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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 1984, reporter Barbara Jones knocked on the door of Sonia Sutcliffe’s home. Little did she know then, but for nine years her life was to become dominated by the wife of the Yorkshire Ripper and the murderer himself. The results of her obsession can be seen this week with the publication of her book, Voices From An Evil God: the true story of the Yorkshire Ripper and the woman who loves him. It is the first time the words of Peter Sutcliffe, the man who killed 13 women and left seven more for dead, have been heard.

It gives insights into Sutcliffe’s psyche, shows what life was like for the Sutcliffes while he was commiting the murders and posits that Sonia knew nothing about them.

So how does Barbara feel about the Sutcliffes? ‘I hope I never see either of them again. Sonia is the most irritating, strangest and coldest person I’ve ever met. She’s so incredibly prickly and demanding. I felt hate for her in court. I was boring a hole in her skull with my eyes. ‘He is, as the psychiatrist Dr Hugo Milne said, a very controlled schizophrenic. In every other way, he is actually rather boring. If he were here now (in Barbara’s Wandsworth home) he’d be drinking coffee and making silly schoolboy jokes, calling himself a ‘Yorkie Pud’. He’s a Jekyll and Hyde character.’

Barbara sent manuscripts of her book to the Ripper and Sonia. ‘The doctors won’t let him read the whole thing because of his unstable mental condition,’ she laughs. ‘But he has seen bits and got legal aid to fight it.’

It is no longer meant to be possible for criminals, their families and even associates to benefit financially from newspapers, but there is nothing to stop a journalist contacting a criminal and writing his story. ‘I feel OK about writing a book about the Ripper. Obviously no money ever went to Sutcliffe.’

How much money does Barbara think she’ll make? ‘You can’t put a sum on it.’ But the News of the World paid £80,000 for its serialisation. ‘I’m going to make a donation to the victims’ trust.’

Barbara, an erstwhile Campaigning Journalist of the Year, author and former investigative reporter with The Mail on Sunday, is now a freelance writer. Private Eye described her as the seamstress of Fleet Street for her skill at stitching up people.

‘I’d say I was unforgiving rather than tough. I do harbour grudges. In court I was described as hard, but I don’t think I’m hard, I’m compassionate.’ She actually comes across as worldly and tenacious. She has been married twice to journalists and has two children, aged 28 and 24. ‘I just dragged the kids up myself. Single parenthood is the most ghastly thing.’ She is currently in an ‘on, off’ relationship with another journalist.

Barbara became involved with Sonia after the publication of Gordon Burn’s book on the Ripper, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son. ‘I was intrigued. I’d seen human nature in the raw at inquests, murders and with children who had taken overdoses, but the Sutcliffes didn’t fall into these cliches. ‘I couldn’t understand how Sonia could be defensive about her husband. He is the worst mass murderer in British history, he degraded women, yet she didn’t see any reason to move from their house.’

Barbara befriended Sonia professionally, using her to get to Sutcliffe. She had about a month’s worth of ‘tortuous meetings with Sonia’, including a two-week holiday. Then, unbeknown to the authorities, she spent 20 hours in Broadmoor’s central hall with Sutcliffe. She would, at his insistence, take him presents like Nescafe and orange juice.

‘I felt very uncomfortable sitting close to him for two hours at a time. He has mad, staring eyes. I used to feel I was going there for the victims, if that doesn’t sound too heroic. I thought if anyone was going to get the truth out of this evil bastard, I was.’

SHE added: ‘I wanted to find him living in ghastly solitary confinement, wasting away, full of remorse and with everybody hating him. I found precisely the opposite. He is smug, really happy about himself and all these women come to visit him. He has all his comforts, adulation and a huge mailbag every day.’

Barbara even went to Mass in the Broadmoor chapel with Sutcliffe. ‘I found it very upsetting watching the Yorkshire Ripper going up and getting Holy Communion. I used to look at the other people in chapel and wonder why God was allowing their disintegration.’

