘an honour’ to be named Deb of the Year.

It isn’t necessary, she says, to be wealthy to do the Season. ‘That’s not important. You don’t have to go out and buy new clothes or anything because the clothes you’ve got are perfectly adequate. A lot of the events are for charities, so you aren’t spending money as much as giving it.’ She enjoys parties. ‘Well, yes, who doesn’t? I’m not a party animal or anything. But it’s such fun.’ Before the Season began, her diary was filled with charity balls, dinner parties and King’s Road shopping trips. She sees the next few months as an exciting time. She enthuses about helping the NSPCC and Queen Charlotte’s charities, and is junior chairman for the latter’s ball. ‘If I want to raise money for charity one day, I’ll have benefited from the experience.’

She also feels positive about widening her social sphere. ‘Being at boarding school, you don’t meet so many people.’ She’s keener on meeting girls, but says she doesn’t know many boys. ‘I haven’t ever had a boyfriend. I meet boys at things like parties. But I don’t want to launch myself at the world of boyfriends yet.’ Is she looking for a husband? She laughs. ‘I haven’t met any of the chaps, but I’ve got to go through university and live my life a bit.’

The delightful thing is that she’s going to meet ‘like-minded people’; when she leaves school, she can do social things with them, such fun. ‘Probably for the rest of your life you’re going to go to Ascot and things. So it is such fun to do it as a beginner with lots of other people who are beginners.’ She has found the other girls jolly friendly and uncompetitive. ‘We were bought up to be nice to each other. It’s very jolly.’ Her own party will be unusual. ‘You’re always starving, after balls. The first thing you think of is food. So after Queen Charlotte’s I thought I’d have a breakfast party for everyone to toast my birthday in champagne . . .’

‘Just the girls who curtsey to the cake,’ corrects her mother. ‘. . . and orange juice,’ she resumes. ‘At four in the morning.’

She doesn’t think the Season will change her. ‘I don’t think I’ll be a different personality at the end. My spectrum of experience will have increased and I’ll have grown up, which I would have done anyway. I have a joie de vivre and enthusiasm. I’m looking forward to it tremendously. I just can’t wait to get on with life. I am at a very happy moment of my life.’

Tonight Britain’s best-known hypnotist, Paul McKenna, the former Radio One disc jockey, will be found at the Dominion Theatre putting ordinary people under extraordinary spells. Like turning an accountant into an uninhibited Elvis Presley and getting a systems manager to wander around in the interval, deep in trance and behaving (hilariously) as if the 2,000-strong audience is full of long-lost relatives.

McKenna’s show is now a cult fixture of the London theatre scene. Few big-name comedians or pop stars could pack a huge auditorium like the Dominion as many times a year as McKenna does. Many of his fans – and they include people like Ruby Wax, Lenny Henry, Dawn French, Jools Holland, Hanif Kureishi and Barry Humphries – return time after time. Annabel Croft, for instance, has seen his show six times.

Hypnotism has made him rich, clever and the proud partner of a beautiful girlfriend, Clare Fordham, whom he first met nine months ago when she came on stage to be hypnotised. They were later introduced at dinner and now live together. He refers to her as ‘the greatest love of my life’, but quickly denies that hypnotism helped him win her. ‘When people ask whether I use hypnotism to get girls, my reply has always been that I don’t need to. That would be like being a bank robber.’

Today, aged 28, he drives a Mercedes, lives in a £150,000 four-bedroom house in Middlesex – ‘It’s all I could afford five years ago. I’m moving somewhere more opulent soon’ – and is well on his way to becoming a millionaire, although he won’t disclose how much he makes from the shows. Nor how much he might get from the range of self-hypnosis videos – money-spinning tapes on how to improve your sex life, combat stress, slim and quit smoking – which can be bought in most high streets. ‘I watched and studied rich people because I wanted to get rich,’ he says. ‘I found they had things in common, like seeing crises as opportunities . . . But feeling rich is not about having a Rolls-Royce and a big house. It is a feeling of success, confidence and security.’ So he programmed himself with that anyway. ‘And then my earnings increased tenfold. That’s when the show started to take off.’

Not bad for a lad who, in formal academic terms, gained only five 0-levels and one A-level, which was in art. But then he says he has also used hypnosis to improve his IQ and increase his reading speed. ‘A psychologist friend of mine measured my IQ and said it had jumped 20 points. I am going to do Mensa. I would guess it’s around 145 or 150. I’d like it to be higher, off the scale. If you can make a little jump, you should be able to make a big one.’

For the uninitiated, here’s an introduction to his stage act. At the beginning of Paul McKenna’s Show, about 100 volunteers go up on stage and he chooses his participants from those he has successfully induced to lock their hands as if with Superglue. Gradually the numbers are whittled down to about 10 whom he helps to become unwitting comics, without ever humiliating them. He won’t hypnotise pregnant women, or those who are drunk or very stressed. ‘No harm can come to them. But they might start catharting. I don’t want someone on stage alleviating their stress by crying or something.’

Last Friday the audience was very working-class; other times it is full of Fulham stockbrokers. There were three women and 10 men on stage at one point. Is there a difference between the sexes? ‘I find on stage men tend to be funnier than women.’

