Her reputation precedes her. Interviewers find actress Claire Bloom guarded, private and shy. They talk of her nervous sensitivity and fiercely controlled personality. She rarely reveals anything personal. So it is an honour to find her talking intimately and revealing secrets. Like the fact that this serene, elegant, very English actress used to take drugs: ‘Well, who didn’t in the Sixties?’ she says. ‘I did pot at parties and loved it. I loved listening to music or looking at paintings.’

She’s appearing next week at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, reading The Turn of the Screw. A talented actress and the darling of the gossip columns in the Fifties, she was shot to fame by Charlie Chaplin in Limelight. She has starred in A Streetcar Named Desire; as Lady Marchmaine in Brideshead Revisited; in The Camomile Lawn; and received rave reviews for her part in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanours (‘it’s impossible to make any assesment of him. He never talks to you after the interview’). Initially Claire is prickly. I say I feel tentative because she has been known to threaten closing interviews, on one occasion three times. Why? ‘There is no reason to go into that,’ she says, with the faintest American twang.

We’re talking in The Mark hotel in New York, the city in which she now spends most of her time. ‘It’s been a big wrench. I miss my London friends and family.’ She’s immaculate in ochre jumper, pale lemon skirt, perfect make-up and faultless bone structure. ‘You can’t be an actress without magnetism,’ she says later, ‘and magnetism has to be sexual. I can’t lack it – but it isn’t overt.’ She is beautiful and looks 20 years younger than her 61 years. Has she had plastic surgery? ‘It’s none of your business.’ She has always wanted to keep busy. ‘It isn’t that the parts don’t come in, but I’m very selective.’ To this end she has taken her one-woman Shakespeare all over America and taught Ibsen to ethnic minorities. ‘When I’m inactive I’m depressed. I like to have a reason to get up and things to do.’

She has been married three times, always to Americans (‘I’ve always been with the outsider because I am one’). First to Oscar-winning Rod Steiger; then to Howard Elkins, producer of Oh! Calcutta!; and now to Portnoy’s Complaint author Philip Roth.

‘My second marriage was so awful that I don’t even… it’s…’ her voice goes low. ‘I don’t even countenance it.’ It lasted three and a half years. ‘It was just ghastly’ (end of subject tone). ‘It was so unhappy. I don’t want to talk about it ever, as long as I live to anyone, including myself. It caused my daughter great hurt, it caused me immense pain.’ WAS it bad in terms of mental anguish or physical abuse? ‘No, not physical abuse. I wouldn’t have stayed two seconds for that. That’s something I won’t take from anyone. You walk. I don’t believe that any woman has got through life without encountering physical abuse once.’ When did she encounter it? ‘I don’t want to go into it.’ She sounds indignant. ‘I’m sorry, that’s very personal.’ She sips her coffee.

‘My first marriage was difficult,’ she continues. It lasted 10 years. ‘It’s very hard for two actors to marry, there is a certain amount of competitiveness – and we were very different people. I’m happy to say that Rod is now very happily married and having a baby’ (she sounds aghast) ‘at the age of 67. I’m thrilled for them. She is pretty and nice and my daughter’s age.’ Claire’s daughter, Anna, is by Rod.

‘Am I jealous? God almighty, no! I left Rod 25 years ago. As for the second one (husband), I don’t know whether he’s dead or alive, and I don’t care!’ We talk then about her life with Philip. They met once and then bumped into each other again on the corner of Madison and 67th. They’ve been together ever since – although for 11 years she was based in London six months of the year while he was in the States. ‘This is the first steady relationship I’ve ever had in my life,’ she says. ‘I’m not the easiest person to live with. I’ve got a lot of things wrong with me. Intolerance, short temper … but I figure I can’t be all bad. Philip has helped me become calmer.’

They wed in 1990, after living together for 15 years. She ‘doesn’t know’ why they married after so long, having often said marriage was an irrelevance. ‘I was wrong. It’s much nicer being married … I just felt we’d been together so long, gone through so much together and I just wanted a kind of seal on it.

‘He’s one of the most intelligent men in America. So you never lack good conversation. We’re alone lots in Connecticut. I’m not solitary in the way that he is – he can be alone from one month’s end to the next – but I like it too.’ Characteristically, she picks her words carefully.

She is intensely proud of her daughter Anna, an opera singer. ‘She has turned out to be a terrific girl. She never had drink and drug problems or any of these dreadful difficulties, so I can’t have done everything wrong. The second marriage was dreadfully hurtful to her because it was hurtful to me.

‘Also, there’s not a professional woman who doesn’t have the same problems I’ve had of trying to balance one’s life. There were times when I was away too much. But I love her immeas- urably.’

CLAIRE’S own family background was problematical. ‘You know that wonderful Gracie Fields song, ‘something, something, it’s all through your marrying our father you ruined the family’.’ She laughs uproariously, as she does often.

‘I feel sorry to say things about a man I hardly knew and scarcely remember,’ she says, suddenly sad. Her father left when Claire was 12 and went to seek his fortune in South Africa, divorcing her mother and remarrying. ‘Before that, it was a very rocky marriage. My mother was wonderful, a single parent – which up to a point I’ve been… ‘We moved a great deal because my father was always changing jobs, but I don’t know what he did. At one point he seemed to run quite a big factory and to have money. At other times we had nothing because of his gambling. ‘We lived all over. I didn’t have any education – I can truly say I didn’t. I can’t count the number of schools I went to – maybe eight or nine.’ She left aged 14.

‘It wasn’t an unhappy childhood, though it sounds it. I recall I didn’t like school and I liked playing ‘let’s pretend’ and dressing up. I didn’t have many friends, and I always had my nose stuck in a book. It was very much my mother and me against the world – with poor John, my younger brother, trailing behind.’

Claire, a charming woman with immense dignity and self-deprecatory humour, remains ‘an optimist’. She does yoga, meditation, aerobics – and therapy, occasionally. ‘I first went to therapy during that bad, bad, bad time. I went for three years. Then when we decided to live in New York it was such a wrench I went to someone again, someone with whom I keep in contact.

‘It’s marvellous being able to go to someone professional instead of going to your friends and crying and telling them a whole lot of rubbish they’ll tell somebody else.’ She pauses. ‘It’s very odd – when you read about actresses, so many of them have a disappeared father. Why do they all go into this ‘let’s pretend’ business?’ Cheltenham Literature Festival starts on Monday

Clarissa Dickson Wright, 45, daughter of the Queen Mother’s renowned surgeon, Arthur Dickson Wright, was the youngest ever barrister called to the bar. She practised for 13 years, decided she wouldn’t have any difficulty becoming a judge, and threw down her briefs to go to the West Indies and cook on a charter yacht in 1977. Permanently, she thought. But soon, feeling like some time in London, she took over a luncheon club in St James’s. Then, fancying a spell out of London, she applied to run a pheasant farm in Sussex. On being asked whether she knew all about pheasants (she knew nothing), Clarissa replied haughtily: ‘One does, doesn’t one?’ And got the job.

She followed this with a period of doing private catering. Then, deciding to go back into the law, naturally she fell into managing London’s specialist bookshop, Books For Cooks, just off the Portobello Road. Tonight Clarissa is our hostess. She was brought up to have dinner parties. Her mother had six ‘indoor’ servants. ‘I never thought anything of sitting down for dinner with 16,’ says Clarissa, sipping a glass of mineral water.

We’re sitting in the garden of Clarissa’s friend, Lady Mary Stewart, in the shadow of Harrods. ‘Versailles’ is what the serene Lady Mary laughingly calls her garden, because it is all green and white.

We’re here because this is Clarissa’s second home. Clarissa garden-sits for Lady Mary whenever she is away on yoga tours, preferring Lady Mary’s garden to her own lack of one in Battersea. But tonight Lady Mary, author of Yoga for Children, is in town.

Typically, some of Clarissa’s other friends have helped out this evening. One of her guests has given a hand laying the table. He is Peter Docherty, a talented ballet and theatre designer. On the table are purple thistle-like cardoon flowers, this year’s fashionable vegetable; blue candles in ecclesiastical candle sticks; Sicilian crockery from Ceramica Blue, near Portobello Road; and massive blue Turkish glasses, from Verandah, also in Portobello.

Instead of overhead lighting (the moon is on low wattage tonight) there are garden flares and about 100 candles ‘twinkling magically’ on the stone floor.

There’s one other guest who has lent a hand. He’s Henry Crichton-Stuart who, having once been aide-de-camp to the governor general of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (Malawi), uses his diplomatic skills to help Clarissa organise the place settings. He’s also a cousin of the Marquis of Bute and has flown down from Bute, where his family has been since the 10th century, just for Clarissa’s dinner.

In addition to the help from her guests, Clarissa has employed her friends, Henrietta Palmer and Mel Watson, to waitress. William Morland provides the background music, fiddling right through the dinner party for a mere £30.

And what of the other guests? Queen Victoria and her son, Prince Edward, appear to have been invited. They are Alice de Mellet de Bonas and her quietly charming son, George. Alice, 72, is the vegan version of Queen Victoria. Five years ago, following the death of her Czech lawyer husband, she decided to dress up as Queen Victoria and ‘open things’. Alice is apparently descended from Queen Victoria (via Queen Victoria’s father). Tonight Alice, gentle and enchanting, is off-duty and whispers she’s wearing an M & S dress. It’s black velvet with lace lovingly added by hand. Another guest is the food writer, Claudia Roden, elegant in Jean Muir jacket and navy silk culottes.