Barbara even took pity on Sutcliffe’s friend Ron Saxon, a schizophrenic who’d threatened his wife with a breadknife. ‘Ron became very dependent on me and asked me to marry him. He’d even bought a ring from a catalogue. I said, ‘Look, I’m really touched but I don’t want to get involved with any man.” She even visited his family and promised to go on seeing Ron. Her involvement with the Sutcliffes led to her being dragged into legal wrangles. There was the court case after Private Eye accused Sonia of negotiating deals with national papers. Sonia, who was later found to have lied herself, won record damages. ‘I was,’ says Barbara, ‘public enemy number one after the verdict.’

And then came the High Court 13 case in December 1990 in which Barbara represented herself as a litigant. The case involved Sonia suing the News of the World for libel following a report in which it alleged she had an affair in Greece with a lookalike of her husband Peter. Barbara, who had been on the holiday with her, was named by the paper as a third party to the action. Knowing Sonia, she knew exactly which buttons to press to destroy her image as a victim of the Ripper.

‘I stood to lose everything except the clothes I stood up in. There was no question of breaking down at any stage.’

Does she feel tainted with Sutcliffe’s evil? ‘I felt the force of evil.’ Sutcliffe, says Barbara, has had three stages in his life. First, as Peter Sutcliffe, the nobody from Bingley, West Yorkshire; then, Sutcliffe the murderer. Today, he is Sutcliffe the celebrity patient in Taunton block. Barbara prays this is the final stage: ‘I hope to God he never gets out – I know exactly where he’d come first.’

Voices From An Evil God: the true story of the Yorkshire Ripper and the woman who loves him is published by Blake at £14.99.

Deep in the woods, there are strange stirrings. One local is threatening to slash the tyres of restaurateur and mushroom lover Antonio Carluccio – his crime was to bring busloads of paying cep hunters from London. Another tells stories of night puffball raids. A third man likens finding a chanterelle to having an orgasm. Yet another won’t tell his wife where he goes when he disappears picking.

There are a lot of fungi fetishists about today.

The New Forest is the home of ceps, chanterelles, pieds de mouton, chicken of the woods and puffballs. All this high emotion, these murderous and lustful thoughts, are engendered by a passion for mushroom picking. Welcome to the intriguing world of strange fruiting bodies.

At Le Poussin restaurant in Brockenhurst, where New Forest donkeys wait outside the bakery opposite stealing the bread of unsuspecting customers, we enjoyed a delicious lunch of local produce, two courses for £10. Proprietor Alex Aitken – he of the night puffball raids – has kept prices low by gathering much free food himself. Mushroom featured heavily. After lunch Alex junior, his nine-year old son, took us into the forest to look for edible fungi – after considering whether or not to blindfold us. The woods were emerald green with moss and golden leaves on the ground. Suddenly there was a clearing, with a mare and nervy foal warming in the sunlight. Conditions of humidity and rotting vegetation were ideal and we found hundreds of chanterelles, sprinkled like gold among the poisonous mushrooms. Mushrooms years away from the white jobs you buy in the supermarket.

We were staying at the luxurious Chewton Glen where it was easy to stop thinking about fungi for a minute. Antique riding boots, leather-bound books and old tennis racquets were strewn round the house, and boleti in the larder. Our bedroom was big enough to ballroom-dance in, and you can swim in the bath while dreaming of gill smells, blunt-edged wrinkles, spore colours and the stinkhorn (Phallus impudicus), which has such a risque shape that Charles Darwin’s daughter burned any she found.

Mushroom guru Roger Phillips sometimes guides hotel guests round the forest, showing them how not to pick the deadly species that kill you after about half an hour. Hunters take wicker baskets, never using a plastic bag, because fungi soon sweat and collapse.

We lunched at the hotel on wild mushrooms in filo cases followed by haddock gateau. Then we indulged our obsession and found some giant puffball scattered like polystyrene balls round the grounds. Nearby we also found fly agaric, the deadly red and white mushrooms popular in fairy tales. Stone Age spearheads and Celtic pottery have been discovered on the nearby cliffs, but we unearthed some field mushrooms.