In front of the audience, McKenna is slick, like a younger Paul Daniels. Off stage, he is a slight, besuited and slightly nervous man who looks older than he is and has hypnotic blue eyes. He talks in a seamless, information-packed, broadcasterly manner, often using pop psychology buzz words, with the patter of a You Can Make Your Life Work salesman. Amusingly, it also becomes apparent that McKenna mirrors, shortly afterwards, every body movement the interviewer makes. ‘Oh dear, no one’s ever noticed before,’ he says. ‘The aim is to create greater harmony for communication.’ McKenna was first introduced to hypnotism at the age of 22 when he worked on Radio Chiltern and invited a hypnotist on his programme. He was hypnotised and amazed at the experience, so borrowed a couple of books on the subject and taught himself. He has never had any formal training. He first hypnotised someone, a friend, in his back garden when he was 23. McKenna then plied his trade doing stag nights, Oxbridge balls and Army bases. ‘My worst experience was with an audience of estate agents when nobody volunteered.’

He had a happy childhood, with the exception of his Jesuit education at St Ignatius College. He is vehement in his hatred of Catholicism. ‘What a bunch of mind manipulators,’ he says, without irony. ‘I couldn’t believe the brutality, mostly mental brutality. You’re guilty if you have sex before marriage. If you do anything, you’re guilty.’ Raised in Enfield, his father is a retired building contractor, his mother a teacher, and his younger brother a surveyor.

At the age of 19 he was developing an interest in eclectic New Age matters, learning from Zen Buddhism, pop psychology, the American psychotherapist Milton Erickson, transcendental meditation and radionics. He had also done exegesis, a weekend of wholesale enlightenment. ‘I think a lot of people who end up in cults are looking for surrogate families. That wasn’t true of me. I did it because a friend said, ‘I’ve just done this course where they lock you up in a hotel room, shout at you for three days and charge you £250. I laughed my balls off’.’

Two years ago, he used the hypnosis techniques he’d been studying to discover what was in his subconscious. ‘I studied the thought patterns of successful people and fed those to my subconscious, and immediately I began to feel so much more in control of my life. I no longer feel victimised. I never get depressed now.’

McKenna takes hypnotism very seriously and uses the entertainment side simply as a hook, ‘to show people that hypnotism works’. ‘If you could bottle hypnotism, it would be the most powerful drug in the world today. But it’s not a panacea.’

To the sceptical, of course, McKenna has simply found an easy way of making money. Debunkers question whether his stage show is fixed (‘I wish it were. That would be much easier’). They maintain that hypnotism is dangerous. And they say that there are good and bad hypnotists and no way of telling whether someone is one or the other.

But he believes it is important for people to discover what they are capable of. ‘Most of us,’ he says, ‘spend more time learning to work a food mixer than we do our brains.’

With fellow hypnotist Michael Breen, he holds seminars to teach people self-hypnosis and has offered courses in self-development, the cure of phobias (‘I charge by the change’) and future-life progression. ‘You can see yourself in future lifetimes, you may be a different sex. It’s like a snapshot of karma, so why not deal with those things now in this life rather than have to go through them in a future life?’ He has also investigated past-life regression (‘Fascinating. People talk in foreign languages’) and is now moving into the corporate world and starting to work with companies on stress control and hypnotic negotiation.

His greatest interest is realising human potential and success conditioning, ‘instead of going to a hypnotist because there is something wrong with you’. To this end, he has been working weekly for the past three months with Olympic fencer Johnny Davis who is ranked 26th in the world. ‘I don’t know if he’s going to win a gold medal, but he tells me he’s vastly improved.’

Psychics and astronomers say McKenna is special. Ask him if he is normal, and he laughs a lot. ‘What do you think?’ But does he feel different? ‘When I was a child, I felt very different from everybody else. And by my teens, I felt incredibly different. I felt everybody else had got it wrong. I didn’t feel exactly lonely or alone. But I don’t find that many people who think like me.’

The millionaire cowboy-booted hunk opposite me has been hailed the most macho star in America, the king of the martial arts and the heir to Bruce Lee. Ten years ago he was as big as Stallone, bigger than Shwarzenegger. Now he’s been eclipsed not just by these two, but by younger versions of himself, Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Still Chuck remains the darling of the video rent market, with one of the largest world wide sales. So what’s it like now just to follow in the footsteps of Shwarzenegger and Stallone? ‘You don’t compare yourself to anyone or you start to drive yourself crazy. Sly, Arnold and I are all friends. I’ve known Arnold for 25 years. Of course he’s at the top of the heap right now. But the three of us have talked about success. You can be number one today and number 50 tomorrow. You just take the success and enjoy it when it comes.’ Chuck, 50, who is not as tall as he should be and also looks younger than he should, has a beard that covers a passive face, and eyes that challenge defensively. His father was a Cherokee Indian.

Despite the fact that he has rubbed shoulders with US Presidents, he himself came from the wrong side of the breadline. In 1990, Chuck divorced Dianne, his wife of 30 years, and immediately got involved with a 19-year-old fashion designer. He was 48. ‘Monica was a very mature 19-year-old. She met the President of the United States, heads of state and the chief of operations in the army with me, and she fitted in easily.’ They stayed together for two years. Now Chuck is dating women, but lives alone on his Texas cattle ranch.

‘I went from living with my mom, to my wife. I’d never been alone. That’s probably why I jumped straight into a relationship. Now I stay real busy, I have to be doing things.’ He is open and gentle, and while appearing laid back, says he is incredibly driven. Growing up without a father left him feeling insecure. ‘Insecurity comes out either as over aggressiveness or over passiveness. In my case it was the latter. I was so insecure, I couldn’t prove anything – even to myself.’