Novelist Jane Barry bursts into the garden resplendent in very red hair and a black dress she describes as ‘a piece of sculpture’. She is covered in ethnic jewellery and complains loudly about ‘a pair of very uncomfortable shoes’. Once calmed down, she talks about her forthcoming novel, Hungry, on which Clarissa was ‘food adviser’.

Last to arrive on a financial high, is about-to-be-bond-salesman Adrian Braimer Jones, whose main claim to Clarissa’s affections ‘is that he keeps bees’.

He immediately tackles Clarissa’s cousin, Peter Thompson, about the Royal Family. Peter wrote the unauthorised biography of Robert Maxwell and has a book coming out on Fergie. ‘She’s much more likeable than Robert Maxwell,’ is all he will reveal, drily.

Over drinks, Lady Mary has a wonderful conversation about wasps not communicating. She, like Adrian, is a bee-keeper. Peter Thompson talks about Alice’s childhood in Ireland and how she married a diplomat. Pre-dinner drinks are mineral water or Taittinger NV champagne. Six of Clarissa’s guests are teetotallers, being reformed alcoholics.

Tonight the menu is completely English. The starter is in honour of Henry: 13th century herrings ‘in the fashion of Bute’ – herrings filled with hard-boiled eggs and potatoes, served with a green sauce. The fish come from Selfridges. The accompanying wine is a white Burgundy, Pernand-Vergelesses 1987.

Then there’s an Elizabethan main course, delicious roasted loin of veal stuffed with its own kidneys, served with gooseberry sauce. ‘Leopold Bloom loved to eat the inner organs of animals,’ Clarissa is heard to utter when this dish arrives. The meat comes from Quatro Bello in Camden Town. The main course is accompanied by Staton Hills Cabernet Sauvignon 1987, which has just won the All America Gold Medal 1992, although this will not be officially announced until November.

The vegetables accompanying the meat are cardoons poached in beef stock; hot buttered watercress, the Victorian way of doing it; carrots pureed with lovage, a medieval dish; asparagus pease, an Elizabethan recipe in which asparagus tips are cooked with butter and mint; plus new potatoes. The vegetables, apart from the cardoons from her country garden, all come from Portobello market.

Clarissa freely pronounces herself ‘cardoon obsessive’, she grows these unusual vegetables in Lincolnshire and has spent the last four years trying to promote their reintroduction to England. She sells them to order from Books for Cooks in Blenheim Crescent.

Just in case this herbivorous banquet proves insufficient, Clarissa has catered for her only vegan guest with a superb concoction of smoked tofu, aubergine, tomato, mushroom and coriander.

This feast is followed by raspberries with mouthwatering Cornish burnt cream, a 17th century recipe of layers of egg custard and clotted cream. There isn’t a grill here, so Clarissa appears – flaming blowlamp in hand – and proceeds to brulle it at the table, a 20th century way of doing it. Because it is an English meal, there then follows a savoury: a little potted lobster with clarified butter and mace.

Over dinner, Jane talks about matters New Age and psychic. ‘Archdeacons are generally not renowned for their panache,’ she is heard to say. Then follows a conversation about university degrees and how they bear on success in life.

Peter Docherty utters: ‘Three jumbo jet-loads of people die a day from nicotine-related illness.’ He has just given up smoking. Claudia and Lady Mary talk about the pressure to have A Significant Other in life. Then there is conversation about George’s job and the day he had to get on a plane at Gatwick in full costume.

Clarissa has been cooking all day. She cooked the dishes that needed to be prepared in advance at home, and the rest at Lady Mary’s. Catering in someone else’s home is easy for her, ‘after, all I did it for a living’. She entertains fortnightly – intimate non-al fresco dinner parties in her own home – and only uses Lady Mary’s sky-high dining room four or five dry evenings a year.

The food cost about £150, the wine £145, the help (excluding fiddler) £80. The meal was an historic and gastronomic triumph. It is agreed that Clarissa, clever and wildly generous as ever, has done it again. Blue Turkish glasses of water and champagne are raised in a toast.

There is something tacky about ice-skating. One goes to meet Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean expecting Colgate smiles and the psychological equivalent of sequins. Instead, they talk for the first time about their traumatic childhoods, the shocking death of his father, their intimate relationship and their years of celibacy. They are humble, genuine and touching.

We meet at Queens Ice Rink, west London, where they are practising during The Best of Torvill and Dean UK tour. This is Nottingham’s celebrated ‘Royal Couple’, four times world champions, Olympic gold medallists and the only team in skating history to be awarded nine perfect scores.

Jayne is weeny, with a full face, big eyes, generous lips and a recently acquired antipodean twang. She is 34 and looks innocent in jeans, white lacy shirt, koala bear brooch and hair in pony tail. She looks to Chris before replying to questions. Also 34, he is tall, blond and be-jeaned and has a pronounced dimple on his chin.

Chris is ‘married’ to two women: his partner Jayne, with whom he has formed an unusually strong bond over 17 years, and his wife of one year (his protege, as his curriculum vitae would have it), the French Canadian ice-dancer Isabelle Duchesnay.

Jayne, in turn, has her ice partner and her ‘other partner’ – her husband of two years, American sound engineer Philip Christensen. Jayne and Chris spend more time with one another than they do with their respective spouses.

Their symbiotic relationship is partly rooted in their childhood experiences. Chris doesn’t remember much of his. His father was a miner and they lived in a two-bedroom council flat.

‘I suppose when it’s unhappy you block things out.’ He talks slowly. His parents divorced when he was six. ‘I lost my Mum. She went off.’ He doesn’t know why he was left with his father, who swiftly introduced a stepmother. ‘I’d been very much tied to my mother’s apron strings. She’d always been with me and looked after me – and suddenly she’d gone.’

‘And he didn’t understand why.’ says Jayne.

‘It wasn’t as if she was just around the corner. I didn’t know where she went to.’ Chris didn’t see his mother again for nine years. ‘Then things were very cool between us. By then my stepmother had taken her role. I suppose losing Mum made me independent.’

Jayne partnered Chris, aged 16. She was also an only child. ‘I wasn’t ever lonely,’ she offers, in a way that suggests she might have been. Her father was a newsagent and her mother did odd jobs. (‘A very working class background.’) She went to grammar school. ‘So they thought I was going to be clever.’

‘But you managed to fool them,’ interjects Chris, affectionately. She passed only two of her nine O-levels.

Chris reveals more about his emotional make-up, talking about his father. His father suffered a heart attack and died, aged 59, just after the 1984 Olympics. Chris was only 26.

‘That was very difficult,’ he says, talking heavily and sighing deeply. ‘I felt very alone. You’re probably crying for yourself and the way you feel, so it’s kind of selfish. But I felt so alone.

‘I had to deal with all these organisations which dealt with death all the time, so they are quite blase about it. And I wanted to shake everybody and say, ‘My father has just died! Doesn’t it mean anything?’ ‘My father worked down a coal mine and smoked a lot. He worked seven days a week. For 20 years he got up at 5am every morning to go to work, just to cover costs. The minute I earned some money, he could have retired.’ He pauses. ‘But he died.

‘We weren’t one of those families, like middle-class families, where you have a lot of conversation. We never talked. But we had a quiet understanding of each other. We meant a lot to one another without saying anything. We never told each other we loved one another, I wish I’d done that now. And I wish I had known him more – he was never there because he was always working.’ He speaks regretfully.

‘Suddenly my mother (as he calls his stepmother) became dependent on me. I had to do a lot of growing up quickly, become responsible and be a provider.’ He still supports his stepmother financially.

We talk then about the relationship between Jayne and Chris. Their rapport (professionally they echo one another’s every glance and movement) is legendary. ‘We’re not brother and sister, we are a bit more,’ Chris has said. But people – despite their protestations – always made out that there was more to their relationship than met the ice.

Did they have crushes on one another? ‘I think so, when we started . . .’

‘I think,’ interrupts Jayne, ‘it was because we liked one another that we became friends.’

Did she really want to marry him? ‘I never said I wanted to marry him,’ remonstrates Jayne.

‘People probably thought we were strange because we didn’t bring other people into our lives,’ resumes Chris. ‘But that would have sidetracked us.’ So were they both celibate? ‘I guess so,’ they say, simultaneously and laugh nervously.

Were they really celibate from the ages of 16 until they both married, aged thirtysomething? ‘Yeah, pretty closeted lives. But I don’t want to get into our sexuality,’ says Chris, his voice rising.

Are they saying they didn’t sleep with anyone? Jayne protests that this is too personal. ‘There was no one else for years,’ admits Chris. Do they love one another? ‘Not the same way as my wife.’

It did not always appear thus. ‘If one of us fell for someone else, our partnership could not survive,’ Jayne once said.

‘We’ve grown up since then,’ explains Chris.

‘When Chris got married, there was nothing to make me feel jealous,’ she adds. Their marriages, they say, haven’t affected their partnership. There is, they say, no difficulty with their respective spouses over their being so close, nor with Jayne being inextricably linked with Chris in the public consciousness.

‘The difficulty is to do with making our separate lives coincide. The difficulty with our marriages is that we haven’t had much time together because our lives are split like that.’ Chris makes a V with his arms. ‘It’s hard having a telephone relationship. You just have to throw yourself into work and not be bitter about it.’

Jayne lives in a small two-bedroom Knightsbridge house with her husband. Chris (who drives an old Renault) has a three-bedroom cottage in Buckinghamshire and a rented apartment in Germany: ‘Isabelle lives out of a suitcase.’ Does he feel married? He exhales deeply. ‘It’s different in there.’ He motions to his heart.

