THE Marchioness of Worcester, former actress Tracy Ward, is a woman obsessed. She lives on the Duke of Beaufort’s Badminton House estate and believes in organic farms fertilised with human manure. She cycles around the countryside wearing a Rajisthani skirt and fiddles with Ladakh prayer beads. To save water, she doesn’t flush the loo after she pees. Her life makes gossip columnists gleeful. She was expelled from school after smacking the deputy headmistress, did a sexy cabaret act, stripping to black camisole, in rough London pubs, posed nude for Norman Parkinson and dated heroin-addicted Etonians. Tracy’s sister is the actress Rachel, her mother is married to Lord ‘call girl’ Lambton and Tracy married Harry ‘Bunter’ Worcester, heir to the Duke of Beaufort’s fortune. Phew! In the past few years, Tracy has metamorphosed. She’s now Mother Tracy, the tireless charity worker and Green person. She’s a trustee of Friends of the Earth, The Gaia Foundation (works with indigenous people in forest areas), Transport 2000 (to reverse the Government’s £23 billion road programme, improve public transport and cut down pollution) and the Schumacher Society (lectures by eminent environmentalists).

She agreed to be interviewed only if we talked about Gatt, the EC, cost benefit analyses in our economic system, unbridled capitalism and suchlike. I’d just returned from a trip to Venezuela. ‘Did you stay with many tribal people?’ she asked, hopefully.

Now we meet. She should live in a grass hut, but wants to work within the system so resides in upper-class splendour in a lodge with oil paintings. Outside, her A-reg BMW sports anti-nuke stickers. She walks with amazing grace, is ethereal and wears that Rajisthani skirt (originally her protest vote against the plight of Ethiopian cotton workers, she won’t buy things that undermine other communities’ health) and a large emerald ring and Rolex watch. She’s beautiful, sexy, pouty and speaks with a just-woken-up breathlessness.

She offers coffee or ginger, then nips off to collect her daughter Bella on her bike, telling me, big-heartedly, to eat an apple or raid the fridge. Now we talk in the peaceful, grand sitting room. She’s just sent 2,000 (‘to everybody I know’) Friends of the Earth application forms, out of her own money and time. ‘They’ve all told me they’re really concerned with the environment. So I’ve made it easy for them.’

She’s happily married, but her husband doesn’t share her views and the relationship isn’t very Green. What makes her marriage work? ‘I guess we love each other,’ she says simply. ‘There’s mutual respect, independence and we share a lot too. My being an ecologist, caring about trees, African people, Gatt and the way that we consume doesn’t interfere with that.’ She speaks characteristically with a faraway look in her eyes, as if she’s in her own world.

SO ASK her, say, what she’d like to do one day with Badminton. ‘My vision of it is irrelevant. Forget it! It’s his. We live in a patriarchal society and all the decisions about money and property rest with the man.’ Or about children: Bobby, five, and Bella, two; surely an ideal number in terms of population explosion? ‘Don’t let’s go into this … I’d like two and Harry would like three. So we’ll have three. But I don’t want to make the article a battle between …’

Bella was born on the NHS. ‘If you have money and are spoilt, you pay through the nose for something which is well supplied by the NHS. Also I didn’t want just to be among people who can afford to be in an expensive hospital. I wanted to give the money I’d have spent at the Portland to the Gaia Foundation,’ she says.

‘But you could have done that anyway.’

‘Yuh, I could have. But I do as well. It was just that ideally I wanted Harry to give what he would’ve paid for the Portland. But it didn’t work that way,’ she says. ‘I never asked him.’

Her children are educated privately. ‘But I want them to understand there is more to life than making money and satisfying shareholders.’ And if Bobby so desires, she’ll take him hunting. Isn’t there a contradiction here? ‘No. Because I don’t see how we can get people who work in the cities and make decisions about property and motorways to really love the countryside unless they are out in it. Most of these people don’t come to the countryside unless they’re hunting.’

Her environmentalism is an obsession. Why? She tortures her hair. She says she doesn’t feel the spiritual emptiness that she thinks many in the West suffer. ‘I just feel I have a real craving for learning, maybe because I didn’t work hard enough as a child.’

She finds it tricky to talk about her childhood. ‘In the past I’ve had my nanny and mother ring up in tears.’ She was bought up in an Oxfordshire manor by her nanny in a nursery, saw her parents rarely, and went to boarding school aged 11. ‘I was always being chucked out. I’d had enough of discipline at home. I didn’t work very hard, or concentrate. I couldn’t take people telling me what to do.

‘You should have guidance and love from your immediate family or community. My mother was off doing her own thing, it was the fashion then. I don’t feel my parents and nanny gave me any direction,’ she says, slowly. ‘At school you’re just one of 300 people and don’t have enough identity.’ She might have discovered her identity in acting, but found it egotistical and self-obsessive. ‘Also I felt vulnerable having started so late.’ It’s hard now to imagine her as the raunchy cabaret stripper. An easy target, the alternative Marchioness is commonly dismissed as an old hippy and accused of being ineffectual. She maintains that money and title are not important, but knows both make it easier for her to hold her opinions. She can be naive (idealised visions of spiritually happy tribal people) but she’s hard-working and her intentions are extremely good. She seems to have found herself through helping other people and if she’s worthy, why the hell not!

KEITH FLOYD is about to dine in his arch rival’s establishment. He thinks that eating, drinking and sex go together. But he’d like the sex first, he announces loudly to the genteel clientele talking in whispers as they do in nice country hotels.

We’re in Gidleigh Park, Devon, an impeccable hotel set in Dartmoor National Park and a contrast to Floyd’s humble pub. Floyd hasn’t eaten here for four years – his protest vote at the no smoking rule in the dining room.

Gidleigh Park is a 1920s timbered house in a spectacular location with croquet, rows of size 38 green wellies in the hall and staff who plump the cushions and offer a little quelque chose (like a monkfish and potato canape) before you can say parfait.

Getting starrish Floyd here has been a pain. He insisted that I fetch him (a round trip of four hours) or send a taxi. He charges £6,000 for a personal appearance, so I suppose I’ve got off lightly with an £80 taxi bill. He’s been trying to cancel me all day. ‘I don’t go out at night,’ he says in smoky, thespian voice. ‘I can’t stand it.’

He looks spruce in Rolex, bow tie and polka-dot scarf. Thirteen books and nine TV series down, he’s currently being made into a Madame Tussaud’s model, writing his autobiography (possible title, Floyd Still in the Soup?) and Floyd in Italy and appearing in pasta commercials in Australia. There are Floydie fans hanging round his pub and women who send him faxes of themselves scantily clad. (He used to call them up when he was drunk at midnight and they’d say ‘How dare you, just because you’re on television!’) He signs 50 autographs a day and finds it hard to step out without housewives pestering him with their recipes. Fortunately, this evening, only one person approaches: a waitress to take our order.