This all changed when he went to Korea as a serviceman and learned the martial arts. He believes that the philosophy behind martial arts makes all things possible – ‘I have to give the martial arts much of the credit for the success in my life’ – and karate helped instil in him self-control and drive, and enhanced his self-esteem. Nowadays he feels very content. ‘Whatever I want in life, I know I can get it. But I have nothing more I want.’

So what happens when a tough guy’s muscles turn flabby? He smiles. ‘I don’t plan on that happening.’

Eight o’clock on Sunday morning at the Duke of York’s headquarters in Chelsea. We are backstage at the Roland Klein fashion show, part of London Fashion Week. The lights are bright and the seats are empty. The models complain that it is freezing.

By the time the show starts at 12.30 there will be 32 of them. Right now, 10 sultry and tired-looking ones are on the catwalk being accessorised and sartorially refitted. Others wait backstage, gossiping and smoking. Many appear to have got the job by dint of having anorexia and you wouldn’t look twice at some of them without make-up on.

This lasts 25 minutes and costs around £75,000, which doesn’t include making the clothes. None of the models has rehearsed for the show and some of them arrive only 10 minutes before it begins.

Melissa, in Klein’s fake fur, fur boots and a velvet jacket, draws earnestly on a cigarette, then stubs it on the carpet. ‘Dah-ling,’ says Kevin, the producer, kissing the air around model Anjani’s cheeks. Round him the girls keep doing silly walks and pelvic thrusts, in a parody of the job. ‘Can you see my knickers?’ another girl asks him. Model Dunya laughs and says the girls’ ages vary. ‘But we all lie about them.’

It’s 9.30am and Yasmin Le Bon is gossiping. ‘It’s like I had to walk down the runway with one foot, basically.’ Yasmin (who gave birth five months ago to Saffron) looks sensational even in rollers.

Backstage seems like a communal changing-room on the first day of Harrods’ sale, except for the constant thumping music coming from the stage area. A makeshift Neville Daniel hair salon has been set up in the corner, like some pre-fab theatre. By 11am the dressers (women who look like Debenhams sales assistants and help the models change) are sitting doing their knitting. Some processed chicken sandwiches have arrived which, amazingly, the models wolf down. In addition, lots of them put sugar in their coffee.

Everywhere, girls are now doing their faces, one in a yoga position on the floor in the semi-darkness. ‘We do it better, we know our faces better,’ intones Sonia. ‘It’s like,’ says Yasmin, who is doing her own make-up, ‘do they have 30 sets of clean brushes? You don’t want an eye infection.’ At 11.15am four of the models are still missing, rushing in from other shows. The ones who are here are standing around looking bored, in curlers and smoking incessantly. The atmosphere is relaxed. Instead of bitchiness, one hears pleasantries. The only nasty remark came when one model asked where the lavatory was. ‘She’s pretending she’s never been to the toilet,’ sneered her colleague once she’d sashayed off to the Portaloo. There are now about 80 people backstage, in roughly 10 by four metres. The talk is multinational. ‘He paid me 5,000 Deutschmarks for two hours’ work,’ one model is trembling with excitement as she tells her friend. ‘Non lo so,’ comes the reply. There are cries of ‘Did you see your picture in the paper? It’s good’, and ‘Did you do Paul Costello? He’s nice, eh?’. By 12.15pm, the photographers are encamped around the catwalk. The panic about who sits where is over. Roland says: ‘You only have to sit one person wrong and you’ve ‘ad it.’ He hasn’t made his models rehearse, because he wants them to be spontaneous. ‘Just walk,’ he says. ‘Just look natural.’ But he is in a tizz, because the curtain at the back of the walk has been put on the wrong way round.

At 12.20pm, the last model arrives, with windswept hair and no make-up. A squeak goes up in the salon. And now she’s got to wear a bustier and it doesn’t fit. The noise level is increasing, the atmosphere becoming more manic and the excitement is palpable.

‘Into outfits, please,’ the cry goes up at 12.30pm and the hired dalmatian who has to walk up the er, catwalk, starts barking. ‘What pretty lingerie, dah-ling,’ says one model to another. ‘Do you think I’m too small to wear this bra?’ the recipient of the compliment asks the producer. ‘Have a baby, they get bigger,’ he says. ‘Then they go,’ says Yasmin, dolefully. It’s 12.40pm. The music is thumping and the sound of the audience can be heard. The hairdresser is throwing a wobbly because there’s no spray. ‘Come on, we’re starting,’ says Kevin, squeakily. ‘Melissa, Elizabeth, now.’ ‘Take your cigarettes away. Cigarettes off,’ yelps Roland. Suddenly even the plainest ones look stupendous.

At 12.50pm, a force 10 panic is blowing. ‘Who starts off?’ says one girl. ‘Where are the steps?’ asks another. ‘Quick, Melissa, you’re on,’ says Roland. ‘I can’t go on like this,’ she says.

Nearby, Moschino’s male models, who have taken little notice of the girls getting changed in front of them, are themselves now in various degrees of undress and watching the Roland Klein show on the monitor. ‘That doesn’t work at all,’ says one. ‘The dog’s dying to get off.’