‘We’re doing the skating while we can,’ he continues. ‘It’s difficult not being with the person you want to be with.’

‘He’s stuck with me,’ says Jayne.

‘I didn’t mean it to come out like that. It’s hard if you marry someone and then don’t see them for the majority of the time. I’ve been married a year and of that I’ve had less than three months with my wife. Just days here and there.’

Jayne and Phil have had more time together: ‘When we first married we were together for six weeks.’

The Torvill and Dean partnership will come to an end when their bodies give up – or Jayne decides to have children. ‘I’d like to have children before my time clock runs out.’ Jayne starts unconsciously to wring her hands and cradle her body. ‘I can’t leave it much longer.’

Before they leave, the millionaires who have struggled for financial security look at one another. It is said they have a telepathic relationship. ‘You want some sandwiches?’ asks Chris.

‘I was just about to take some,’ says Jayne, and wraps in a red napkin the sandwiches the Queens Ice Rink management have left on the table. * Torvill and Dean, 17-26 September at Wembley Arena.

IT’S OVER. The harsh streaks of an uneasy dawn brings the news that they have found the last of them. He is dead. We are told he is Peter Alcock. More we do not know.

Faces sunk from lack of sleep take in the information and turn away. There is no emotion left. The price of coal!

I look around what is for me an unfamiliar landscape. The head-gears over the shafts look like giant, grey steel Meccano constructions. Their halogen lights are always on for shift workers, making the whole place look somewhat like the Nottingham Forest football ground under floodlights. A yellow bulldozer goes back and forth up a black mountain, stockpiling coal. There are 400,000 tonnes in these mountain stocks – enough to fuel 100,000 homes for a year. You’d need climbing gear to tackle one of these man-made mountains.

They should be selling it – but they are over-producing. The killer around here, says one policeman without irony, is the dash for gas. They have 14 million tonnes of coal on the ground in Bilsthorpe. We are in Robin Hood country, the region near Sherwood Forest. But this is the land not of merrie men but dejected ones.

There is frost on the road and there are patches of fog. You can make out industrial estates, quarries and flesh-coloured buildings – miners’ houses on the fringe of the pit.

It is a busy and bustling community during the day but it is no place to be standing and stamping one’s feet during the night; especially this night.

Around 4am it really hits me. Two orange-suited miners with lamps on their heads and in their hands walk past. The air is chilly and it may be only that which set off the shivers.

We are waiting for two men still 2,000 feet beneath the ground on which I stand.

Now we know they were dead already. Then, we still had hope. Even so, I couldn’t stop thinking of the wife of David Shelton, 31, from Bingham, who was visited by a personnel manager earlier in the evening. She is eight months pregnant and has an 18-month old child – and he had to tell her that her husband had been found dead.

Despite all the technological advances in recent years the fear that their man might not return from their shift lurks in the subconscious of every miner’s wife from the day they marry to the day he retires. It is that which makes miners wives special people and miners’ communities special: The price of coal.

In St Margaret’s Church they lit five candles for the missing. Forty people turned up for the service of mourning for the dead and exaltation for the living.

It started at 11am yesterday when the collapse occurred. The flying squad emergency team from Mansfield Hospital and the pit’s emergency team were immediately in operation.

They brought out Paul Smith with facial injuries, in deep shock but conscious, with a sore back.

Then they found Bill McCulloch, a 26-year-old bachelor who lived with his parents. Bill was dead.

It is different at pitheads these days in times of disaster. Mourning is done in private. Technology detracts somehow from the great drama of the rescue. Yet it is human still. Throughout the night colliery workers brought us tea and coffee.

‘There were one or two doomwatchers at Toppa Pit Lane,’ said a security man, ‘but now it’s quiet.’

Earlier he was given flowers – white and yellow roses and pink hydrangeas picked by an ex-miner from Clipstone pit and a former miner from Bilsthorpe.

‘They wanted them put inside pit shafts,’ he said. ‘If he’s taken t’trouble to pick them, I must get them down there when I’m allowed.’ The flowers lay on a plastic chair in his office dying – while the teams of tired men, working ‘20-minute snaps’ pursued a rescue operation in which hope was fading.

And then, suddenly, it was over and the miners and their families returned to get on with the rest of their lives, while we who came to report upon this night got into our cars and drove away weary past a gamut of safety instructions: ‘Wear gloves’ dictated one sign on the road; ‘Think before you act’ said another; ‘Remove dangers yourself’; ‘Wear eye protection’; ‘Know your support rules’.

For us the morning brought another story in another part of the country.

Terence Conran built a £200 million empire and then watched most of it disappear. Now he’s redesigning and – he hopes – rebuilding his dreams.

SIR TERENCE Conran screws up his face, goes red, whacks the table and his coffee spoon flies up in the air. He grimaces. His wife has said he has the most tremendous temper. ‘I’ve lost complete control only half a dozen times in my life. Then I get into extreme fury and out of control. I hope it’ll never happen again in my life. It feels rather like being sick, physically draining,’ he says.

‘I lose my temper with Shirley (his former Superwoman wife). She’s somebody who just goes on and on and on and will not let the subject die.’ On other occasions, like today, he’ll thump the table and people think he’s losing his temper. ‘But actually it’s just me marking an exclamation mark.’ A boat goes by outside the window and Sir Terence lights a cigar. Next February Sir Terence will open London’s largest restaurant, Quaglino’s, in Bury Street, St James’s. Founded in 1911, it was London’s most fashionable restaurant in the Thirties and has been closed since 1980. Sir Terence is sitting in his Butlers Wharf office, overlooking Tower Bridge, with Conran furniture, modern art and freshly ground coffee. The cultural hero is wearing a navy linen suit, college shoes, red polka dot tie and gruff expression. He looks very attractive.

He opened his first Habitat shop in 1964, improved the public’s taste, helped bring the word ‘design’ into the dictionary and made a great deal of money. But he met Nemesis in 1987 when he faltered in the City and decided he wanted out of Storehouse (BhS, Habitat, Mothercare and Richard Shops). Less than five years ago, he was ‘worth £200 million on paper’. And now? ‘What I am worth is my own business.’ The expression in his eyes is lifeless. ‘The turnover of my various businesses now comes to around £35 million. Peanuts compared to the old days, but reasonably substantial . . Well, Butlers Wharf has gone into receivership. And he left Storehouse in May 1990 (a year before he was due to retire) with a seven per cent stake. Once worth more than £100 million, that stake, which he later sold, was then worth less than £30 million.

‘I don’t feel like yesterday’s man. I happen to be running probably London’s currently most successful store (The Conran Shop) and certainly three of London’s most successful restaurants (Bibendum, Le Pont de la Tour and Blueprint Cafe).’

The restaurants appear to be flourishing. But he bought the Conran Shop UK in May 1990 for £3.5 million; a year in which the shop made pre-tax profits of £506,000. Observers question whether it is now likely to see similar returns.

Sir Terence is opening another Conran Shop in Paris. In London a smoked fish shop and ‘yet another’ restaurant, Cantina, are scheduled to open in November. And then there’s Quaglino’s.

‘Quaglino’s is to be the biggest brasserie in London. It will seat 400 people. There’s going to be lots of art in it. I’ve asked contemporary art dealer Kasmin to use some of the walls as a gallery now that his Cork Street gallery has closed.’

Conran also has a furniture business, Benchmark Woodworking Ltd, is chairman of the Design Museum and is writing a couple of books for his publishing house Conran Octopus. ‘One book is rather appropriately called Back to Basics.’

Yet he has a slight air of disillusionment, a languorous feel to him. He also has a bit of a lisp and a somewhat depressed manner of speaking, as if he can’t muster the enthusiasm. But he has a wry humour, though he doesn’t go out of his way to charm. Perhaps this is defensiveness.

He studied at Central School of Art and Design and married three times – first to Brenda Davidson, then to art school graduate Shirley Pearce by whom he has two sons, Sebastian and Jasper; and now to food writer Caroline, by whom he has three more children, Tom, Sophie and Ned. ‘He has been married to Caroline for 27 years. ‘We pursue relatively independent lives’ – a fact which friends emphasise – ‘but we do get on extremely well.’ He is proud of his children. ‘I don’t think I was a model father, I’m not a family man or conventional father. But I think I was more than adequate. Shirley and I were divorced in fairly difficult circumstances, after six years of marriage – some happy, the rest deeply unhappy. I think I was discarded (he laughs) because I didn’t fit into her plans. I think she probably regretted it in later years!

‘Shirley is an extremely ambitious woman and it’s difficult to live with someone intensely ambitious. She was rushing round the world and Caroline took on the mothering role. Caroline and I were probably a haven of sanity for Jasper and Sebastian. Caroline probably compensated on the emotional side for my simplicity in that area.’

His son, fashion designer Jasper, is homosexual. Sir Terence has said that that is Jasper’s choice, though he thinks it harder to find happiness as a homosexual. ‘I don’t blame myself at all. That would be like an Indian family being upset because they’d got a girl instead of a son.’ He lights his cigar again. Extracting personal information from him is, initially, like trying to persuade him to furnish his homes with Louis XVI and ruched curtains.

‘When Jasper was only three some gay friends of mine told me, ‘Japser is going to be gay.’ They knew. Many of my friends are gay and one’s son being gay isn’t any different. I don’t think it has anything to do with upbringing – I’ve certainly never had any homosexual tendencies myself. I think people are born that way. Not for one moment have I ever been worried, sad or embarrassed that Jasper is gay.’