At Rocher’s, a seaside restaurant and the home of more mushroom fetishists, proprietor Alain Rocher won’t tell his wife where he forages for fungi. They talk glowingly of Mrs T, the local top mushroomer who, it is rumoured, sells to Harrods and once took a taxi from the New Forest to London with her fungi – and still made a profit.

There is, of course, more to do in this corner of the New Forest. The riding, for example, is magnificent and hiring horses from the East Street Stables, we rode through heather and streams, passing pink cottages in the middle of nowhere. The light and cloud formations are eye-catching. But next day we were back searching for mushrooms from the vantage point of the car (keeping an eye out for oncoming donkeys) and the following night stayed at Gordleton Mill Hotel, with its outstanding Restaurant Provence. The chef is dishy Jean Christophe Novelli and his famous creation is Pied de Cochon (braised pig’s trotter sometimes filled with, you guessed it, wild mushrooms) but mycologists should feed on the scallops with freshly pickled trompettes de la mort (horn of plenty mushrooms).

Gordleton Mill has slightly dodgy Gallic decor, but is idyllically positioned in a garden that sprouts field mushrooms. There is also a fridge to fit a juggernaut, stuffed with pieds de mouton and horn of plenty. Novelli scores his mushrooms from a Polish dealer.

People talk of murdering for less. Or just serving the type of mushroom that sends you straight to hospital, the death cap.

How: Until the end of this month Chewton Glen (0425 275341) offers dinner, bed and continental breakfast for two people from £255 a night (minimum stay two nights) including service and VAT.

A lot of people can’t stand television presenters Anne Diamond and Nick Owen. ‘I don’t have a personal need to be loved by everybody,’ retorts Anne, wearing a loud applique jumper with jewellery at the collar. She knows that she gets up people’s noses.

‘You want to be liked, it would be nice to be liked by everybody,’ she says. ‘But people automatically decide they love or hate you. Television takes you right into people’s homes and they form an opinion on you. Frankly, there’s not much you can do about that.’

Anne and Nick are sitting on a pinkish sofa, perhaps the first time they have done so publicly since they split up in 1986. Widely accredited with rescuing TV-am from the doldrums, they are being reunited on BBC1 for Good Morning … with Anne and Nick, starting on 12 October at 10.30am. The programme, it is said, will tackle major issues of the day.

‘We don’t like the word ‘issues’ very much,’ says Anne. ‘It sounds a bit weighty. We’ll be doing human journalism, people stories.’

‘It’s a topical magazine programme,’ interjects Nick. ‘Stress the word topical … There’ll be lots of specialists and advice spots – agony aunt, gardening, medicine, vet…’

‘Financial adviser lady, legal adviser lady,’ Anne pips in.

THERE will also be a big phone-in factor, says Nick, wearing a jazzy tie. ‘It’s not a phone-in programme, but people can phone 24 hours a day for advice and help.’ The counselling will be pertinent to the issue of the day. ‘We’re aiming at whoever is out there, not just housewives and kids. There are,’ continues Nick, ‘blokes out there.’

Anne is pretty, with perfect teeth. ‘People always say I’m pert.’ They also say she has the face of a chipmunk.

‘Writing that is a bloody disgrace,’ says Nick. ‘What will Anne’s parents or children think?’ Nick, on the other hand, has sad eyes. ‘I’m not a sad person,’ he says, in melancholic tone. ‘There is just a lot going on in the old emotions at the moment.’

‘I think his eyes are sensitive,’ says Anne.

Anne, 38, and Nick, 44, have been brought in to beat ITV’s saccharine duo, married couple Richard Madeley and Judy Finigan, the precious hosts of This Morning. ‘There is no personal rivalry,’ says Anne. ‘We know Richard and Judy fairly well, don’t we?’

‘Oh yeah, yeah… They have a great rapport, not surprisingly since they are married. But we spark off in our own way and our programme will have a very different feel.’