The girls run across the room and change clothes at the speed of video fast forward. The hairdresser drags his hands through their hair just before they go on stage. There is a crowd of models waiting to hit the catwalk. ‘Where are they going?’ Roland is crying. ‘Go down the stairs. Behind the scenes is turmoil. But up front things look sleek as clothes make their way sexily up the catwalk. ‘You ‘aven’t been,’ Roland keeps accusing. (Answer: ‘Yes I have.’) ‘You’re all on,’ screams Roland for the finale.

Backstage there are big smiles, claps and euphoria. The show is over. All the models kiss Roland. The dressers take the clothes back. One girl puts on her thermal vest and a pair of skimpy shorts. The others return to the models’ uniform of jeans and cowboy boots. They kiss the air and call au revoir and ciao, and walk out into the rain with their make-up still on their faces.

Peter Scudamore used to think the best way to deal with a tricky situation was to panic. Now, he prefers to handle difficulties with prayer and goes to Catholic church most Sundays. ‘I’m not as good a Christian as I should be,’ he says. ‘But everyone has to find a way of coming to terms with things. Racing is a dangerous sport and I face that through religion. I say a prayer.’

This week Scudamore will ride in the Cheltenham Festival and on Thursday he will sit astride Carvill’s Hill, the Arkle of the Nineties and the 5-4 favourite to win the Gold Cup. Probably the world’s best jockey, he recently rode his 1500th winner and has ridden a record-breaking 200 winners in one season. But this week is vital. For Scudamore has never won the Grand National or the Cheltenham Gold Cup. ‘You always think you are going to do better than you actually do.’

He has fallen thousands of times and even cracked his skull. His father, a top jockey, had his racing career cut short when he partially lost the sight of one eye. ‘It’s not something I like to think about. There are some bones I haven’t broken,’ Scudamore almost whispers. ‘Obviously, I’m frightened. I don’t want to hurt myself. The fear of death and permanent injury is always there. But I don’t go into races thinking, ‘I could die’.’ Just over a year ago, he broke his leg – again. Half his shin, he says, was dangling. ‘I lay there thinking, ‘Shit, I’m going to have to have it amputated’ . . . I’m very rude to ambulance men. It’s probably from my childhood, because my mother was so over-protective. She wouldn’t even let me bicycle down the road. If you fell over, she was always there and fussing – so I can’t stand ambulance men clucking over me.’

Scudamore has a starved look and a dry sense of humour. He isn’t weeny like flat race riders but is slight with brown eyes and what looks like a concave tummy. (He sometimes needs to weigh 10 stone, including a saddle.) He is also very softly spoken and often talks in parentheses and sentences that don’t finish.

He is racing’s Mr Nice Guy and considered a pillar of rectitude. He is delightful, sincere, quietly confident and unassuming. He also has a choirboy’s good looks and a famously good and stable marriage. So which deadly sin is he most attracted to? ‘Perhaps greed,’ he says. ‘No, lust.’ Which is surprising, considering his wholesome image.

He has been married to Marilyn for 12 years, since he was 21. He looks foxed when he tries to remember how old she is, eventually deciding she’s about five years older than he. Is he faithful? ‘Yes,’ he says, with a furrowed brow and a wringing of hands.

‘We don’t have the perfect marriage, though. It isn’t like one long honeymoon where I’m in a permanent state of love. Marriage is hard work. We scream at one another and sometimes don’t talk for a week. It’s hard for her with me always being the focus of attention, though it’s slightly easier now she runs her own company promoting jockeys. I’m very ambitious, so I must be very hard to be around. Take holidays, I can’t stand the idea of just lying on a beach. So she went to Barbados with some friend of hers. We try to live an open, mature life.

‘We work things out. If we don’t talk about things, then they brew up. She smokes and that upsets me and is the cause of arguments. We don’t always appreciate what we’ve got. The thing I want out of life is to educate my children. I have two lovely boys (aged nine and eight). It would be wrong of me to want more.’

His childhood has been described as idyllic. He was brought up on a small farm in Herefordshire and retains a slight West Country accent. ‘I was always very proud of my father, because he won the Grand National and the Gold Cup.’ Scudamore wrings his hands again, talking about the two wins that have so far eluded him. ‘He was a brave, honest and good jockey, so I looked up to him. I suppose that gave me my ambition. But I don’t feel I have to live up to him. There hasn’t been any pressure in that way.

‘My parents were so good, a wonderful couple who set the standards of right and wrong for me. I wasn’t spoilt. We didn’t live in luxury or have fast cars, but we had everything we wanted. Looking back, my childhood was very stable.’

Scudamore had an unremarkable academic career at Belmont Abbey, a minor (Catholic) public school. ‘A kindly and cheerful boy with a good sense of humour,’ his housemaster said in 1974 on a report that had a ‘very poor result’ in chemistry and a ‘weak performance’ in maths.

As a child, he used to pretend he was able do things before he had actually mastered them. ‘I always thought from the day that I first rode that I was the best jockey in the world.’ He was three years old. ‘I know it’s stupid, but I’ve always wanted to be the best. If someone criticises me, I find it hard to accept. You always believe you are the best.’ (His father is the only person from whom he accepts criticism and the two are still very close.) ‘I’m still a bad loser. Winning is a great high and losing is a real down. Racing gets me down. I know it shouldn’t. I’m not always happy. Sometimes I get really fed up.’