There’s widgeon on the menu. But Floyd doesn’t order it. Then he turns to the wine list. ‘Very dangerous. You’re paying.’ He claims that his alcohol intake seen on television is the result of weeks of film being edited down. He chooses the Clos de la Vigne au Saint, a snip at £40.

He eats like a widgeon and smokes for Devon, so today, he says, has been like waiting to go to hospital for a barium meal: he’s taken nil by mouth. ‘I dread coming to places like this. You’re not allowed to smoke with your meal so I’ve bought my own…’ and, hilariously, he produces a cheapo ashtray out of his pocket.

He is exceedingly good company. In the dining room, where David Bowie, Ted Hughes and David Gower have all eaten, he talks about Joseph Conrad, pirates and his life. He thinks eating alone is one of the world’s nicest treats. Then he can indulge his sexual fantasies and only pay for one person. How would he fantasise about the women in this dining room? ‘Hungerford ’89,’ he says, choking with laughter. He then pulls out his ashtray, props it on the windowsill and starts to smoke. Does he do it to shock? ‘I don’t do anything to shock. I’m a smoker, I can’t stop.’ HE HAD a call recently from the Good Baby Breast-feeding in Hotels and Pubs in England Guide, or something like that, to ask whether he approved of breast-feeding in public. ‘I don’t give a toss either way. But people come into my pub and they belch, fart and read the paper. It’s fine if you want a cigarette or decaffeinated tea. People should be able to do what they like.’ Sex on the table? ‘An excellent idea.’

More wine arrives. Floyd becomes gleeful and tells the story of a Qantas air hostess who served him in first class, along with Kylie Minogue, Gough Whitlam and Mrs Murdoch, and told an unrepeatable joke involving parsley and pubic hair.

His woodcock arrives, and he sprinkles it with expletives. He says it should fly through a hot oven and complains that it comes with the same slice of foie gras that accompanied his rabbit ragout which he insists wasn’t a ragout. Anyway, he prefers his with a bit of shot sprinkled on the side of the plate.

He indulges in a spot of culinary espionage for the chef in his restaurant, who worked in Gidleigh before he was sacked. ‘I’m a food anarchist. I’m there to sabotage the great culinary skills these people have learned from the master chefs.” He lights up another cigarette. We haven’t yet finished our main courses. ‘We’re not attending a f***ing religious ceremony,’ he explains. ‘We’re having fun here.’

A terrified maitre d’ approaches and whispers solicitously: ‘I’m terribly sorry sir, we don’t allow smoking in the dining room.’

Floyd erupts. ‘I shall get my taxi and go home,’ he says, angrily. ‘You don’t f***ing well tell me not to smoke. I was doing it discreetly. Nobody was sitting next to me. If I were paying for this…which planet are we on?‘ And he storms out.

‘Quite right, too, it affects the taste of the food,’ says one table, sniffily. And the other diners say they’re going to complain about his language.

DAWN Airey, network controller of children’s television at ITV, likes her job. It was, she told a Sunday paper, the best thing she could do with her clothes on.

She also remarked that she thought children should come home from school, put their feet on the table, stuff their faces with crisps and relax for an hour or two. In a stroke, she confirmed what all right-thinking parents had always suspected about children’s TV bosses: that all they want to do is turn their kids into couch potatoes and stuff their heads with the audiovisual equivalent of junk food.

Dawn, 33, is unamused. She says so in her head girl manner, as she sits with fresh-scrubbed face, specs, school neat hair, plain skirt and natural tights in her ITV office with its animation posters on the walls and soft toys on the window ledge. She says she’s been misrepresented, quoted out of context, and has fired off a letter to the offending newspaper. So let’s do some detective work, children, and find out who Dawn really is. A passing resemblance to a Woodentops character – from a recent photograph in which she grins with Pinocchio-style inanity – may be cruelly noted.

But with which children’s TV character does she most identify? ‘Oh good grief,’ she replies. (Her vocabulary is very jolly hockey sticks.) ‘My favourite animation series is Scooby Doo. But I don’t want to be that dog. ‘I know!’ she exclaims suddenly. ‘I’d like to be one of the wolves in Wolf It! They’re mad as hatters but enormous fun.’ True to form, Dawn then agrees gamely to be photographed with her head poking through the office foliage, alongside a variety of soft animals.

She has been at ITV Network Centre since March. Before that she played career hopscotch. She started as a management trainee at Central in 1985, hopped to Channel 4 liaison officer, researcher at Central, associate producer on Classmates (‘a kind of This is Your Life putting stars like Ian Botham or Lord Lichfield with their schoolmates who make cringeworthy comments. Some people’s worst nightmare’) and planner at Central before landing her current position.

She says all this in a PR-ish sort of way; she’s got the hang of presenting herself positively. Very grown up.

Now she commissions 1,000 hours of television a year and schedules and acquires programmes for the networked daytime and children’s slots. Her programmes kick off at ‘oh nine twenty five’ with quizzes, followed by This Morning with Richard and Judy, two factual pieces in the afternoon, then the children’s schedule. She enjoys her own output. ‘I wouldn’t commission it otherwise.’

Her route into television would make a whizzy series. She is a lass from Preston who was schooled privately and comprehensively, then worked in a bank during the day, a pub in the evening and with a vet at the weekend (‘holding down animals to be injected and so forth’ – at the vet’s, not the pub). She saved her pocket money to travel for 15 months in India, Africa and Europe and work in a kibbutz, then went to Cambridge where she read geography, gaining a 2:1. Her hobbies are map-collecting, tennis, cats, food, wine and work. She is a light TV viewer, ‘just 10 hours a week’. Dawn spends three nights a week in London with old Cambridge friends, whose two-year-old she uses for market research; otherwise she lives near Oxford with her ‘de facto partner of 13 years’. Her what? ‘Well, it means your formal partner when you’re not married.’

Ah! Her common-law husband or lover? ‘Well, boyfriend sounds crass and teenaged.’ Anyway, he’s called Martin and works in PR and they’re not going to marry. ‘It’s not on my agenda at the moment.’ (Life as a career move.) Nor are they going to produce target audiences. ‘We don’t want to have children. We’re both so wrapped up in our careers that we’d make lousy parents,’ she says. ‘I’m so busy meeting the televisual delights of children during the day that to come home to children in the evening would be too much.’ She hopes Martin will give her a Nintendo for Christmas. ‘I’d like to play Sonic the Hedgehog.’

So back to television. Parents can hold the poison-pen letters: Dawn is keen on a balanced diet and believes that children cannot live on crisps alone. ‘In terms of televisual delights children want good stories, action, adventure and quality programming. They’re not hugely different from adults.’ She was weaned on Camberwick Green, the Woodentops, Magic Roundabout and Jackanory, but, unlike the rest of her generation, doesn’t think that their modern successors are weak and depraved by comparison. ‘Children’s audiences,’ she avows, ‘are now as well served or better.’ HER offerings to a mass market are Woof! (Emmy award-winning drama), Children’s Ward (ITV’s most popular drama, about the young patients and staff in an inner-city hospital) and The Tomorrow People (sci-fi series about children with special powers).