We talk then about Sir Terence’s childhood. His parents, both from ‘extremely wealthy’ families who had lost their money in the 1929 crash, had to scrimp to send him to school. ‘We were pretty broke. But I didn’t feel deprived. I’d never known any different. It was the war years and life was very austere.’

He was expelled from Bryanston, aged 16. ‘I was caught riding a bicycle without lights in the direction of Tarrant Rushton aerodrome at midnight. I was having a midnight tryst with my girlfriend.’

They lived in London then Liphook. ‘A perfectly pleasant upbringing.’ His father imported resin for paint. ‘He got rather fed up that things went badly for him.’ The young Terence was industrious: he collected wild flowers, was a lepidopterist and had a workshop and pottery at home. He was also like his mother, ‘emotionally controlled with a great creative talent and wonderful eye’. From this came the self-professedly self-confident, loyal and intolerant Sir Terence.

The adult Sir Terence has worked hard. He has even been called a workaholic. ‘I don’t think I am.’ Nowadays he gets up at 5.30am and goes to bed at midnight. In between he leads an ‘intensely unhealthy life, smoking cigars, eating too much and drinking good wine’. He ‘relaxes’ in the bath. ‘I lie in the bath and think about how the towel dispenser is going to fit into the wash basin at Quaglino’s.’

He is ‘sad’ about his Storehouse experience. ‘Though at one stage I was doing more work than was good for me. I felt physically and mentally exhausted. I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got all these carrier bags of reports to do and meetings shunting up against each other.’ But I miss the mass-market element. My greatest regret is that I’ll never finish that job (of revitalising the companies). That rankles.’ He’s also sad he wasn’t able to finish Butlers Wharf in the way he dreamed.

He has never done anything ‘purely to make money’. For him, work is pleasurable. He was impoverished when he started off and has said he doesn’t want to die rich. ‘It would be silly and offensive to say one’s not interested in money though,’ says this man who believes in the principles of socialism and has never voted Tory. ‘I’ve spent my money on houses and doing them up and on pictures and sculpture. But I’ve never dreamed of owning Irises or anything. I don’t like external manifestations of wealth in any way.’

And is it true that he’s mean? ‘Ah, my meanness! I don’t like waste. I try to tell everyone how much photocopies cost and I encourage them to switch the lights out. I don’t like them to throw away anything that can be used. People confuse that with meanness.’

Sir Terence softens as the interview proceeds, smiling more, laughing often and taking the mickey. I warmed to him. But he guards his emotions more than most. ‘He doesn’t ever show his emotions or speak about them,’ Jasper once said of his father.

‘I think,’ says Sir Terence slowly, ‘emotions are very private things. I don’t express them to other people. They are just for me. I like being under control.’ He doesn’t respond well to probing questions and keeps moving his chair farther away.

He is also a surprisingly shy man. ‘I am very self-contained. I’m not shy with people I know well. But I hate going to parties. I loathe meeting new people. I really don’t know what to talk to them about. I get embarrassed.’ He is now 60 – an age when many multi-millionaires would be thinking of retiring. Would he like to wind down his work to spend more time, say, with his wife?

‘No. I’ll never retire. I’ll never stop doing things. I hope to have projects on the go until I die.’ It has been said by a friend of his that Sir Terence is deeply afraid of growing old and dying. Typically he demurs. ‘Actually, I’m quite relaxed about the idea that death is an inevitability.’

Is death The End? Is there an afterlife? How does he view dying? He shakes his head and motions with his expressive hands, does a kind of whistle, says chuuu, and does a ‘curtains’ gesture followed by a sort of Nazi salute. This indicates that ‘my body is going to be taken away and cut up for scientific research. Then there’ll be a huge fireworks display and a wonderful dinner for my friends when I hope they’ll get very merry’. So he’s not reckoning on coming back again? ‘One would be rather surprised.’ When would he like to die? ‘I hate the idea of being senile. I’d like to die at 75, no older than that. Then I think, ‘Oh my God, I’ve only got another 15 years to do all these things I want to do.’ ‘

TODAY is probably the world’s biggest ever redundancy party. Thousands of British Telecom employees will be celebrating becoming former British Telecom employees. In fact there’s never been a Black Friday quite like it. More than 30,000 jobs are to be shed this year, of which 19,000 go today. And with generous redundancy payouts for them all, the mood promises to be one of Gold Rush fever. As if everyone has won the pools.

Which has led to speculation that the pubs will be awash with BT chaps waving fat cheques and drinking themselves silly after organising a giant conga out of the BT headquarters.

There have been parties all week. Parties all round the country. Yesterday the celebratory wrist exercises started at 11.30 am. The venue? Upstairs at The Sir Christopher Wren pub in the shadow of St Paul’s, within a square mile of HQ and about a dozen other BT buildings.

One man drinks three pints before midday. ‘”Downstairs in the function room other BT folk are ringing the changes. The room has been booked from 12.30 until the evening and up to 150 people are expected. But there isn’t a Beattie in sight. ‘The assembled party goers are all male.

Bill is counting 20 lots of £20 notes and leaving them behind the bar to pay for the drinks. ‘Some of them just leave a credit card behind the bar,’ says landlady Julie Wood. ‘We’ve had a party every day this week. Some go on all day.’ After all, they’ve had their salary slips, so they know the redundancy money is in their accounts.

‘The atmosphere’s like the Notting Hill Carnival,’ says one Invisible Man – like many, he signed the Official Secrets Act in the days when BT employees were civil servants and doesn’t want to be named. ‘Some of The Suits are getting £200,000 pay-offs. And people in their twenties are getting deals that exceed £20,000.’ This Invisible Man wears a white short-sleeved shirt and grey slacks, called ‘BT Image Clothes’ by these folk.

Employees have been raring to accept voluntary redundancy. The revellers tell stories of the faxes that have been pouring out of the machines in BT over the last few weeks. One is an unprintable version of the song Please Release Me Let Me Go. Another is a tasteless joke involving Princess Diana. ‘’

Stories of those who have been turned down are legion. ‘I know a whole department which applied,’ says bearded Alex, who has taken off a half day to be at this party. Unusually, he is still employed, and happy. ‘One guy had a terrific fight. It was war. He was shouting and thumping at the table trying to get out. The ones who have asked to go and haven’t been allowed are incredibly bitter.

‘One technical officer was told he could go. He sold his house and got a place at college and a grant – and then he got a letter saying he couldn’t leave. ”

Another man whose application was accepted adds: ‘There are people who have ordered cars in the belief that they’re going to get redundancy, and they’ve been turned down.’ He is 54 years old. ‘I was turned down twice. I’m glad – because this is a much better offer.’

An anonymous engineer of 54 is holding the party today. He has left the company after 33 years. ‘I’m happy to go,’ he says, with a grin. ‘I won’t look for another job. I’ve got plenty to occupy myself at home. Only time will tell if I’ve got enough money never to work again.’ The music blares. How does he feel about his job prospects? ‘You can always take early-morning cleaning jobs if you’ve got to make ends meet.’

His friend, a man with a kindly face and coloured shirt, has also worked for the company for 33 years. He’s divorced and has three children over 18. ‘I used to enjoy the job, but morale’s got so low now.’ He’s drinking bitter shandy to stay sober. ‘I’ve already been to a party on the Regalia boat this week.’ Nearby a man pretends to kiss his friend with abandon on the cheeks. ‘I’ve retired,’ he continues, with glee. He says he’s been counting the hours since he was told in April that he could go. ‘When people ask what I do, I’m going to say I’m a ‘pensioner bumming around’. I’m going to spend every day playing golf. I’ve got to go to the dole office to get national insurance credits. If a job comes up I bet I’ll get it,’ he says morosely. ‘But I don’t want one.’ He’s having his Redundancy Party on Friday. ‘I’m putting £200 behind the bar.’ ”’

Dave Flack, 27 and single, has long hair and a gold earring. He wears jeans and T-shirt. He doesn’t mind being named. ‘”He has worked for 11 years, doing private wire maintenance. Latterly he was paid a salary of £19,000. ‘I don’t have a job to go to. I’ll probably do part time work for BT through Manpower.’ Why did he decide to leave? ‘Because I wanted a change.’ He also got ‘over £20,000′ redundancy. ‘‘Hopefully I’ll be able to buy a house.’

Chairman Iain Vallance hasn’t joined them. He’s out of town today at the BT AGM in Birmingham. ‘He’s a dove,’ says the 54-year-old would-be golfer. ‘He really knows how to look after people.’

Down the street, more former BT employees are revelling al fresco outside the Master Gunner pub. This is the party for Rick Hullett, who is bald, genial and drinking whisky. They’re all signing someone’s leaving card which reads ‘congratulations’. It’s 2pm and the atmosphere is like that in a coach of football fans. Lots of roars and cheers.

Andy Yates, 30, is ‘happy’ to leave after 14 years. He’s getting ‘over £30,000′. ‘I’m going to North London University to do computing and information technology.’

There are 20,000 people who have been refused a redundancy package because of oversubscription.

‘”‘”‘”-£ So what of the conga? ‘What!’ says a former engineer. ‘With all the people leaving, it would clog up London.’

BT: THE FACTS * 19,000 jobs will go today with another 11,000 to be axed by the end of the year. Payoffs range from between £17,000 to £204,000.