His mother, fearful lest he get hurt, never wanted him to go into racing. His first job was as an estate agent. But he had his first National Hunt win when he was just 20. ‘Whenever I go home, my mother still asks me when I’m going to get a proper job.’

He feels his upbringing was unfairly privileged. ‘It was very privileged and false. I’m not sure it’s right to be brought up in such a protected way,’ he says now. ‘Most people aren’t bought up like that nor do they go to all-boys schools.’

Because of his elitist background, when Scudamore left school he felt awkward with girls. ‘I left school at 17 without many female friends,’ he says. ‘I was always frightened of rejection.’

He does, however, enjoy meeting the Royals. The Princess Royal used to ride out from his yard. ‘Goodbye Ma’am,’ he said, as she left one day. Then his youngest son, Thomas, then only knee high to a jockey piped up: ‘Goodbye Mum.’ The Princess fixed him with an amused eye. ‘Thomas,’ she said, laughing, ‘I think you have ideas above your station.’

On another occasion, he sat next to the Queen Mother at a dinner of course upon course of a Roux brothers-prepared banquet. Typically, Scudamore was dieting, so he spent the evening picking at quails’ eggs. He doesn’t have a lavish lifestyle. He lives near Cheltenham in a house called Mucky Cottage, which is named after a horse. His trainer Martin Pipe (together they make the most successful team in racing) picks him up by helicopter in the summer. Otherwise he drives himself, around 50,000 miles a year in his Peugeot 605. He races six days a week, often leaving home at four in the morning.

He does a spot of gardening in his spare time. He thinks it would be naff for him to read Dick Francis. ‘I read him when I was a kid. Racing is nothing like Dick’s books.’ And he doesn’t think he looks like a Francis hero.

He admits to a turnover of £80,000. But later in the interview he says that was a ‘porky pie’. Because he doesn’t want a visit from the tax man? ‘Yes,’ he laughs. ‘And because I don’t think it’s good to boast about your earnings. I want to be a millionaire the same as the ordinary arse (his word for a non-rider), but it’s not a lifetime’s ambition.’

People go on about his retiring. He knows his racing years are limited and his nerve will not hold out forever. But he loves his way of life and its risk. ‘If you said to me a few years ago that I would ride 200 winners, I would have said, ‘I’ll then be the most famous jockey, my life will change. That will be it. The kids won’t cry and the missus won’t moan.’ But, in fact, it doesn’t change anything. I might win the Gold Cup on Thursday, but life won’t change. And I don’t want it to change.’

Volatile, fair and loyal personality who organises poetry readings in a Cork Street gallery and is the wife of ad man Maurice Saatchi. Versatile and competitive producer of high-brow plays. Entertaining and high-voltage career woman with supercharged emotions who was formerly on the board of Haymarket Publishing.

Such is the reputation of Josephine Hart, author of Damage, a novel about a middle-aged man’s (requited) erotic obsession with his son’s fiancee. Hart is dressed in black leggings, black Paco Rabanne mid-thigh jacket and flat black shoes, looking expensive, elegant and understated. ‘I break out sometimes and buy red or occasionally green. But I have a strong reaction to colour. If I wear red too much, I get too excitable.’ Black soothes and controls her, making her feel calm. ‘You can fade away in black in a way you can’t with other colours.’

She carries a horse-nosebag handbag, black of course, which contains a thumb-sized book of Shakespeare’s sonnets. ‘Poetry is an absolute necessity in my life. I read it certainly every day,’ she says later, in her very Irish accent. ‘I need it, really need it. I would be bereft without it.’ She’s also wearing a gold ring that looks like the Sydney Opera House, with a diamond in each roof, plus three strands of grey Chanel beads. She has rich brown hair, sharp eyes, thin lips and a strong, determined face. ‘I think I’m fairly fit’ – she swims most days – ‘I move everywhere very fast. If it were possible I’d run, but it looks too embarrassing in the street.’

She wears little make-up save beetroot lipstick. So what of her face? ‘I think it’s a big face (means big features) – but not a pretty face, and not a fashionable one. I think it looks strong and open. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m terribly open.’

She feels very Irish. ‘Yeats says, ‘I carry from my mother’s womb a fanatic heart’. There’s tremendous intensity that comes from being Irish and a passion for words.’ She waxes eloquently and lengthily on the subject, very Irishly.

Here is a formidable woman who lingers in the mind long after the meeting, possibly because her words seem so wise. She comes across as persistent, single-minded and with an iron will: a survivor; and an intense, complex and deep character who appears terribly tough on the surface. She also has an elegant mind – is passionately literary, erudite and interesting – and shows her convent education in a high-mindedness, impetus to self-improvement and moral rectitude.

‘It’s terribly difficult to know yourself,’ she says, putting her hand on her chin in a gesture of self-comfort. ‘It’s a very difficult journey between the necessity of finding out who you are because it’s crucial in your relationships with other people, and self-obsession.

‘All my responsibility in life, I believed, was to behave correctly, fulfil my duty and save my soul.’ Has she managed that to date? ‘I think I’m very dutiful.’

She has spent years trying to work herself out, trying to decide when to lay ghosts to rest. ‘I wouldn’t say that finally living in the here and now is something that I have fully managed to do.’