She doesn’t yet have a character as popular as that pink cultural icon Mr Blobby in Noel’s House Party. ‘We’ve got Rupert Bear, and Bungle, Zippy and George from Rainbow.’ None looks likely to make number one in the charts or edit The Sun, but she’s working on it.

She has to deliver the ratings (‘we’re a commercial channel, not a philanthropic one’) and naturally wants a majority share of the audience: ‘At the moment we’re getting 54 per cent.’ The fight for zapper-happy kids is a tough one, but she acts responsibly. ‘We’re acting in loco parentis. We take seriously our responsibility to inform, educate and entertain.’ Critics wonder how serious she is. They fear her ruthless pursuit of audiences will mean less information and education and more soaps and cartoons. ‘They’re mistaken. We have more educational programmes than ever before,’ she counters. ‘At the expense of entertainment.’ She doesn’t see her programming going the American way of wall-to-wall animation. So what will her end-of-term report say? ‘Very promising start. Should do well – as long as she cuts down on the crisps.

PISTOLS AIMED AT DAWN: ITV’S CHALLENGERS NICK WILSON, Director of Programmes, The Children’s Channel. Age: 44.

Family background: father was a publican (ex-RAF); mother, now a retired publican.

Marital status: married, with three girls and one boy.

On The Great Cartoon Issue: ‘Do children watch too many cartoons? Not mine!’

On The Great Crisps Issue: ‘Do children eat too many many crisps? Not as many as me! I love crisps, especially Kettle Chips I curl up and watch TV with them!’

ANNA HOME, Director of Children’s Programmes, BBC TV.

Age: 55.

Family background: won’t say.

Marital status: single.

On The Great Cartoon Issue: disapproves of the United States which offers ‘mainly wall-to-wall cartoons of the kind which we would, on the whole, not buy’. She does acknowledge that cartoons are important for children’s television but insists that she buys ‘only the best’.

On The Great Crisps Issue: won’t say.

JAMES BAKER, Director of Programmes, Nickelodeon.

Age: 29.

Family background: father is the ex-newsreader Richard Baker. Mother, he says, has devoted her life to ‘bringing up two media pansies’ (brother Andrew writes for The Independent on Sunday).

Marital status: going out with BBC journalist Anastasia Cooke. No kids. On The Great Cartoon Issue: ‘Kids are very good at picking and choosing what they want to see. Cartoons aren’t the be-all and end-all, but a good script works equally for adults and kids. Kids like so-called adult programmes too.

“They’ll enjoy the visuals in Blackadder or Absolutely Fabulous just as adults like the verbals.’

RICHARD La Plante, former rock star and psychiatric counsellor, martial arts expert, screenwriter, actor, novelist and husband of the first lady of screenwriting, Lynda La Plante, has written a thriller, Leopard. It is, according to the blurb, about ‘nature’s perfect killing machine’. But turn the pages of Richard’s own life to discover nature’s most unbelievable living machine – a tale of sex, drugs and a woman who was once paid to talk to him.

Richard, 47, has long blond hair, a tattoo, is dressed in black and sits, legs astride, in rock ‘n’ roll pose. He laughs at himself constantly and is Schwarzeneggerishly forceful.

Before Richard wrote, he was the singer in Revenge, a rock ‘n’ roll band. ‘It ended in a New York bar when I slapped the guitar player’s brother for insulting me and broke his nose,’ he says, in his drawly Pennsylvanian accent. ‘He left by ambulance, I left in handcuffs.’

His first job was as a psychiatric counsellor in a Massachusetts hospital. In 1971, he ran off to live in a tent in the Mexican Senora Desert for six months. ‘I wanted to see what I was all about – but I didn’t arrive at enlightenment. I just did a lot of magic mushrooms and bottles of mescal. Then I’d lie there drunk for two days.’ Does he still do drugs? ‘I don’t think that’s a question I want to answer.’

He went then to San Francisco and joined a ferocious-looking hippy called Russell. ‘I lived in a strict vegetarian commune. I gave away my shoes and didn’t wear any for a year.’ Then they walked barefoot – 3,500 miles in three months – to Boston. ‘I was arrested in Utah for being a vagrant and put into jail.’ He talks characteristically with Kung Fu-style hand movements.

He worked next, aged 24, in a Boston mental institution. ‘People don’t frighten me, however freaky they are,’ he says. ‘That’s valuable in the lock-up ward of a psychiatric hospital, because people are like animals and smell fear.’

He ‘bonded’ with two adolescent male patients. When he went on holiday, they broke out of the institution and into his house. ‘When I came back home, they were living there!’ he laughs. He didn’t report them and they stayed for six weeks. ‘When the hospital found out where they were, I lost my job.’ So he went to Mexico and converted a hot-dog stand and sold artefacts.

In 1975, he was best man at a friend’s wedding in England. He looked so strange that Lynda was bet a fiver to talk to him. ‘I was wearing a blue velvet suit several sizes too big. I’d swapped it with a friend who was 6ft 2in and I’m 5ft 8in.’ So it wasn’t love at first sight? ‘No, she wasn’t my type. I liked them dark and Mexican and she was red and English.’ Then they hit it off and Lynda joined Richard in Mexico, for one of the worst trips of her life. ‘She needed surgery in Mexico City and nobody spoke English. While she was being operated on, I was smuggling motorbikes to make money, ate a burger made of donkey meat and ended up in hospital on an intravenous drip. They asked Lynda where to send my body.’ Their relationship suffered. ‘Lynda hated me; I hated her. I couldn’t wait to get rid of her,’ he says. “Then, when she left, I missed her so bad I didn’t know what to do.’

So Richard went to London – where he imported cowboy boots – and cemented their relationship. ‘We fought every day and night for about a year. We still do regularly.’ What about? ‘My being American and not having any manners or social grace. Nothing’s changed.’

They married in 1977. What is the key to their marital longevity? ‘Separate bank accounts and staying out of each other’s way. But the real secret is our fighting. If we don’t like something, we get it out real quick. People who come to our house are often frightened by our relationship.’

Are they faithful to each other? ‘Well, that’s not just physical, it’s a mental thing as well.’ Can he be faithful without being physically so? ‘Yes, but I don’t want to get into that.’ Is sexual fidelity important to him? ‘I wouldn’t like the idea of Lynda with another man at all.’

Lynda had 10 years of a faltering career as a stand-up comic and bit part actress before turning to writing. Now executives trip over themselves to find a slot for any series she offers and Hollywood pursues her avidly. They rarely read each other’s work. But does he live in her shadow? ‘I’m not sitting there saying, ‘She’s doing this, now what am I doing?’ It’s like a parallel street.’