* 35,000 jobs have been cut in the past two years.

* BT made profits of £3 billion in the last financial year – £250 million a month between October and December, or £95 a second.

* BT has announced a 27.8 per cent fall in pre-tax profits for the first quarter to 30 June this year.

* Chairman Iain Vallance last year received a salary increase of 43 per cent taking his basic pay and bonuses to £534,000. This year’s 12.5 per cent increase if matched to bonuses could take his pay to well over £600,000. * The company, which was privatised in 1988, has 26 million customers, three quarters of whom rent phones at £17.88 a year.

* Complaints about BT rose to almost 41,400 last year, up from 38,530 in 1990 according to official regulator Oftel.

* Oftel has ordered BT to lower connection charges from £152.75 to £99. Also ordered a review of charges.

* BT uses 45,000 tons of paper for Yellow Pages directories, 2,300 tons in photocopier machines, 1,750 tons in brochures and publications and 25 tons for business cards.

* Maureen Lipman and the Beattie advertisement campaign was dropped in favour of the £20 million Get Through To Someone campaign. March 1992. * A £12 million campaign was launched with police to defeat obscene callers in July 1992.

Imran Khan – sex symbol, matinee idol and pin-up cricketer – is not fantastically good looking. Maybe it’s because his eyes are particularly small, his nose contrastingly large, his facial skin slightly mottled and his chest hair peeks through the gold chain over his T-shirt neck. He looks as if he’s just woken up after a hard night of drinking, although, being a good Moslem, he doesn’t drink. And he appears exhausted. Anyway, it’s difficult to see what all the fuss is about.

‘I never thought I was good looking, ever,’ he says in his accent that is a hybrid of Oxford and Lahore. ‘People started saying I was when I became successful, so I equate it with success. My sister used to say I was ugly, and I agreed.’

He doesn’t have any of the flirtatiousness or overwhelming charm one expects either, but he does have a presence, a great gentleness, and what New Yorkers call mensch. Does he like being a sex symbol? ‘It’s one of those things you don’t take seriously.’

We’re sitting in his Knightsbridge maisonette, conveniently located above L’Escapade nightclub which is always full of the Sloaney blondes who fancy him the most. Up here there’s a mirrored dining room and canopied bedroom with painted tiger on the wall, a bedroom of great expectations. Imran is wearing track-suit pants and open-toed massage sandals with plastic bobbles.

The phone rings, the first of countless times. He is, after all, one of the world’s greatest all-round cricketers, an Oxford graduate in PPE (albeit a third) and a proud Pathan from an affluent Pakistani background. In the Eighties, he became part of the high-society Party Set, a darling of the paparazzi, he practically lived in the St James nightclub, Tramp. Once constantly spied in the company of beautiful women, his companions have ranged from artist Emma Sergeant to actress Stephanie Beacham, Susannah Constantine (erstwhile partner of Lord Linley), the daughter of the exiled King of Greece, and Sita White, daughter of Lord White of Hanson. He’s now almost 40, but the image of the hunky playboy lingers. However, most of the women he steps out with are now sensibly married and cynics say he only escorts them to get press for the cancer hospital he wants to build in Pakistan. So will Imran remain a bachelor?

His eyes light up when we start to talk about women, but he doesn’t smile easily. ‘People always assume that the reason I’m scared to give up my independence is because I have lots of women around me. That’s nonsense. It has nothing to do with that . . . ‘

Does he like his playboy image? ‘It used to bother me when my mother was alive because she was religious and it upset her. But it doesn’t matter now.’ He doesn’t think the image justified. ‘No. Playboys have a lot of money and time, and I’ve never had either.’ Well, is he a womaniser? ‘No. People just say that because I’m a single man.’ He says he doesn’t have a girlfriend at the moment.

He doesn’t want to discuss whether he finds affairs fulfilling. He crosses his arms self-protectively. ‘Er, by answering that question I put myself in a difficult position because this will get quoted in Pakistan. And in Pakistan, the mere fact that you admit you’re having affairs upsets a lot of people’s sensitivities.

‘I respect my own culture and a lot of young people look up to me. It’s a big responsibility for me not to make these admissions in public. Everyone knows I’m a single man and a normal man. But there’s no need to stick it down their throats.’

‘But everyone knows you have lots of affairs,’ I say. The door bell rings. Imran goes to answer it. ‘I didn’t realise people think I have affairs,’ Imran yells back, as he opens the door.

‘This is going to hack my wife right off,’ says the postman, excitedly, basking in Imran’s presence and handing him a parcel. ‘Like half the women in the world, she’s in love with you.’ Imran returns, looking coy. Would he have an affair with a married woman? ‘No, I think that is a sin. The biggest sin in my religion and my mind is when you hurt someone. You would stand to hurt the boyfriend or husband. There are guidelines in the Koran on adultery.’

Has he ever had a love child? His voice goes low. ‘No.’ If he got someone pregnant, would he have the child? ‘I’ve never thought about it. I’m pro-abortion. I think it’s much better not to bring a child into this world if you can’t give it love and security.’ So what would he do if he got someone pregnant? ‘Well, I won’t.’

He lives in Lahore again and is in London only for a couple of months, setting up a floodlit fundraising cricket match at Crystal Palace on 28 July, and to finish writing two books.

So far this year he has not played test cricket, having injured his shoulder in April, ‘torn tendons, amazingly still sore. It happened five weeks before the World Cup, but I couldn’t stop. I knew I was aggravating the injury.’

Imran has the longest fast-bowling career (21 years) in history. He’s also considered one of the only people who could keep the vitriolic regional differences at bay in the Pakistani team.

So is he retiring? ‘It would be silly to announce my retirement again’ – he did so in 1987 and then succumbed to pressure to return to the game – ‘but in my mind, this is it. I have probably played my last match. There’s no challenge in cricket any more.’

He is obsessed with raising money for his hospital, which came about as a result of his mother’s death of cancer seven years ago. She wasn’t diagnosed early enough and by the time she came to England, her intestinal cancer had spread to her liver.

‘My faith was completely shaken by her death. I stopped believing for a while. I was with her when she died.’ He looks down and sighs deeply. ‘It was the pain that affected me. It was the most helpless feeling anyone can go through to watch someone that close to you in pain and you can’t do anything about it. Then I realised there was a reason for what had happened – that I should build this hospital. If I hadn’t watched her in that pain, I wouldn’t have done this.

‘We don’t have one cancer hospital in Pakistan and, despite there being lots of heroin smuggled out of the country, heroin-based painkillers are banned because of the narcotics laws.

‘Things started to happen which showed me there is a force up there. The sort of course my life took showed me I wasn’t really in control of my future.’ Imran now believes firmly in God and prays on a mat facing Mecca every morning. ‘When I hurt people, it always affects me,’ he continues. ‘Since I’ve started building my hospital, a lot of people have come outside my house begging.

‘I hate people pestering me. I am public during the day when I’m playing, but when I go home I want to be private,’ he says, with feeling. ‘Sometimes, I lose my patience and am rude to them. I tell them to go away. Or I give them money and tell them to get lost.’

He is altogether less anglicised than one expects. He doesn’t smoke cigarettes (‘well, I had a few when I was at school’), although a packet of Cartier sits on the table. And he doesn’t drink, due now to his growing faith. Is he sure? He looks wrecked.

‘I’ve never touched alcohol. When I was growing up, I saw a close relative – I don’t want to name him – who used to drink a lot. That affected me. He was a powerful, dignified man whom I looked up to. But when he drank, his personality would change, he couldn’t walk properly and he would fall around and be abusive.’

Imran’s Eastern roots are particularly noticeable in his beliefs about giving children tremendous attention, love and security within the framework of an extended family. ‘I think you should give the children everything. The way British children are raised is alien to me.’

His own childhood was otherwise idyllic. Holidays were spent in the Himalayas or jungles and he wanted for nothing. He describes his childhood as growing up with a ‘security blanket’.

The son of a wealthy engineer, he has four sisters and the family is still ‘very close’. One of the sisters always stays with their father and he sees nothing strange in the fact that, aged 39, he still lives with his father. ‘We have a biggish house,’ he says, genuinely surprised. ‘It’s not a problem at all.’

We return then to the subject of marriage. He uses words like responsibility, self-denial and sacrifice. He takes marriage very seriously indeed. (He doesn’t believe in living with someone.) ‘Marriage for me is one of the greatest responsibilities a man has to take. I think a man is a failure if the marriage fails.’ He deflects from the questions by doodling. ‘You shouldn’t just marry for the sake of security. There’s a lot of self-denial involved, it’s a complete change of life. I’m not scared of the risk. No, I don’t think I am scared of commitment or intimacy either. I just believe that if you make that commitment, you have to be able to live up to it. You must be able to make it work.’

He says an arranged marriage is still a possibility for him. ‘Maybe that’s what I’ll end up doing. I’m not looking for an ideal woman. If something is meant to happen, it will. I have learnt you have no control over certain things in life. I don’t live in the future.’

Friendly, unaffected, lovely, always pleasant . . . these were the words with which friends and acquaintances described murdered mother Rachel Nickell today.

The blonde, part-time model was strikingly good-looking, with natural poise and charm. She was ‘the kind of woman whose looks stopped people in their tracks’, recalled a neighbour.

Fitness fanatic Rachel, 23, followed a regular routine of swimming, walking on Wimbledon Common or playing tennis. At the local leisure centre, where she swam two or three times a week and took son Alex to the mother and baby swimming group, her beauty made sure she stood out from the crowd. ‘She had this great self-confidence,’ said assistant manager, Jacek Kaldonek.