Mr Ordinary and Miss Average, as they were known in their TV-am days, are not married to each other. They talk then about their relationship. ‘Even people in the industry get muddled. We went on the telethon with all our children and I overheard a technician saying, ‘Ooh, I knew they were married, but I didn’t know they had that many kids.”

‘We have a terrific buzz between us. A great spark,’ says Nick. ‘It’s been there since we first met in 1979.’ Their affection for one another is palpable. Are they best friends? ‘Oh Christ yes. We’re on the phone to each other all the time.’

Their relationship doesn’t present difficulties with their respective spouses. ‘Anne’s husband has thrown us together again.’ Mike Hollingsworth is editing the new show.

Anne and Nick have a telepathic relationship. ‘We certainly know how each other is feeling during a live programme,’ explains that nice smiling Nick. So, Nick, how is Anne feeling now? Her manner is self-assured. He pauses before answering. ‘Fraught.’

‘Yuh,’ says Anne.

They both sit with their arms crossed protectively throughout the interview, communicating with their body language and rescuing one another from difficult questions. On television, if Nick wants to interrupt Anne, he strokes her thigh gently.

Anne doesn’t mind being back in the media spotlight. (She has, however, endured a horrific year following the cot death of her son, Sebastian.) ‘You only had to sneeze at TV-am and it was front page of The Sun. I broke my toe one day, and that made the front page, too,’ she says, high-pitched. RECENTLY Anna Ford launched an attack on the BBC for refusing to allow female journalists to tackle serious stories: television, she said, is middle-aged, middle-class, white Anglo-Saxon men. ‘You can get drawn too deeply into the sexist argument,’ counters Anne.

Nick thinks they have learned a lot with age. ‘Now I think, ooh yes, I see what Plato or Socrates meant.’

The real Anne and Nick are not much different from their screen versions. Nick is gentle and friendly, a sensitive soul, and Anne is quick-witted and sometimes a little prickly. They are both ever so bright and jokey. Talking to them is like having a conversation with a television programme. In 1985, Nick was dubbed one of the world’s most boring men. ‘That’s balls! I just said I was an ordinary guy, and this book, Glad To Be Grey, said I was striking a blow for ordinary people.’

This is all rather unfair because you will recall the incident when Pamela Stephenson tried to brighten him up by taking off his trousers in public. He took it in good part, but landed up in hospital later. ‘Yes, I said to her it would be all right to do it privately,’ he says, in well rehearsed manner.

So what are their qualities? ‘Ooh, Jesus,’ Nick exhales.

‘I can tell you what his characteristics are,’ says Anne, perkily. ‘I think he’s intelligent but gentle, terribly warm and humorous, caring and picky about his food.’

Does Nick disagree with anything Anne has said? ‘Ooh God,’ says Nick. ‘Well I’m not going to say ‘yes I am intelligent’. I like to think I’m reasonably bright. Anne is extremely sharp. She’s also very quick to get to the nub of an issue, terribly sensitive and she laughs at my jokes.’ Anne laughs. ‘On the downside she gets over-upset about things she shouldn’t worry about…’

‘He really is diplomatic,’ Anne jumps in. ‘Sometimes too calm. I could whack him for that…’ Giggle, giggle.

‘I love being whacked…’

‘…but I know he likes it too much.’ deputes.

Lorne Thyssen, heir to one of the richest men in the world and one of its most eligible bachelors, is talking about how he lost his virginity. ‘It was an extremely unpleasant experience. I was only 15 and it was with a hooker in Travemunde in Germany.

‘The poor girl was so bored with the whole thing that she never took her glasses off. She kept saying, ‘Are you finished yet?’ I found that deeply traumatising,’ says 29-year-old Lorne, giving his first-ever interview. ‘It was a nightmare. The whole thing took about half an hour and cost the equivalent of £40.’ He laughs.

We’re in New York, the city where Lorne is trying to get work as an actor. He comes from an extraordinary background. His father is the magnate Baron ‘Heini’ Thyssen-Bornemisza (annual income of about £25 million and assets estimated at a cool £1 billion), a passionate art collector who owns the world’s largest and most valuable private collection – it is rivalled only by the Queen’s.