How successful does Richard feel? ‘I feel unsuccessful – until I meet all those people who’re impressed when they ask, ‘Are you published?” Does he live off Lynda financially? ‘No, I pay my own way,’ he says, with a dead tone. But she earns stacks more money? ‘Oh Christ yes, oh heck. She’s in credit and I’m in debt.’ Would he prefer to be the higher earner? ‘I don’t care. As long as I have my motorbikes and my gym. If you want me to say I feel inadequate, I don’t.’

They don’t have children; sadly Lynda can’t. ‘We went through all the tests and did the f***ing by thermometer. Today, with the technology, we’d have been able to have them.’ Thirteen years ago they tried to adopt. ‘The family reneged. They didn’t want to compound the baby’s mortal sin by getting her adopted by a non-Catholic family. It was sad – we had the room ready for her – but we’d never seen her. We no longer want children. Our lives are pretty active.’ Indeed.

THIS week it was Jacqueline Bodger’s 40th birthday and she attended the inquest to hear why her five year-old son Terry died after going to have six baby teeth extracted, visited the stone which covers the ashes of her eight- year-old child Martin, killed by a car just six years ago, said ‘goodnight’ in her head to her dead children as she does every night, and sat on the sofa in her sitting-room with her husband Philip just wondering why. We’re talking in their council flat in Hendon. They moved there to start afresh, away from the painful memories of the home outside which Martin was run over. Now Terry’s bicycles stand in the hallway by the front door and and toys lie untouched in his bedroom. There are framed photographs of two smiling, healthy boys on the walls, and 70 sympathy cards line the sitting- room shelves.

Philip, 41, is a refuse collector and Jacqueline worked as a clerk in Edgware General Hospital after Martin died there. They have both been off sick since Terry died. They are a sweet and gentle couple, honest and unblaming, and were clearly doting parents.

One day Terry had toothache and Jacqueline took him to the local dentist, who said his tooth would have to come out. He was terrified of needles, so was refered to Eastman Dental Hospital for a general anaesthetic. ‘I told them about Terry’s asthma because I was concerned about gas, but they said not to worry,’ says Jacqueline.

Terry had a bad reaction to the gas. ‘Having lost one child, I went into complete panic. I thought ‘Oh no, not again. We can’t lose another child.” Then Terry’s heart stopped. So they transferred him to University College Hospital. ‘Someone, I don’t know who, said, ‘Mum can’t come in the ambulance.” (The hospital blame the ambulancemen for the decision, and vice versa.) Jacqueline went by taxi and got stuck in traffic.

At UCH, she waited two hours to see her son in intensive care. ‘He looked the same as Martin when he died. I couldn’t cope.’ Suffering further complications, Terry was transferred to Great Ormond Street Hospital by ambulance. Jacqueline wasn’t allowed with him and again took a cab, which got lost.

When she arrived, Terry had had another heart attack and the consultant told Jacqueline he was brain damaged. Next day there was further trouble with his heart. ‘We went and put our arms round Terry and he died,’ she says, fighting back tears.

‘I went mad,’ says Philip. ‘I was screaming that we’d already lost Martin. I wanted to smash the place up.’

Martin’s death had been more rapid. He was run over crossing the road, picked up by a passing ambulance and died an hour later. Jacqueline only knew about the accident when a neighbour knocked on her window, minutes after it happened. When she and Philip got to the hospital, the consultant said Martin had died. ‘It happened so quickly,’ she says. ‘I was confused with shock.’

Martin was cremated. ‘I always felt upset wondering what they did with Martin after I left the chapel,’ she explains. She can’t remember much about his funeral. ‘It felt like watching a play. I felt I was going through the motions, watching myself doing these things.’ They put his ashes in the chapel under a stone inscribed with a poem Jacqueline wrote. ‘We felt unhappy, because you couldn’t put flowers on it. So we bought a grave plot, had a headstone made for Martin and put plants on the spot. We knew Martin wasn’t there, but it was in memory of him. We went there every week, rain or shine.’ She pauses. ‘Then we buried Terry in the plot we’d made for Martin.’

Jacqueline’s face lights up when she recalls happier days. Martin, she says, was lively, outgoing and friendly. He loved walking with his parents, adored collecting worms and snails in the garden when his father was digging and enjoyed school.

Terry, a Thundercats fan, was at nursery school and was shy, generous, artistic, bright and loving. ‘He was always saying, ‘I love you Mummy and Daddy.’ But he was a real Mummy’s boy.’

When Martin died, it was very difficult for them to cope with Terry who was just nine months old. ‘But then he’s what kept us going. When you’ve lost one child, the one left becomes extra precious.’ (They keep saying they ‘lost’ him, as if that’s less final than his being dead.) When they first returned home after Terry died, they couldn’t sleep upstairs. ‘Every night Terry used to wake and I’d hear his thud, thud along the corridor. After losing him I expected to hear that noise for ages. We just couldn’t face him not being in his bedroom so we slept in the sitting-room for a week.’

With Terry’s death, it was the wait for his inquest which kept them going. ‘We hoped to find out a reason why a healthy child should have his teeth out and die. We still haven’t got that answer.’ Anaesthetics carry a rare risk and the inquest recorded a verdict of misadventure: there was no question of a lack of care.

Now Eastman Dental Hospital has set up an independent inquiry. ‘If there’s a machine or procedure that’s wrong, it should be altered. We didn’t want to find someone to blame. But we don’t want other children to suffer. No, no, we’re not interested in compensation at all.’

The Bodgers get up every morning, aimlessly. ‘There doesn’t seem to be any future,’ says Jacqueline. ‘We don’t do anything. We just sit at home. It feels like one long day since we lost him. We just don’t accept that he’s gone. It makes you feel empty all the time. Like there’s a big blank space inside and you don’t know how to fill it. We go to bed at night and hope we won’t wake up the next day. All the time I say ‘why me?’ and then why twice.’ She doesn’t get an answer. ‘You just think they were fit and well, so why were they taken away?’ Does she believe in God? ‘No.’ ‘Definitely not after we lost Martin,’ adds Philip.

They don’t want to move house or pack all Terry’s things away. They learnt ‘the first time’ that that didn’t work. Now Philip is prepared to return to work. But not Jacqueline. ‘I can hardly bring myself to go out of the door at the moment. If I go out in the car it has to be somewhere I hadn’t been with Terry. I can’t face it. It’s too painful.’

They are a close couple, married for 19 years, and the trauma has made them closer. ‘We’re just hanging on for each other. We haven’t been apart since we lost Terry.’

Emotionally, they’ve reacted very differently. ‘Phil’s been able to get a lot out by getting upset and angry,’ says Jacqueline. ‘I just don’t seem able, it won’t come out, though I’m very, very angry that I’ve lost Terry this way.’ They saw a psychiatrist for the first time last week. They’ll continue if it helps.