‘Although she had a tremendous physique, she was never one to flaunt herself. I’m sure she knew she was attractive, but you would never see her flirting or anything like that.

‘She was always smiling and she was an excellent swimmer. A lovely, unaffected sort of person.’

Rachel, daughter of well-off parents from Bedfordshire, dropped out of university early and never completed her degree. The social services would no doubt describe her as an unmarried mother, but she was in a loving, stable relationship with Andre Hanscombe.

Mr Hanscombe, 29, a dispatch rider, is hard-working, good-looking, a talented semi-professional tennis player, who one day hopes to turn pro, said neighbours.

The couple behaved like newly-weds, openly affectionate in public. ‘They were close, they were in love,’ said the manager of Bucci’s Italian restaurant in Balham, where they would eat once a week.

‘They used to kiss and hold hands. They were always looking into each other’s eyes.’

Friends said Rachel was a devoted mother to Alex. She chose to give birth at home, and afterwards, her career took second place.

Elderly neighbour Walentina Korzeniowska recalled: ‘I stopped her in the street once to tell her her boy was the most beautiful child in London. She was the sort of woman you wanted to say things like that to.’ Child-minder Lorna Wilkes would help Rachel out, looking after Alex when she went on modelling assignments. ‘She was a kind, lovely person,’ said Lorna. ‘She and Andre were devoted to each other.’

Rachel, Andre, Alex and their mongrel Molly lived in the smarter end of Tooting in an £85,000 modernised two-bedroom flat in Elmfield Mansions, a well-maintained block.

Estate manager Mr Shanti Shah said the flat was under offer, and the sale is going through. ‘They wanted to live in the country,’ he added. Today the curtains of the third floor flat were drawn behind the window box overflowing with flowers which Rachel had carefully tended. The couple weren’t well off, but had a Volvo and had recently tidied up another car, ready to sell.

Rachel’s parents are not even here to hear the news and take some small comfort from their son, Mark, 25, who is studying to be a vet at London University.

Andrew Nickell, 50, and his wife Monica, 48, left for Canada yesterday to visit Andrew’s sister.

They have a £250,000 modern detached house in the Bedfordshire village of Ampthill, where Rachel and Andre had recently visited them.

In the tree-lined street with carefully manicured lawns and well-tended potted shrubs, Rachel’s parents are respected and admired. ‘They are the kindest couple. There’s nothing in the world they wouldn’t do for anybody,’ said one neighbour.

This gentlest of couples will learn over the phone of their only daughter’s murder, and will then have to return home to see their grandchild, still so deep in shock after witnessing his mother’s killing that he cannot speak.

An elderly neighbour of Rachel’s parents paid her tribute. ‘Rachel was a happy-go-lucky girl. She was full of life, very beautiful.’

Michael Crawford is not an obvious sex symbol. But there’s something about him that attracts 140 fan letters a day – and a year ago caused an obsessive female fan in LA to follow him fanatically for three months. ‘Each night I drove home from the theatre and a car pulled out from behind the hedge and started to follow me. I was on my own and the audience had gone,’ he says, wringing his hands and looking down as he does throughout most of the interview. ‘I used to come off the freeway by a different exit each night to try to lose her.

‘Being British, you don’t want to call the police or make a fuss. And I didn’t feel I was in danger. But one night I just got tired of it, so I stopped the car. The woman drove into a cul de sac. As I got out, she came streaking past me, nearly hit me and drove off. The next day I got a letter from her apologising for upsetting me. ‘I just wanted to know where you lived,’ she wrote. ‘I didn’t mean you any harm.’ ‘

She then sent him a large cheque for the Sick Children’s Trust, the charity supported by his fan club. How does Crawford feel about inspiring such passion? ‘I don’t want to think about that . . . but I don’t think it’s healthy for her to behave like that. It’s too fanatical.’

Michael Crawford is returning to the British stage for the first time since 1986, performing in his already sold-out tour of The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber. His tours in America have been triumphant, outselling Whitney Houston and Diana Ross. His recordings are gold and platinum sellers in the States and in Britain his record sales have pipped those of Michael Jackson. His is a show business career that spans almost 25 years, from Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em to the lead in Phantom.

Crawford has a reputation for being a ladies’ man. Is he a Don Juan? ‘Not at all.’ His eyebrows shoot up. ‘I have lady friends and like having them. But I live alone. And in the last five years I’ve been travelling and living out of two suitcases. I can’t imagine any woman who would want to tolerate that. Life isn’t really conducive to having a long-term partner right now. But if I met someone I felt I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, I would stop travelling.

‘I just haven’t found that person yet. It’s very hard to meet people. It’s difficult enough for normal people who go to the pub every night. But my feet just haven’t touched the ground, I’m always in a different town,’ he says, genuinely. ‘I just meet receptionists in hotels – and we’re not all keen on women in uniform!’ He appears genuinely to dislike talking about himself and often deflects with his humour.

He has made his work a higher priority than meeting someone and one detects a certain sadness. But he disagrees. ‘No. There is no sadness about it. If I wanted to meet someone, I would go for it. I would take adverts and join a club. I would do whatever is necessary to meet a partner. I don’t think, ‘Gosh, I’ve got to get married’. I don’t have a girlfriend at the moment. But I have close friends.’ Publicly, his daughters, now 26 and 24, are Crawford’s ‘dates’. When did he last have a girlfriend? ‘I’m not going to discuss that,’ he says, somewhat petulantly.

In 1965, when he was 21 years old (‘Too young,’ he says) he married actress turned photographer Gabrielle Lewis. Almost 10 years later, they divorced. ‘If things go wrong, you either rush headlong into another relationship, or you sit back and think, ‘What went wrong? What have I done? What’s wrong with me?’. You have to resolve it . . .

‘I want to be careful about marrying for the second time. There are no guarantees, but you just wouldn’t want it to go wrong again because it’s too hurtful.’ People aren’t generally still licking their wounds 20 years later. ‘I’m not,’ he replies. ‘I’m just wary.’

Crawford looks wholesome, like some country golfer. He is neat in leaf-green jumper with sea-green shirt, gold chain round his neck and a dazzling smile of capped teeth. He also appears in robust health and wears a curious silver ring set with crystals. ‘A crystal is meant to be good for the throat,’ he says, adding that he also crosses his fingers and walks round ladders.

During his five-year run in Barnum, he was hospitalised for exhaustion; another time he went on stage just 24 hours after a hiatus hernia operation; and he pushed himself through a gruelling tour in the States with a kidney stone, checking in at the hospital in each new town.

‘I don’t know why you make it sound so dramatic. I’ve been ill twice in my life,’ he says, gently. ‘Not bad for a man of 50.’ Does he push himself to the limit? ‘No.’ Certainly he comes over as terribly normal and soft, a loving sort of person. (He admits to being shy and a perfectionist.) He has moved financial mountains in his life. ‘We never had much when I was a child,’ he says. ‘It was the kind of household where my parents couldn’t smoke and send me to school. So they gave up smoking! I wish they’d carried on smoking!’ (He left aged 15.) In the 1960s, he was also impecunious. ‘I had a flat in Clapham and my daughter Emma slept in the drawer of the chest of drawers because we didn’t have much money and she’d outgrown her crib. When she grew a little more, we put her in the bath – with the water turned off!’ He laughs. ‘No, I’ve never been ashamed of where I’ve come from or what I’ve done.’

Nowadays, he turns down lucrative job offers and earned a rumoured £20,000 a week (‘An exaggeration,’ he says) in Phantom.

‘For the first time in my life I have a feeling of security. I go where my instinct tells me, where I feel I would be happiest. The financial thing doesn’t enter into it. I made one film for money, Hello Goodbye, and it was the unhappiest time I ever had. I lost my integrity for the three months we made that movie.’

We talk then about his childhood. Born in Salisbury, he was called Michael Dumbell-Smith. (He changed his name, inspired by Crawford biscuits.) He has always said that his RAF pilot father died in battle before he was born. But author Anthony Hayward, in a recent biography, alleges that Crawford was born illegitimately and that his ‘father’ was killed 16 months before he was born.

‘I’m not going to talk about that,’ he says now, in a manner that suggests he could be quite temperamental. ‘I’m writing my book where I’m telling all about my life. That’ll be about a year and a half and then we can talk about all that . . .’

His mother married his stepfather when he was four. ‘I don’t know what I missed not growing up with a real father. That’s like asking a blind man whether he misses seeing trees. But it’s not true that I hated my stepfather. I didn’t feel he was like a blood relation, but he sacrificed a lot for me and I appreciated that.

‘I was an only child, so you spend a lot of time making your own amusement. I was always playing wall tennis. So maybe it was inevitable that I should take up a profession where I am only competing against myself. ‘But I’ve no idea what makes me tick. I agree I’m a very instinctive sort of person. I grew up mainly surrounded by aunts and female company. I also grew up with a lot of love around me, which I think helps me in my sensitivity. I don’t feel in any way tortured or scarred inside, I feel very content.’

The strongest influence in his life was his maternal grandmother. ‘She was my spiritual teacher. She taught me to live life simply and be aware of other people’s emotions and situations.’

His mother died when he was 21. ‘That was hard because I was very young and it turned me into somebody I didn’t want to be. It made me very independent and alone. That encouraged me to go looking for a relationship very quickly. I got married soon after she died.’ Today, he senses the presence of his dead grandmother and mother around him: ‘I still feel they’re with me. I feel they’re helping me.’ He says he believes in God ‘in a child-like way’.