Her 16-year-old brother and nine-year-old sister died within months of each other when she was 17 – one from illness and the other in an accident. She lived in an extremely enclosed world (‘I never went anywhere. For me to go to Dublin was a major thing’) and handled the pain in a very intense way while her parents ‘almost died of grief’. ‘I feel I have lived two such different lives and integrating them both is very difficult.’ Does she feel like two different people? ‘To some extent.’

She once stopped training to be an actress because she felt she had to delve into herself too much. ‘It requires such psychological courage and I definitely wouldn’t have been able to do that. I know I would have cracked up.’ Is she damaged? ‘I am full of sadness, definitely. The life was certainly damaged. But I don’t know whether my soul was damaged beyond repair. I don’t think so because a lot of extraordinary insights came out of it.’

What goes on in her soul? ‘The same as that which should go on in anybody’s soul. The question of how you live a good life.’ She joins her hands together and rests her chin on them, looking as if she is praying. Materially, she lives a good life. Her father ran a garage, while M, as she calls her husband, is not short of a bob or two. ‘That has been the most irrelevant thing in the world to me. It’s hard to describe the emphasis on the spiritual that I grew up with. The things that were interesting were poetry and how well read you were, not whether you had a car.’ In Damage, the narrator is a man. How easy was it for her to be a man? ‘Hideously easy,’ she laughs, an infectious laugh that hits the ceiling. ‘I was so shocked. I felt in total symbiosis with him – and what that says about me as a woman, I really don’t know.’

She views her sexuality – and she’s paraphrasing Tom Stoppard in the Real Thing here – as the great unplayed card. ‘In every other area of your life, people can see how you are, see your clothes, listen to what you say. But a person’s sexual nature, their behaviour in sexual matters, is the great secret of people’s psychology. An extraordinary thing . . . the power of sex . . . it’s majesty . . .’ she says. ‘It has a terrifying ability to throw us out of synch in relation to everything else . . . It is an intense experience . . . I really feel it is an extraordinary, the most extraordinary event in life.’

So how would she describe herself? ‘I have a very disciplined surface and underneath a reasonably cheerful nature. The two are integrating more now.’ She talks in an emphatic way, cutting the air with her voice and speaking aggressively with her hands as if she were chopping meat in the air. ‘I’m emotional, passionate (she gobbles the word as if she doesn’t want to say it out loud). I think I’m fair. When I examine my behaviour every day, I ask myself whether I’ve been fair.

‘It’s terribly easy to be harsh towards others and soft to oneself. And it’s easy for me to be incredibly loving, just as it is easy for me to go pow (she punches her palm with her fist) phew like that when I am angry. My nature is one that would go like that whack (she hits her hand) if I let it.’

It was said that she often bred fear rather than affection in her colleagues. ‘That was a long time ago. I was terribly upset when I read that. But I think it was probably true.’ She thinks perhaps people found her persistence, forthright opinions and intense concentration disturbing. She does come over as very hard. ‘I can accept that. I can completely sympathise with someone who doesn’t know me thinking, ‘God, what’s going to stop this person?’ ‘ she says, her face visibly softening for the first time.

‘I have a determination based on having to decide to survive, not financially but psychologically. But I don’t think I’m hard at all, not at all. I wish I were much tougher. People I love can do absolutely anything with me. My children complain that I’m too soft.’

Jeremy Guscott has a 42in chest, an outside leg of 43 inches and cheveux noirs. It says so on his model’s Z card. On one side of it, there is a photo of the hunk playing rugby; on the other, he sits, legs astride on a chair, while a blonde with a plunging neckline stands behind him with her legs apart.

‘I wouldn’t say I have the typical look of a male model because I’m rather short in the legs and long in the back,’ he says, sitting forward and gazing straight on out of melting eyes. ‘I’ve been told I look like Bruce Oldfield, but often I think I look too serious.’

Such work may seem, traditionally, rather a sissy sideline for England’s rugby union star as the team prepares to take on Wales at Twickenham on Saturday – but he’s happy.

Actually, he can hardly believe his luck. Just over two years ago he was working as a brickie, and a lot of his friends still do. But he is now famous for his graceful and brilliant athleticism, for his surprising attacks and resilient defences.

He presents himself in a calm and confident manner. But as a teenager, he was expelled from Ralph Allen comprehensive in Bath just before taking his CSEs.

‘I can look back on it these days and laugh,’ he says. ‘I also look back with anger. I got suspended for things like answering back to teachers, being obstinate and totally ignoring them, walking out of classrooms or smoking. At other schools, you would’ve just got detention.’ He smiles defiantly.

He is slim and moves in a feline way. The first time I met him informally, he appeared gentle, disarmingly charming. But in interview he is defensive, petulant even. Talking to him on some subjects is like arguing with an errant teenager. You quickly realise that this is a self-protective attitude.

Take the question of mini Guscotts. This week it was revealed that he is going to become a father.

‘You said you were going to get to work on having children straight away after the World Cup,’ I said. He gives a (rare) genuine laugh. ‘There’s no evidence of this, none at all,’ he says, distantly. ‘But my wife and I are both 100 per cent sure that we want children.’

He married Jayne, his sweetheart of five years, 20 months ago. It’s a mixed marriage and he met her after she kicked him at a local disco. (She insists it was her friend.) In similar fashion, his father came from Jamaica and had a mixed marriage to a woman he ran over on his bicycle. ‘I’ve not known anything different from a mixed marriage,’ says Jeremy. His maternal grandfather disapproved so strongly of his parents marrying that he refused to see Jeremy until he was three. ‘I’ve not had any problems with racism,’ says Jeremy, swallowing hard. He did, however, get called Sambo at school. ‘Kids get called Four Eyes and Fatty. You’re not going to get a reaction out of me, Caroline.’