SARAH Miles,the actress, is dying. She is in the terrible last stages of arsenic poisoning. Her face is awfully pale and her breathing difficult… She’s filming Dandelion Dead, a television drama based on the true story of a 1920s solicitor who murdered his wife. But her real life is more improbably dramatic and beset with tragedy than fiction.

The star of The Servant and Blow Up to Ryan’s Daughter, Steaming and White Mischief disappears, insisting on having her unflattering make-up removed before she’ll be photographed. But she doesn’t change out of her nightie. She has cascading hair, sad eyes, a pretty face naturally almost devoid of wrinkles and she refuses sharply to divulge her age. Initially, she seems nervy, actressy and incredibly sensitive.

She speaks tantalisingly. Shortly after we start talking, she tells of the fire that raged in her wood-beamed Hampshire home last October. ‘The whole conservatory went up like Manderley. My friends were screaming, panicking. I had no idea of the power of fire, phooooow, extraordinary, so fast,’ she says, in a poetic, delivering-lines kind of voice. (She tends to speak discursively in lengthy paraphrases.) ‘I had bare feet, glass was everywhere and I was chucking bread-bins of water over it.’

Sarah is writing a novel on a computer in her dressing room during film breaks. ‘Filming is so boring,’ she says, wearily. But surely it pays nicely? ‘Alas my piggy bank is almost empty. We had the wrong people looking after us financially. We really messed up.’

Later this month A Right Royal Bastard, her autobiography which charts her life until the age of 18, will be published. (It is embargoed until then and so its contents cannot be divulged.) This is a major feat because Sarah is severely dyslexic. ‘I never took an exam, let alone passed one at school. You grow up with the feeling that you are stupid. There’s an inner pain.’ But 20 years ago, while meditating, she received the ‘joyful message’ that she should write. Since then she’s had paranormal experiences (which she won’t explain) which have allowed her to recall her life very clearly. ‘Alas, I can’t remember back to the womb. A lot of people I’ve met can.’

She says, wistfully, that she had a wonderful childhood. Her father was an affluent engineer (they had servants, which she finds ‘terribly embarrassing’), and she and her three siblings roamed carefree with their animals in Essex. People who have read her book comment, mistakenly in her view, on how sad and unloved she was. ‘They say my mother didn’t love me. But she had every right to be pissed off with me. I was an infuriating, agitated little girl.’

WHENEVER her mother said something important or frightening, a curious thing would happen. ‘A silver screen with black edges would come down in front of my eyes.’ Sarah would be blinded by this vision. ‘It still happens today. Maybe that’s what they mean by blind panic.’

She was frequently hit with a hairbrush, which she found ‘comforting. It allowed me to know my boundaries, to know what was right’. Her voice becomes low. ‘I got whacked after I tried to drown my brother. I was three and pushed him into the pond because I wanted him to go away.’ She failed. ‘He fell in the only part of the pond where there were bullrushes.’ She laughs, a tinkling laugh. ‘I love him dearly now.’

She was also expelled from two boarding schools, including Rodean after a hiccup with Royalty. ‘The Queen Mother was visiting the school. She asked me whether I liked it and I said I hated it.’

Sarah has a son, Tom, 25, by her husband Robert Bolt (the Oscar-winning screenwriter of A Man For All Seasons and Dr Zhivago). In parenting, she tried to compensate for the lacks in her own childhood. ‘I didn’t have cuddles but didn’t feel the loss of them. But maybe I gave Tom too many. I couldn’t wean him off them … I probably did everything wrong. I’m sure I was the most ghastly mother.’

Tom, who was expelled from 10 schools, ended up fighting for his life against heroin addiction. Sarah talks only very reluctantly about this now, for the first time. She is cautious for fear of ‘damaging’ him. Tom has been ‘clean’ for seven years. ‘He’s so strong he’s been able to beat the Devil,’ she says. ‘But less than 10 years ago, he stole everything to get money for heroin. He cleaned us out. He stole every one of my awards and Robert’s Oscars. But he brought back all Robert’s Oscars when he couldn’t sell them because they weren’t real gold. Mine were silver!’ She laughs.

‘During this period, my mother was dying of cancer and Robert, who’d had a stroke, was still unsteady. I was preparing for a ritual where I had to hand Mother over to the next life. I can’t explain it because it’s very personal, but if it’s done gently, it means she gives me some of her spirit when she dies.’ The ritual was interrupted by a phone call for help from Robert.

‘Tom, who was then 16, had come to the house to get money from Robert. I don’t know whether Tom knocked him over. But Robert was on the floor and I thought he was going to have a heart attack. As I went to see Robert, Mother said, ‘Do what they do on telly, call the cops.’ Those were her last words to me before she died.

‘I called the police and when they saw what Tom had done, they put him in jail. When he came out, he became a dispatch rider on heroin. He ended up on the streets, because I threw him out. He was a derelict, sleeping rough. That was tough love, the only way to stop him killing himself, and went on for three years.

‘People used to phone me and say, ‘You’re killing your son.’ I’d say, ‘Thank you’ (politely) and put down the receiver. Finally he nearly snuffed it and we sent him to a rehabilitation clinic in America. You send them to these clinics where you have to pay up front, because they run. You’re paying thousands of pounds each time – and they leg it. We hadn’t got any money left. This time he didn’t run, and he cleaned up.’

LAST year, in an article in the Daily Mail, Tom blamed his condition on his working parents, many nannies, the loneliness of life in a show-business family and his ‘whacky’ and ‘stormy’ mother who would hug him, then suddenly be emotionally absent. He felt unwanted and his drug-taking was an attempt to deaden this feeling. Sarah, with an edge to her voice, denies this. ‘The Press twisted it. Tom had everything he could possibly want in terms of love and friends. But my divorce was terrible for everyone concerned.’ She doesn’t blame herself for his addiction. ‘It’s genetic. There’s a lot of alcoholism on my husband’s side of the family. His daughter from his first marriage died of it. (She commited suicide.) And Robert is a workaholic, foodaholic and drinkaholic.’

She also doesn’t feel guilty because she views the problem in cosmic terms. ‘It’s all karma. Tom and I have an awful lot to work out in this life and we haven’t yet got to the really good part.’ Now, happily, Tom sells watches in markets and is working with Sarah on a musical called Boy, about families and drugs. She’s writing the lyrics and Tom the music.

We talk then about her marriage. In 1967, Sarah married Robert, a former schoolmaster, who was at the height of his Lawrence of Arabia fame. Curiously, Sarah resolved on matrimony after she tumbled down the stairs. ‘Robert was typing in the sitting room and I fell down harshly, bang, and twisted my ankle. His typewriter never changed rhythm and I thought, ‘This is the man I’m going to marry.’ Until then I’d been suffocated by men.’ She was attracted to his implacable self-discipline and dedication to work. But they split up in 1973 after the scandal of David Whiting, her business manager who became obsessed with Sarah and was found dead. Sarah, who’d been filming, returned from a night out to find his body in her Arizona hotel room. Mysteriously, a verdict of a drug overdose was reached, although the inquest revealed he’d taken only two Mandrax.