His belief is understandable. His child, Emma, nearly died of meningitis when she was seven. ‘It was one of the worst experiences of my life.’ He becomes pensive and quiet. And, in 1990, he was caught in gang gun warfare in LA. ‘I was driving back after dinner with friends. A car came roaring up the street on the wrong side.’ The gunman shot at his target. ‘You just heard crack-crack, it didn’t sound like a bang. The bullet missed me by about a foot. I thought, ‘My God, that was close’. My head was pounding with fear.’ You can understand why Crawford doesn’t mind cars with fans.

Last month Phillip Schofield took over from Jason Donovan, one of the world’s biggest singing stars, in the leading role in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Palladium. Before Schofield stood in for him for six weeks in January, he had only ever sung in the bath, and his previous stage experience was limited to two stage productions and a walk-on part in a children’s variety show.

He is now rumoured to earn around £500,000 a year from television and public appearances. He has been compared to Barbie Doll’s boyfriend Ken and dubbed a taciturn man of plastic responses and controlled gestures. A man who, in particular, has consistently refused to discuss his affair with his girlfriend Stephanie Lowe or speculation that he is homosexual. Today Schofield, 30, talks for the first time about his private life. So what about the accusations that he is gay? ‘Pheeee,’ he says, blowing the air. ‘Nobody has ever said that to my face. People say all sorts of things, about how much I earn and so on.’ He is talking fast and nervously. ‘It makes no odds to me what people say, but I think my girlfriend would have something to say about it.’ He nurses his shoulders while he is speaking, in a gesture of self-comfort, with his arms crossed defensively across his body.

Has he ever had a sexual relationship with a man, even as a schoolboy? ‘No. That sort of thing didn’t happen at my comprehensive,’ he says, sitting in yellow shorts like bathing trunks and a sleeveless USA Sporting T-shirt. He has airbrushed good looks and copper eyes, with spiky gelled hair and bronzed shoulders to match. ‘I never felt like it, no, absolutely not. Quite a lot of men I know have, but not necessarily me. I would never sleep with a man, but I’m not homophobic.’ He does, however, sometimes have a camp-cum-thespian way of expressing himself.

People, I remark, say that he has a girlfriend as a cover-up. Schofield throws his head back and laughs loudly. ‘You can’t win then, can you? But I’d defy them to find any evidence of this allegation.’ Why does he think people say such things about him? ‘I don’t know. Maybe because I’m fresh-faced. Maybe because I’m not open, so people assume there is something to hide.’ He continues to cuddle himself. ‘I just don’t talk about my private life, so people start saying, ‘There’s no smoke without fire’, but that’s not true. I’m secretive because you have to keep something private.’ He lost his virginity when he was 14 and, contrary to reports, never proposed either to his half-Russian girlfriend Marika Tautz when he was 22 or to anyone else. He now receives up to 500 letters a week from girls, has been on the front cover of Smash Hits, has a fervent young following, and is a registered heart-throb who is embarrassed to go out and buy underpants. He has known Stephanie for five years, from the days before he had to cope with adulation.

So how important to him is his girlfriend, freelance production assistant Stephanie Lowe? And does he intend to marry her? ‘We’ve not discussed marriage. But we’ve been living together for a year,’ he says. ‘I never shared a flat before I lived in London,’ he says. ‘I always ended up in a bedsit on my own and had to have stair parties because the room was too small to invite people in. So it’s taken a lot to get used to having someone else in the house and having their things around. ‘Now I like it. I like having someone to come home to and discuss things with. I like coming home when the lights are on in the house, bread’s being baked and the garden is mowed.’ They live together in a comfortable Victorian house in west London.

Is he in love? ‘I think so, I think so. What does being in love mean? We get on very well. She’s very close to me and we’re good mates. Love is about trusting someone, having them trust you, enjoying seeing them, liking their company.’ As he talks about Stephanie, his voice, which was loud and performance-like at the beginning of the interview, becomes quieter and less defensive, and his face softens.

Does he trust women? ‘Yeah,’ he stumbles, tapping his face with his hand. ‘But that’s a tricky one. You’re told that people love you all the time, so when it’s actually said genuinely it’s difficult to take notice of it. You end up analysing it too much rather than accepting it at its face value.’ Unlike many performers, he doesn’t appear to have the desperate need to feel loved by his audiences. ‘I’m not that insecure.’

And is he monogamous? ‘I tend to be monogamous because I’m terrified of Aids,’ he has said. ‘I tend to be monogamous because I am quite loyal,’ he says now. ‘That’s how I’ve led my life. I would hate to tear someone apart by them hearing that I’d had an affair.’

He finds such scrutiny of his private life makes living in the public eye difficult. He feels vulnerable being a big star. And he says he finds himself performing the whole time. ‘It’s a strange lifestyle. You’re never finished being on show.’

He finds it difficult to be vulnerable now. ‘I do it behind closed doors. Or it gets suppressed completely and you lose a part of yourself. I think the part of me that relies on other people is rather undernourished. You end up making yourself more independent than you would have been. ‘I’ve probably become more confident than I would have been and I also have a self-preservation order slapped on the inside of my eyelids.’ He has also lost many of his old friends (partly because he found it difficult to keep up with them when he went to New Zealand when he was 19). ‘A few just haven’t been able to cope with my job. It was far too strange for them to comprehend.’

Schofield is a pleasant man with an open face, who seems a reliable, optimistic sort. ‘I do have quite a short fuse,’ he admits. ‘But I haven’t lost my temper for a long time,’ he says. ‘I have a really vile temper when it rears its ugly head. I once kicked a phone off the wall in an old flat of mine. It was stealing 10p pieces like it was going out of fashion.’ More recently, he fell out with a man who had sold Schofield insurance that didn’t properly cover his mobile phone. Hearing the man was in hospital having a knee operation, Schofield offered to go in and ‘kneecap’ the other leg.

‘I’m surprised by my success – but not in television, I worked really hard at that,’ he says. According to his manager, he’s having problems with his voice. ‘Joseph is better this time round. Before I was having to prove myself, which made it a burden.’

Schofield was born, memorably, on an April Fool’s Day. ‘My mother was mortified and tried to persuade the midwife to write that I was born the day before. Until I was about seven, she told me that I’d been born after midday, ‘So you’re not a fool’.’

He had a solid family base and his parents encouraged him in his chosen profession. His father (now retired) was a french polisher. His mother worked in an old people’s home until she took over responsibility for Schofield’s mail. And his younger brother has a record shop in Cornwall. He started writing job application letters to the BBC when he was just 10 years old and also turned his bedroom into a mock television station, which he would close down each night before he went to bed. Until only 10 years ago, he used to keep crickets in a tank to lull him to sleep at night. ‘All true, I’m afraid,’ he says, with a slight Antipodean lilt in his accent. Ten years ago, his father suffered a heart attack. ‘It was very traumatic at the time. I don’t want to talk about it. It was one of the most frightening things that ever happened. One day he came home, went into the kitchen for a glass of water, came back and dropped dead in the chair. I’d learned artificial respiration by watching some American cop show on television. So I did that for 10 minutes.’ His father then had quadruple bypass surgery and Schofield got a certificate saying that he’d saved his life.

Now things are on the up and up. He won’t talk about how much he earns. But he drives a convertible green BMW and hopes to earn enough money to last him if the phone ever stops ringing. ‘I don’t have any ambitions. They’ve all been used up,’ he says, smiling a television smile. ‘I sometimes wonder whether, when I die, I’m going to leave anything behind. I worry about that less, now that I’m on at the Palladium. I’ve stood on a stage that so many famous people have stood on. Now I feel that I’ve achieved something.’

This week ‘Madame’ Vasso, Fergie’s Greek clairvoyant with the blue pyramid, is starting up a new telephone helpline service. She has 10 Mercury Premium Rate service lines on which, for 48p a minute, she will explain how to use crystals and pyramids, and give advice on loneliness, anxiety, love, health and money.

She says she’s doing it ‘to help people’. She also intends to start a ‘candle’ phone line soon. ‘To tell people how to use candles for problems with love and depression.’ How do you use a candle for love? ‘If people are very depressed, you should light the candle and say Our Father’s prayer.’ Vasso will make 15 per cent of the 48p from each phone call. ‘Nothing,’ she calls it.

This is the tale of a woman who was launched from basement obscurity to international fame in February when the papers carried a picture of her hugging her client Fergie. The story of a psychic who was going quietly about her business in Islington’s Chapel Market where she charged £10 for a tarot reading, but who now charges £50 for a reading at home and is offering an international telephone service – plus spiritual healing, hypnosis, Greek herbal medication, healing with ‘pure wax candles’ and crystals. ‘My clients,’ she says in her heavy Greek accent, ‘are professional, business people and high profile.’

Born Vissiliki Kortesis, she is actually only called Vasso. ‘Just because I’m foreign,’ she says, high-pitched and indignant. ‘People should have more respect and not treat me as if I’m in a circus and call me Madame.’ When the names of Vasso and Fergie were first linked, Vasso said she was treating the Duchess, whom she met a year ago at the house of another healer, for a bad neck and back. ‘She loves him very much,’ Vasso commented on the Yorks’s marriage. ‘They’re very happy together.’

Twenty-four hours after the announcement of the royal split, it was reported that Vasso was driven to Sunninghill Park in a chauffeured Range Rover. ‘I have nothing to say about that,’ she says now.