We’re sitting in the tiny, bare sitting-room of his terraced house on the outskirts of Bath with his female manager, who is there to help him feel comfortable. There are some reproduction sepia photographs of Bath on the walls. It is a bland environment, with decor that is devoid of personality. He’s done a little magazine modelling and recently walked his first catwalk as the guest-of-honour model at Oxfam’s 50th birthday celebrations, in front of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent.

‘He felt really uncomfortable in that environment. He was polite but couldn’t wait to go,’ says a friend.

I ask about his modelling career. Is he a sex symbol? A matinee idol? ‘Oh, thanks.’ He gives a weak laugh, but the clothes he wears today could have come straight from one of his mail-order catalogue sessions. M&S camel double-breasted jacket, Blazer shirt and trousers, and camel suede brogues – this is the flash look that has just got him into Esquire magazine’s Best Dressed Men list.

Well, does he think he’s sexy? ‘I don’t think I’m sexy,’ he says, curtly. Or good looking? ‘I’m not being pressed on that.’ Do women chase after him? ‘Not that I’ve noticed. You just get the odd letter through the post that suggests they’d like more than a signed photograph.’

This is just a sideline. He actually works nine to five in the sales department of British Gas. ‘I’m in the housing development department, dealing with getting gas to villages that haven’t already got it.’ Somehow, he manages to make his tone quite menacing. ‘It’s quite wide and varied, and I enjoy going out and talking to people,’ he says, talking like a beauty queen. ‘I wouldn’t pursue another career. My future is with British Gas.’ He has, of course, been offered around £1 million to become a professional rugby league player. But he says he’s not interested in money – his ambition is to be a manager in British Gas marketing. Of course. But the real reason comes out later. With rugby union, he can come and go as he pleases. ‘I don’t think I could cope with the restrictions of being a professional. I didn’t cope very well with being told what to do when I was at school. I’m still not that good with people who order me around and tell me what to do. I wouldn’t be the boss.’

In his early days, his coaches reckoned he had a talent for the game but a suspect temperament. Is he still difficult? ‘Can be.’ And with an attitude problem? ‘I don’t think so.’ Nor does he think he’s too big for his own boots. ‘I still have the same friends I’ve grown up with. When you’re with the squad, you can’t be seen to be big-headed and nobody is.’ He concedes that he is aggressive. ‘I’m not afraid to tell people what I think of them,’ says this 26-year-old. ‘It’s never been a problem.’ His parents live 100 yards away. ‘Family, friends and community are important to Jeremy,’ says a friend. ‘He’s very deep-rooted.’ His father came from Jamaica 30 years ago and worked at the Avon Rubber Company before taking voluntary redundancy and becoming a hospital porter. His mother has been a teacher for 10 years.

Gary, his brother, is two and half years younger. ‘I’m always taking the mickey out of my mother and saying Gary was the favourite child,’ says Jeremy. Their father never used to let them out to play and get mucky. ‘We laugh about it now. But he wouldn’t ever let us go out and play and get dirty.’ Was his father too strict? ‘He was very strict.’

But, he says, with an almost quizzical tone, that it was a happy home. What went on in his childhood that led to him act in such a bolshie fashion at school? ‘I can’t think of anything. I can’t think why I did it.’ He clears his throat defensively.

One thing’s for sure – on Saturday, he’ll be boss. And he’ll be able to go out and play and get dirty.

I had a wonderful childhood and wonderful parents,’ says Sarah Brightman. ‘We lived in a four-bedroom house in Berkhampstead that my father built. I went to a stage boarding school when I was 11 and I was unhappy there. I remember my father saying to me, ‘Make up your own mind. You can either come home and do something else, or if you’re ambitious, you’ll have to stay on at the school’.

‘In the end, I stayed on because there wasn’t a stage school in our area. But to be honest, I would have preferred to have remained at home. I loved my family so much that I didn’t want to be away.’

So Sarah, the eldest of six children, went to private school though, in the early days, her sisters were sent to grammar schools. ‘They went private as my father’s business got better. He started from simple beginnings and did very well for himself and his company. We had a good lifestyle.’ She also says she inherited a disposition to insomnia from her father. ‘I don’t sleep well because I’m always worrying about the next thing.’ (She looks radiantly healthy, bright-eyed and rested.) ‘I think I’m one of those people who can survive on four hours’ sleep a night. My father is like that.’

Only days after Sarah spoke to me, her property developer father, 57 year-old Grenville, was found dead in his fume-filled Golf GTi. His marriage to her mother, Paula, ended five years ago and he is thought to have been having a complicated romance and business losses. It is significant that it is to her mother that she goes to stay in her spare time, on the south coast. It is also significant that she told me how important her ‘wonderful’ family had been to her in the 18 months since she was divorced from her second husband, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Despite her father’s tragic death, she showed up this week to play her part of Rose (a woman who has lost in love) in her ex-husband’s Aspects of Love. Work provides a safe haven for her. ‘I can lose myself completely in my characters,’ she said last week, kicking her leg at an imaginary football, as she did through much of our time together. ‘I love escaping. I’m not saying that one wants to escape from the day, but it’s lovely to be someone else.’