Sarah had been savagely beaten by him on the night he died and reportedly had evidence of foul play. ‘I’m not prepared to talk about that,’ she says now, ‘I don’t want to go to jail.’ Because people might suspect her to be guilty? ‘Oh please! I only tried to keep the man alive. (He had threatened suicide before.) No, I don’t want to get myself into the papers again by the knowledge that has come about. I can’t ever impart it because I can’t prove it.’

At the time, she claimed the intense publicity ruined her marriage and she practically disappeared to Hollywood for seven years. Is that really what went wrong first time round? ‘We both had huge lessons to learn,’ she replies, simply. ‘Lessons about becoming whole in a spiritual way.’ She divorced Robert in 1976, but remained good friends. He then asked her to remarry him in 1979, the day before his bypass operation and stroke. But instead, he married someone else – Ann Zane, the former Marchioness of Queensbury – although it was short-lived. He was also a vegetable for two years, paralysed down one side and unable to speak.

Their relationship changed after his stroke. ‘Robert was a great raconteur and suddenly he was face to face with the wall, couldn’t speak or move and was told he was going to die. We all thought he was going to die.’ (Sadly, he still talks with difficulty.) What was that like for her? ‘Rather beautiful to see him just lying there accepting everything, and obviously horrific. We didn’t know whether he was all right in the head and he couldn’t tell us. It’s taught me patience. Now it’s a joy to be in service. That’s where true contentment comes from.’

While caring for Tom in the rehabilitation clinic, she re-established her matrimonial commitment to Robert and they remarried quietly in 1988. ‘It would never have worked the second time if it was purely lust that brought us together,’ says Sarah, who once had a reputation as a scarlet woman. ‘I was in love with his spirit, eloquence and wit.’ Now their relationship works in an old-fashioned way. ‘I wouldn’t ever want to be the powerful one in a relationship. I find that unattractive in a woman. I like my man to be dominant and I always put my husband first. He still makes all the decisions.’

Any interview with Sarah has to include the bananas stuff. About Sarah drinking her urine twice daily to immunise herself against allergies – ‘it tastes like every lavatory you’ve ever smelt’.

About her paranormal experiences and spiritual awakening that turned her from her atheism – ‘That’s between me and my maker. But it had a profound beauty and socked me out the fucking sky.’

And about reincarnation, her readiness for death and the value of silence. She talks about it all enthusiastically.

A FILM should be made of the life of artist and writer Phyllis Pearsall – or Aunty Pig as she is called by Chris Patten, Governor of Hong Kong. An astute, mischievous and spritely 87-year-old, she was born into poverty, once tried to hit her mother’s boyfriend over the head with a bottle, walked 3,000 miles and has advised Prince Edward on his love life.

She has also endured the violent murder of friends in the Spanish Civil War, survived an air crash in a Dakota, had a Damascene conversion, starved, went blind and regained her sight, learned to drive at the age of 59 with 259 lessons, and met the Queen.

We’re sitting in her unprepossessing flat in Shoreham-by-Sea. She is tiny with silver hair, navy slacks and flowery shirt. She’s the founder and managing director of the A-Z Map Company and drives, sometimes daily, to its Sevenoaks offices. ‘I go to see what the darlings are up to,’ says Phyllis. Her company grew out of her inspired belief in the need for a comprehensive map of London streets.

In 1935, maps hadn’t been updated since 1918, so she stalked 3,000 miles of London streets, rising at 5am, walking daily for 18 hours and listing 23,000 roads. After an unfortunate accident with a shoe box of ‘Tr’ street names, she omitted Trafalgar Square from the original proof for her street map; luckily a beady compositor spotted the mistake.

Initially nobody was interested in her maps. ‘They hadn’t seen women reps and just asked, starting to fondle one, whether I was beddable,’ says Phyllis, with wonderfully old-fashioned enunciation. ‘I said I was too busy doing the maps to be beddable.’ WH Smith gave her her first order and received its initial delivery in a borrowed wheelbarrow. More than 12 million maps have now been sold.

IN 1986, she went to Buckingham Palace for her MBE: ‘The Queen put the medal on one and then one curtsied, which I couldn’t do very well. So I toppled over but somebody saved me.’ She was invited to ‘luncheon’ in 1990. ‘Prince Edward and I discussed his girlfriends. I told him he should look for kindness.’

The Prince and Phyllis discussed sincerity. ‘He said, ‘I’ll find a girl fascinating, charming and fall for her, then just one sentence can finish it. Just one remark will suddenly end one’s interest in her if it’s not sincere’. Yes, he was talking entirely about girls.’

Phyllis’s charming tract, An Artist’s Pilgrimage in Business, is published this week. She turned her business into a trust in 1966; and the book, illustrated with her line drawings, describes her Utopian philosophy. Art is her ‘passion’. She’s painted for Sir Richard Luce and a commission for the former Speaker, Lord Weatherill. ‘Dear ‘Jack’, bless his heart (he has a twin sister, ‘Jill’), is coming to the exhibition.’ (The Little Gallery, Arundel, 25 October.) In December she’s going to Hong Kong to paint, staying with Chris and Lavender Patten. ‘I’ve known Lavender since before she was born,’ says Phyllis, who helped Lavender’s mother, the late Joan Walker-Smith, through the traumatic birth after the death of her husband. Last year Phyllis stayed in Government House painting a commission for the Pattens. ‘Chris is the most huggable of men with a tremendously affectionate nature,’ she says. ‘He calls me Pig because those were my initials before I was married.’ Phyllis was educated at Rodean, which was ‘awful’. In 1919 her family struggled across war-torn Europe, seeking her grandmother, and arriving in Budapest after the communist rebellion. ‘People were starving and being crucified. Jews were being thrown into the Danube with weights on them. When I returned to Rodean and mentioned I’d been in a revolution, they said, ‘What do you mean by coming back in the autumn in your winter hat?” Her father was a Hungarian emigre and her mother Irish Italian. Once they pitched up together at the school, loudly accusing each other of adultery. ‘I hid in the airing cupboard,’ says Phyllis. Later, scandalously, her mother turned up on horseback, wearing men’s clothes and with her lover, the portrait painter Alfred Orr.

WHEN Phyllis was 14, her father, a map maker, wrote saying she should get a winter coat on credit, because he was bankrupt. He fled to America and Phyllis left school and took a taxi home with no money. The Maharaja of Patiala (being painted by Alfred) opened the door in full regalia and paid. ‘Then Mother said, ‘Alfred has an artistic temperament and couldn’t possibly have a little girl in the house. Get a live-in job’.’ How did Phyllis feel being abandoned and rejected? ‘But my mother was infatuated, dear,’ she replies, surprised at the question. ‘I’ve always accepted whatever happens.’