His mother is former fashion model Fiona Campbell-Walter and he and his sister Chessie are the Baron’s children by his third marriage. (Heini’s current and fifth wife is the former Spanish beauty queen Tita Carmen.) ‘There aren’t many people who live like my father,’ says Lorne, ‘with private jet, yacht, a large staff, seven homes, and well, not quite a footman behind each chair. He lives like a 19th century grand seigneur.’ Next week is the grand opening, followed by dinner with the King of Spain, of the new home of the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection at the Villahermosa Palace in Madrid. Germany, Britain, France and the United States all vied to house the £800 million collection of some of the world’s finest works of art. ‘Unfortunately, Maggie Thatcher only offered gallery space in the Isle of Dogs or Manchester. You could hardly expect that to appeal to my father!’

The Baron is quoted this week as saying that his decision to make the loan permanent to Spain is meeting opposition from his children. ‘Absolute rubbish,’ says Lorne. Does he mind renouncing (with compensation) his claim to the pictures? ‘Oh God, no! You don’t know what a nightmare my father has lived trying to safeguard the collection.’

Lorne has arrived heavily scented. He is wearing a Ralph Lauren shirt, cravat and cheap shoes. He is good-looking, lean, has gel in his longish hair and smokes Marlboro constantly. One senses his incredible nervousness, but he has a front of enormous confidence. He is also startlingly clever, politically acute and has refined hands.

He is drinking Coca-Cola, having given up alcohol ‘again’ two months ago. ‘Drinking was an escape for me, an escape from not being able to deal with life,’ he says. ‘I’d been drinking since I was 17. I’d reached a stage where I actually drank to get drunk, very quickly. I wasn’t happy, I was maudlin. I suppose I did it because there were things in my childhood I didn’t want to face up to.’

His childhood was ‘a gilded cage’. His parents divorced when he was one and he was raised in Switzerland by a nanny. ‘I was actually something of a freak. I was taught to read at 18 months, to write aged two, and to do maths at four,’ says Lorne, who speaks five languages.

‘I was regimented by working four hours in the morning at the age of 18 months. Then, when I was four, I had earned the privilege of going to the local kindergarten where I could mix with the other kids. It was a really weird, strange childhood.

‘I WAS brought up in a typically English, emotionally constipated environment. But my mother adored me. I had a very tough English nanny and was left entirely to her charge. (My sister was being shunted round various schools). The nanny tried to bring me up against my mother. We lived in a different part of the house and my mother was this ghostly apparition one saw during meal times.

‘I had very little contact with children of my own age, and I became introverted and painfully shy. The time I spent with my father taught me to be a good listener. Also, it was the safest bet if rows were going on.’ (These days he is both extremely funny and a good raconteur. Later at dinner in New York’s fashionable Le Cirque, he starts reciting Shakespeare.) ‘I spent school holidays with my father. I was in awe of him until I was 16 and then we got properly pissed together and he realised that I wasn’t a complete idiot. I didn’t have a lot of contact with him when I was young. I saw him as this hugely powerful, daunting figure.’

Aged eight, Lorne was ‘sent to a prison camp in the Swiss Alps’ where he was always freezing and in floods of tears. At the age of 17, just three months before A-levels, he was expelled from Le Rosey after escaping detention, getting drunk and throwing up on the headmaster’s feet. He then went to Edinburgh University to read psychology, which he didn’t like, and dropped out after two years. In 1987 he did a ‘patriotic’ four months in the army, although he wasn’t obliged to do national service because he wasn’t resident in Switzerland.

‘I spent two weeks in a bunker in the Gotthard Pass, the most godforsaken hole you’ve ever seen. It’s not something I’d recommend to anyone – even the officers started cracking up.’