In similar fashion, playing Rose helped her to overcome the break-up of her marriage. ‘It was quite therapeutic. If you work and have something that you can cling onto, that is the best thing you can do. Work is the one thing I know I do excellently. It gives me stability.’ She talks in a guileless fashion and presents herself like a little girl.

She says that since becoming single, she has become stronger. ‘I am opening up and becoming stronger as a person and a performer. I’m becoming stronger because I’ve had a lot of personal things to deal with. I’m not going to go into them, because they’re obvious. But I’ve also had to go through a lot of barriers career-wise.’

Married since the age of 18 (first time to a band manager called Andrew Graham-Stewart), she has coped well. ‘I’ve always been very reliant on a man. But I’ve handled it really well. I’ve not stopped working since I got divorced, I’ve lived in another country (America) and I’ve dealt with things for the first time by myself. I haven’t had anyone to go to and say, ‘I’m scared about making this decision, what do you think?’ ‘

Does she still feel hurt about Lloyd Webber? ‘I never felt hurt.’ Seriously? ‘No, I never felt hurt.’

‘He went off with another woman and you didn’t feel hurt,’ I say. ‘I have never felt hurt and I’m being truthful.’

She says they work together happily today. ‘There aren’t really any negative things to say.’ So why did he leave her? ‘You’ll have to ask him.’ She laughs. ‘He obviously had his reasons and did it.’ She appears incredibly accepting. ‘I don’t think one has any choice in life.’ He settled on her a sum that she won’t disclose, but estimates have been in the region of £6 million. ‘I live off my earnings and I wake up like everybody else, panicking in the night because I have bills to pay.’ Curiouser and curiouser. Why does she feel the need to panic in the night when she has some tidy sum stashed away? ‘Because I like to live in a real situation. I can’t do my job unless I’m in it with everybody else and I know what they’re thinking. How can you go into a meeting and negotiate when your head is in Timbuktu?’

She has left behind a lavish lifestyle. She will tell you how it didn’t change her. (‘I wasn’t any different.) And how she would do things like go to the White House or meet the Prime Minister. But nowadays she lives a quieter life.

One of the things that helped her make this change was her faith. ‘How am I going to say this without sounding cranky?’ She sometimes chooses her words carefully and talks in a circumspect fashion, as if she fears being stitched up. ‘My mother and two sisters are Catholic. Religiously, I haven’t anything very strong in my background. But I feel a very strong force within myself, almost like an instinct which I follow.’ She places her hand on her stomach. ‘It is warm and it is bright. I suppose you could call that God. I know that what keeps me going is this strong, warm force inside me. ‘I think you have to be very humble about what you want to achieve in life, because it’s not our decision,’ she says. ‘I don’t say I’ll leave everything to fate, because I certainly wouldn’t. But there is a fair amount of that. You can plan your life for the next 20 years, but there is no way it is going to go that way.’

When she talks about her split from Lloyd Webber, she talks about such cosmic forces again. ‘There are forces and things that happen that are completely beyond our control. Relationships aren’t like business and you can’t treat them as such. If someone really truly loves you and you’re just yourself with them and not forcing anything and it is right, it will be there forever. But if it’s not right, it’s naturally not going to work.’ She now lives in a two-bedroom rented flat in central London. She has simple tastes. ‘I’ve got the basics. I don’t need anything else. I don’t own a property anywhere in the world.’

She is 31 years old. ‘I don’t mind if I never get married again,’ she says. ‘And that’s not to do with being cross or anything. I don’t have a particular boyfriend. I’m dating lots of men. At first, I was a bit nervous because I didn’t know what to do. But you don’t have to do anything. You just have to be yourself.

‘I badly need people. We all do. I mean ‘no man is an island unto himself’.’ She leans back on the fleur-de-lis cushion in a hospitality room in the bowels of the Prince of Wales Theatre. ‘We all need help and advice. But inside, I am very, very strong and quite tough and I know what I want. I can be very independent, as long as I have my friends and family.’ Ask her about having children and she shrieks with laughter and starts to kick her leg in a very agitated way. ‘I come from a family of six, the youngest of whom is only 13. So I don’t particularly have any great maternal instincts. I’ve seen it’s jolly hard. I’ve seen my mother bring up all those children without any help. It’s tough.

‘In a way, they do drain your emotions and I feel that I wouldn’t be able to do my work as well if I had babies. If I had children, I’d probably give up all my time and stop work.’

It is unlikely she will stop work soon. She is driven. If she has two hours when the phone isn’t ringing, she starts to pace the flat. ‘Even if I switch on the television and watch a film, my mind’s grinding about why something is such and such a way at work and which camera shot would be good.’

She says she feels like the lion in The Wizard of Oz. ‘The one who has no courage. I’ve always felt like that since I was small. I’ve always felt like I’ve got a hurdle to overcome and often I don’t know whether I’m going to make it. There are all sorts of little things in life that I am scared of. And I am fearful of people.

‘But I’m also very happy within myself and feel quite strongly within myself at the moment.’ She does a double take on the last few words. ‘I’m healthy. I have a lovely family. And I have been given a talent that I feel grateful for.’

So why did she flinch on the last few words? Is it because she always thinks there’s something nasty around the corner? ‘I don’t know.’ She shrugs her shoulders, little girl like. ‘Maybe.’