Phyllis went to Paris and slept under bridges, under newspapers. Was she pestered sexually? ‘Not in the way girls are these days. There was a feeling of camaraderie.’ She also starved, frequently for three days and once for 10. ‘So did Vladimir Nabokov. And we used to watch James Joyce sitting blind and miserable in a cafe.’ She taught English then studied philosophy and Byzantine art at the Sorbonne, supporting herself by selling pictures and articles.

Back in London, aged 21, she married a struggling artist 17 years her senior. ‘I’d just rescued Mother from being murdered by her husband. I was bringing an empty whisky bottle down on his head because he was strangling her. That’s how they lived,’ she laughs. Phyllis was thrown out for ‘interfering’, and took up with the Irish artist she bumped into on the way out.

They went to live in Spain but her husband, Richard, was ‘always angry and frightened’ and she found life impossible. ‘I walked out after eight years, without saying a word. That’s the worst thing you can do to anybody. I wouldn’t do it now. I’d tell him first.’ They didn’t have children. ‘It just didn’t happen. When I was young I wanted 12.’

In 1946, she was getting her maps reprinted in Holland when her plane crashed off course in dense fog on a wooded hill. She suffered a stroke, fractured skull and spine. ‘I longed to be dead.’ Instead of resting, she soon carried on working. Her disabilities, she writes charitably, led to diminished self-interest and the discarding of any fear of death. In 1948, she returned to Spain to visit friends. ‘Many had been murdered. It made me completely apolitical.’ She then begged a passage on an orange freighter from Seville and was painting on the bridge when two stowaways appeared, ‘out of the oranges, still vomiting from the fumes. They said if they were taken back, they’d be shot by Franco’. She looks distressed. The Captain shopped them.

On a happier note, the officers’ sexual advances were not unwelcome. ‘I think I was fairly free with myself if I fell for somebody,’ she says, brightly. ‘I was susceptible. That was part of bohemian life.’ Suddenly in 1950, she went completely blind for three months. Did she just lie in bed? Of course not! She wrote, sightlessly, about a Japanese artist, Itiro Takeda, for the New Yorker.

She writes of her Damascus Road conversion in her book – in 1954 when she was reading Schopenhauer’s analysis of Evil Man. ‘Suddenly whoof, an ethereal light flooded me.’ A few days later she had a Fra Angelico vision of Christ on the Cross. Bang, she says, she was faced with the Herculean task of discarding self-justification, white lies and pride. Phyllis describes herself as an old fool, but a happy one. Her life may sound batty, but she is terribly sane.

THE television journalist Kate Adie, who was adopted as a baby, was reported yesterday to have been happily reunited with her natural mother and sister after searching for a year. But the newspaper stories made one person unhappy.

Ariel Bruce is a unique professional who specialise in tracking down the families of adopted children or those taken into care.

‘I understand the family were very upset about the way this came out. It’s such a private matter,’ says Ariel. ‘There’s enough strain in being adopted and deciding to search for your birth family. Having then to reveal yourself as a public figure when you find them is even more stressful.’ The glare of publicity further aggravates the tension.

Ariel, 41, was aware of these problems when she traced the half-sister of actress Stephanie Cole. But yesterday Stephanie was happy to talk on radio about Ariel and the consequent meeting with her sibling.

Ariel explains: ‘We did a lot of careful work to find out that her sister was interested in the contact before she knew who Stephanie was. Psychologically that’s very important. The fact that it is someone you might have watched regularly on television is revealed much later.’ We’re sitting in Ariel’s attic flat in Bloomsbury, from where she works. There are thank-you cards from grateful clients, photographs of her four children and eclectic reference books, from a 1954 London Post Office directory to stacks of Who’s Who. The office wall is covered with photographs of smiling people – the relations she has reunited. Ariel has a peaceful, open face, studenty specs and wears jeans and a T-shirt. A trained social worker, she has been tracing lost relations for nine years. It started with a chance encounter with James, an 18-year-old odd-job man, who had wanted to find his mother since early childhood. Ariel comes from a Jewish, Hampstead-intellectual, bohemian background. She empathises with her clients’ feelings of rootlessness because of her own experience: her parents were refugees from pre-war Germany who parted, and her mother was deemed unfit to bring her up, so Ariel was put into care from the age of 11 to 18. She was in six foster homes and cannot even remember the names of four of her foster parents.

‘But my relationships with my foster parents give me some understanding of the sort of work I do. I am poacher turned gamekeeper.’

She has been married and divorced twice and has four children, the eldest a 22-year-old son, the youngest a daughter still at school.

She tells the moving tale of one case she worked on for three years. ‘When we found the birth mother, she told us her daughter had been born as the result of what you’d call date rape these days. She was blamed by her husband and family for having ‘asked for it’. I was touched that she had wanted the child at the time, and 40 years later she still did.’ But they are not all happy endings. Recently she did a search on behalf of a man who had a background of both mental and alcohol problems. ‘When we found his mother, she was an alcoholic. The meeting had a traumatic effect on everyone involved.’

Ariel doesn’t just work with adoptions. One man in his seventies wanted her to find his old sweetheart. Ariel didn’t think they’d be able to find her – or that she’d be available if they did or that she’d still like him. It took nine months. ‘But we managed – and they fell in love all over again.’

Since 1926 three-quarters of a million children have been adopted in Great Britain. ‘Adoption touches most of us in some way,’ says Ariel. Now, every year, there are about 10,000 adoptions, of whom 500 are infants, and since the Children’s Act of 1975, they have the right to see their birth certificates.

She says there are no trade secrets in her work – it is 90 per cent rote and 10 per cent inspiration. ‘It’s a mixture of rational, logical – akin to a game of chess – and human.’

She works with a permanent staff of another social worker, a genealogist and administrator, and draws on a pool of research specialists. A successful search tends to end in a highly discreet letter, and she has helped hundreds of people of all ages and social classes. Her charges are normally from £650 to £800.

Many adoptees, she believes, need to know their origins. They need to know their roots to feel secure.

But why do so many people want to trace their relatives rather than leave well enough alone? She looks incredulous. ‘The question is more curious about why people wouldn’t want to. In my view, closed adoption (where there is no information or contact) is an unnatural state.

SOMEONE recently said to Lis Howell that launching a television channel was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. ‘I must be dead then,’ says Howell, waggishly. Howell was the director of programmes at GMTV who was sacked from her £100,000-a-year job amid rows about the F for fanciability factor. Now she is launching UK Living, a women’s satellite channel of which she is head of programming. UK Living, she says unrepentantly, will have the F-factor too. But this time, F stands for feminine.