Lorne recently underwent intensive therapy to make changes in his life. ‘My main issue was guilt. I saw myself as morally degenerate. Therapy gave me back my self-respect, some self-worth and self-confidence. There are now fewer demons. Getting one’s self-esteem back probably does take more time.’ Lorne converted to Islam at the age of 25. Being one of the few Western converts and zealous to boot, he was seen as a leading light and a model Moslem. But his religion prohibits the consumption of alcohol. ‘You can’t imagine the shame I felt.’

HE HAS always refused to talk publicly about his religious beliefs. ‘Nothing could be more personal.’ Initially he was even reluctant to tell his father, who is a staunch Roman Catholic. When the British Press heard about his conversion he fled to Saudi Arabia to stay with Prince Sattam bin Saud. He converted after a kind of ‘divine warning’. ‘I felt the good Lord was running out of patience with me. I was in a lift in a building on Fifth Avenue when the cable snapped. We didn’t fall. I’d just been lugging the Koran around in my briefcase – I felt too overwhelmed by it to take the plunge – and this just seemed like a dramatic warning to stop dragging my heels.’

He looks pensive. ‘I’d always known I wanted to be an actor, but it didn’t seem possible. I was really in a bad state, finding it difficult to adjust after my time in the army, and very unhappy in a difficult relationship. So I dived into the religion. I became very immersed in it and was very extreme. The zeal of the convert and all that.’

He now observes the tenets of Islam, including giving alms, fasting, praying on a mat five times a day and going on a pilgrimage to Mecca. ‘Awesome! The difference between Islam and other spiritual paths is that Islam is like driving a Ferrari.’ He laughs.

We move to matters romantic. He once proposed to a household name (he won’t let me say who) and he has been linked with model Baroness Andrea Von Stumm (‘a French-style intellectual’), Koo Stark (‘I didn’t have an affair with her’), and Karina, the daughter of the late President Sukharno of Indonesia, to whom he became briefly engaged in 1985.

He met Karina at a friend’s house. ‘I immediately took an instant dislike to this girl. She was very abrasive, but somehow I ended up having dinner with her. All of a sudden – and we’d never even held hands or kissed – it just appeared to us both that we were meant to get married.’ So they got engaged – he was 23 – after knowing each other for just two weeks. They went to Gstaad for Christmas and it ‘was an utter disaster. The whole thing was a nightmare. We were miscast’.

He has a reputation as a ladies’ man but doesn’t see himself as a playboy, although he says he’s ‘sowed his oats’.

‘I haven’t had a relationship for four years now.’ He sighs deeply. ‘Of course I’ve had one-night stands. I’m a man and can’t say ‘no’ to my physical needs.’

He certainly behaves seductively. ‘Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I think people are meant to be in relationships where there is commitment on both sides. It ended very badly with my last girlfriend.’ (Model Michelle Brooks.) ‘I felt I was being dishonest because I didn’t want to get married.’

His mother was a strong influence over finances. ‘Matters regarding money were viewed with thrift,’ he giggles. ‘Of course, money is important, but a friend once said he wouldn’t swap shoes with me for £1 million, and I can understand that.’

The Baron pays him a ‘living’ allowance, but he doesn’t want the amount disclosed. He sold his London flat for £200,000 and rents his New York loft on the proceeds of the interest. Does he have any idea how much money he will inherit? ‘Yes,’ he says, cagily. He reckons he will ‘still have the drive to succeed’ afterwards.

He moved from London to America six months ago because he ‘doesn’t want to earn the wages that British actors do’. He behaves in the manner of any hungry actor, pleading for free copies of my photos. This summer he played Mephistopheles in a New York production of Faustus. He is reworking his film script, an ‘improbable’ love story between a Palestinian and an Israeli, and is keen to do a production of Richard III in New York.

‘The problem,’ he says, ‘is always where to find the finance.’ Won’t his father help? (‘My father has always said that if anyone in the family gets kidnapped, he won’t pay,’ he said earlier, laughing.) ‘I’d rather do it myself than go to my family. I’m sure he’d help if I asked.’ Is his father disappointed in him? ‘As long as you do something vaguely useful, my father is quite happy.’ It’s now 1am and Lorne offers to continue the interview in my hotel room.