But does she still see the Duchess? ‘Don’t try to ask me questions. I will not answer you,’ she replies. ‘She’s a friend of mine, put it that way.’ How often does she see her? ‘You see friends whenever you feel like it.’

Born in Nafpaktos 54 years ago, Vasso is one of five children and her psychic powers were first noticed when she was just two years old – she saved her parents from a bomb on the bridge to their village. ‘I started to talk and said, ‘Run, run, run’. A few minutes later the Second World War began and the bridge was blown up.’

Then there was the time when her brother tried to board his ship. ‘I told him not to and he didn’t go. Later, the ship sank and all of the others died.’

She started healing when she was just five years old, using special heated medical glasses on the body and rubbing olive oil into her grandmother’s rib cage. Her grandmother was also a healer: ‘She used to mend bones not with plaster but with green soap and white egg.’

She left school when she was 12 and, apart from a brief spell as a seamstress and knitter, she has always worked in the field of the paranormal. She came to England 28 years ago.

Vasso claims she has healed herself of a bump on her wrist (‘I have photographs of it’) which the doctors had wanted to remove surgically. ‘I have also healed people who were crippled and they have been able to walk. I have healed people who have been to hospital expecting to die and a few days later they were fine. I have helped people give up drugs.’

We go upstairs to her room with the blue pyramid and diplomas of mysticism, a bronze of Hippocrates and a Druid calendar on the wall. She sits under her pyramid to absorb the energy of an Egyptian god whose mother was a sphinx. The dimensions of the pyramid are said to have power and significance.

She gives me some healing with hands that smell faintly of onions. ‘Can you feel energy?’ No. ‘You’re blocking it because you are testing me.’ She then prepares herself for my Tarot reading. ‘When were you born?’ September 24. ‘Ah, Virgo.’ No, Libra. ‘You had abortion.’ No. ‘You have trouble with your left leg.’ No. ‘You look like your father.’ No, I look like my mother.

But, to be fair, when she actually does the tarot reading, she comes into her own. She reveals things I haven’t told her about, things about my career and my romantic life, with great accuracy, She does not seem to enjoy her new-found fame. ‘It has made my life very difficult. I’m not free. People think I’m rich, when I’m not. I can’t go to the market, because I’m frightened. Maybe people think I have money, they can mug me or something.’

We’re sitting in what was her former council flat, her spotlessly clean two-storey Islington maisonette on a noisy road in a rundown part of town. In the sitting room are Greek photos, a picture of the Acropolis, a quarry-full of healing crystals and a takeaway-sized blue pyramid on the table beside my tape recorder.

We talk about money. Her financial circumstances must have changed post Fergie, although her home is not that of a rich person. ‘I don’t think you have the right to ask me such private questions. I don’t make money. Just very, very little. I’m not a rich person.’

A ‘one-parent family’ (twice married and divorced), she lives in her flat with her son. She bought her home for £36,000 and has now increased her mortgage to £90,000. ‘I borrow money from the bank to live. I don’t make enough money to pay the mortgage.’ So how much does she make? ‘I suppose in a week I average £250 or £300, not more than that.’ She says she sees five to 10 people a day.

She doesn’t, however, charge people for healing. ‘Anyone who charges is not a healer. Healing is coming from God,’ says this Orthodox Greek believer who goes to church every Sunday. ‘It is natural and you have to be in service. It is not to sell. If you sell the healing energy, I don’t believe you will keep it.’ She says that money isn’t important to her. ‘I am interested in helping people. I don’t believe in material things.’

They say in Mexico City that the pigeons drop dead from the sky when they hit the smog. Aldous Huxley once said he had never felt so bad tempered as he did during a week’s stay there.

Can it be that bad? Our taxi driver guide immediately takes the matter into his own hands and, ignoring red traffic lights, drives us in his yellow VW Beetle beyond the polluted city to Teotihuacan, the first great civilisation of central Mexico, which existed between AD 100 and 600. We haven’t had a chance yet to change money and so, with a smile as big as the nearby Pyramid of the Sun, the driver pulls down his socks, pulls out his cash and gives us some to be going on with. The site of Teotihuacan is sublime – with vast pyramids, plazas, esplanades and Aztec ruins. Back in Mexico City, we dine at Prendes, where Leon Trotsky and painter Frida Kahlo ate before us. Before eating, the maitre d’ thinks we should watch the game of jai-alai (pelota) being played next door with what looks like a giant banana. Gentlemen must wear a tie to watch the game and my companion is not wearing one. The maitre d’ takes his off and ties it round my friend’s neck, though he doesn’t give us any cash from his socks. The next day a policeman offers to drive us to the market in his police car, but doesn’t give us his tie either. We go to see the National Palace with its moving murals by founder of the Mexican muralist movement Diego Rivera portraying five centuries of Mexico’s history; the impressive Metropolitan Cathedral made of 3,000 tonnes of marble and granite; and the Museum of Anthropology, with its pre-Hispanic exhibits and remarkable design.

Later we visit Frida Kahlo’s house (a museum) but the man at the door says he’s taken all the pictures and furniture away and doesn’t let us in. So we go to the house where Trotsky spent his last years writing and tending his pet rabbit before he met an untimely end with an ice pick plunged into his head. The body has gone, but pictures and furniture are intact. Nearly 350 miles to the south is the graceful colonial city of Oaxaca, where the Mexicans say there are 20 earthquakes a day. The buildings are made of very chunky stones to avoid their effects. We stay in one such, the Hotel Stouffer Presidente, a heavenly former jail and 16th century convent. Nuns were banned in the anti-clerical 1860s and the hotel now has a sombre elegance, a swimming pool among the cloisters and attentive service. We feast on fried tortillas with chicharon, stuffed tamales, rolled tortillas with chocolate-based mole sauce and chicken, Tasajo beef and marinated pork with refried beans. Afterwards we sit at a sidewalk cafe in the plaza surrounded by Spanish baroque buildings and huge trees. Oaxaca has a famous twice-weekly market where ladies scrub their squealing piglets with washing-up liquid and women with flashing smiles and bright costumes sit amid the colourful riot of cardamom, pumpkin roasted in honey, papaya and glistening vegetables grown in the volcanic soil. They sell scarves woven in turquoise, pink and yellow, natural black earthenware, ponchos, green pottery and rugs that have taken two months to weave and tell the story of village life. A lady insisted that my friend ate chapulines – tiny red grasshoppers deep-fried in garlic-flavoured oil – from her brimming basket of dead and salty bugs.

We continued to Villahermosa and made an 80-mile jeep ride to Palenque, most sacred of Mayan ruins. Set in a parrot-filled, threatened rainforest, they rise on artificial terraces. Among them is the royal palace, with a tower which was possibly an observatory and a pyramid containing a royal tomb. Light in style, delicately embellished and with mysterious stone sculptures and glyphs, the place has a haunting feel.

Next stop is San Cristobal de las Casas, a little hill town 177 kilometres from Palenque. It was founded by the Andalucians in the 16th century. Indians in bright shawls drink hot chocolate and barbecue corn on the cob (served with chili) amid colonial mansions and Baroque churches. Across the border is Guatemala, with weather that the tourist authorities describe as eternal spring and a saint called Maximon whose favourite offerings are cigarettes and rum. We drive through the spectacular scenery of the Maya Highlands, 90 miles from Guatemala City to Chichicastenango, known, for obvious reasons, as Chichi. It is a very Indian town with cobbled streets and whitewashed houses and a Sunday market full of over-zealous traders selling dance masks and brand new ‘antique’ artifacts. We sit on the steps outside Santo Tomas church (16th century and built on the site of a Maya pyramid) amid the incense burning and flower sellers. Inside is the sound of praying. Our eight-year-old, self-styled guide, Tomas, points out that the rose petal and pine needle offerings are ‘pagan ritual, Mister’, but can’t answer any questions. It takes a while to twig he has simply learned his English tour script by heart.

He also takes us past a room filled with 50 young boys and shielded from the street by tarpaulin. Inside, all the Tomases of the town are glued to a television set, watching a Spanish-dubbed western.

We stay in The Mayan Inn with its open fires in bedrooms filled with Colonial chests, figures, carved furniture, antique mirrors and old Spanish chairs that the owner, Mr Clark, sometimes bought from earthquake victims in Antigua. There are no locks on the doors and attendants in local costume stand watch outside. In the courtyard a parrot sits next to an ancient Maya sculpture and a marimba band plays.

Lake Atitlan is our next stop: the romantic Hotel Atitlan overlooking the deep green lake and what appear to be most of Guatemala’s 33 volcanoes. Well, three, actually.

Next door are two partly built skyscrapers where work stopped more than 10 years ago when the Nicaraguan money from the Somoza regime dried up. We take a boat across the lake to the village of Santiago Atitlan, where local Indians throng around a man in the market selling PMT tablets as a cure for arthritis, old age, impotence and tiredness. This is also the home of the smoking and drinking Saint Maximon and of some atrocious military killings. I still dream of Guatemala City, crumbling Antigua, volcanoes, colonial charm and jungle. Of vivid fabrics, mountain regions, Mayan sites and marimba music. But not of poisoned pigeons . . .

How: This holiday was organised through Cathy Matos Mexican Tours (61 High Street, Barnet EN5 5UR; 081 440 4306) with flights to Miami with Virgin Atlantic and onward by AeroMexico. The firm could arrange an itinerary similar to that followed by Caroline Phillips from around £1,200.