UK Living welcomes girlies to agony aunts, Jayne Irving with chat, horoscopes and exercise, reruns of Delia Smith with creative cookery, reruns of Kilroy and reruns of Good Morning… with Anne and Nick. ‘A year ago if I’d been asked to do a women’s channel, I’d have said, ‘I don’t want to be ghettoised and sidelined.” Now she argues that the channel isn’t patronising. ‘It reflects what people do. Just because women traditionally do something doesn’t make it a demeaning, lower-grade activity.’ Howell, 42, changed her views after being sacked. ‘I had to fall back on my friends, family and the security of domestic detail. It suddenly became a pleasure to go to the school gates to meet my daughter or to bake.’ She is adept at plundering her experience for media purposes. She was actually only without a job for four days before she was given work on Good Morning… with Anne and Nick. Five weeks later, she was offered the UK Living job. Howell is wearing a white see-through T-shirt with sober suit and pearls, and is a small, bottle blonde with a northern accent and beseeching eyes. She looks tired, has a slightly forlorn air but speaks and thinks extremely fast.

When GMTV went on air in January, she was dubbed the most powerful woman in ITV. ‘That was hysterically funny. It doesn’t say much for women or TV.’ When ratings dropped, she pushed Michael Wilson off the sofa. They dropped further then under Big Breakfast competition and Greg Dyke (who with Roland Rat saved TV-am) stepped in and said F-off to the F-factor.

THE big problem was the F-factor, whereby Fiona Armstrong was encouraged to wear shorter skirts because she has great legs. Howell denies having played the game by the worst male rules. ‘I don’t regret it. It hit a truth and a nerve,’ she says realistically. ‘We live in a society which is confused about the way women behave, dress and act on TV.’ GMTV, running at a £10million loss, has only increased its 38 per cent audience share by 2 per cent since Howell left.

Howell was deeply distressed after being sacked. (She’s contractually obliged not to talk about her departure.) ‘I was shocked, upset and damaged. It was an alarming experience. I still feel scarred. Many women don’t like women achievers. When you fall from grace, people laugh, snigger and punch the air. But then there is support that you don’t expect.

‘I’m resilient but not tough. I get frightened and worried. I always think ‘maybe this is it’ and I’ll not be able to earn a living. I get scared that I’m not as good as I think I am. All sorts of self-doubts.’ Did she feel a failure? ‘Of course. But I was wrong. It’s the old female thing of ‘everything’s my fault’.’

Howell believes she is a feminist, hot on equal opportunities. (‘How on earth does taking a well-known and respected woman and making her as attractive as possible conflict with feminism?’ she remarked during the F debacle.) ‘I’m an organic feminist. That makes me sound like somebody who grows her own vegetables!’

Once she threatened to sue a newspaper when a journalist asked whether she exploited her own sexuality to get her way. Why did she consider it so damaging to be thus accused? ‘I find it offensive and hopefully inaccurate, although we all bat our eyelashes.’

She had a happy, lower middle-class childhood. ‘We were part of that aspirational post-war generation. Education was tremendously important.’ She was educated at Liverpool Institute for Girls.

She has said that there is no way somebody like herself is going to land a plum job at the BBC or ITN. Realistic? Or inferiority about being a grammar school girl from the provinces? ‘Maybe I’m a bit chippy,’ she replies. ‘When I moved to London I was resentful of metropolitan people. But it was fashionable to be chippy, and I have an opportunist element in me.’ She married a law student after she finished studying English at Bristol University. It lasted three years. ‘We both married too young. He has just married for the third time.’ For the last 13 years she has lived with reporter Ian Proniewicz. Why has she never married again? ‘That’s personal.’ Thinks quickly. ‘He’s never asked me!’ Giggles.

‘I don’t think marriage is particularly relevant. We might have got married when I was pregnant, but I couldn’t stand up half the time – let alone get down the aisle.’ (She had high blood pressure and had to lie on her back for six weeks before the birth.) She talks then about motherhood. Just eight years ago she dropped out in Cumbria in a well-documented interlude as a postmistress and earth mother. Aged 33, she had her daughter, Alex. She desperately wanted to go back to work. ‘Almost unheard of in Cumbria.’ Did she resent her child then? ‘No, because it took so long for her to be conceived. I was desperate to have a baby.’

Howell didn’t work for 18 months after Alex was born and felt ‘quite lost’. Does she lack the inner resources to be all right without the identity of a job? ‘I did wonder about that.’ At GMTV she was portrayed as a demonic worker. She didn’t socialise, and worked from 4am to 4pm. ‘I’m driven, in a way. But I’m not a workaholic.’ Driven because she needs to prove herself or make her mark in the world? ‘No.’

GEORGE Iain Murray, who refuses to use the name George and is the 10th Duke of Atholl, lives in Blair Castle, Perthshire. The castle has white-painted pebble dash on it and was started in 1269. ‘The Earl of Atholl owned the land then. He was on a crusade when a local gentleman called Mr Cumming decided this was a nice place to build a house and started doing so,’ says the Duke. ‘The Earl returned and was somewhat annoyed to find a house in the middle of his grounds. So he turfed Mr Cumming out and took over.’ The Duke, whose father was killed in action in 1945, was evacuated to Blair Atholl during the war. (Before then, the castle was let to an American married to a Dutch diamond millionaire. ‘They used to play bicycle polo in the ballroom. When they left, they gave a new floor.’) He came to the title aged 26, through a third cousin three times removed. He doesn’t have a son and heir.

He is the only man in Britain permitted to have a private army, an honour awarded by Queen Victoria after she stayed in Blair Atholl in 1844. His army has never been to war, it is purely ceremonial and soldiers are drawn from his estate.

The Duke, who is vice-president of the National Trust for Scotland, recently retired as chairman of Westminster Press and now comes rarely to London. He wanders round his 135,000-acre estate with a Purdey 12-bore side-by-side shotgun and Ben the black labrador. He’s wearing brown brogues, tweed jacket and a ‘genuine’ Fair Isle sweater. He has a good head of hair and significant nose.

Tomorrow is the 12th when grouse shooting starts. ‘The Glorious 12th is not going to be glorious,’ he says, crossly. ‘In fact, nothing is going to happen.’ The grouse were killed by bad weather in May and he doesn’t intend to shoot them until Glorious September. In 1977, they had their ‘best year’ and shot 400 brace.

The castle has 120 rooms. ‘Mostly attics, five flats and archives for family papers.’ Since 1269, the castle, which was the last building in Britain to be besieged, has been altered every century. His changes have been ‘insignificant and cosmetic. Last year I rewired’. He hasn’t touched the main castle, 32 rooms of which are open to the public.

He lives in 20 rooms which were originally butlers’ and dairy maids’ houses. ‘It’s known as the South End and was added in 1750.’ His drive and entrance are well hidden from the 165,000 annual visitors to the castle. (He says he wouldn’t ever serve teas to Americans. ‘Not if I can help it.’) HE moved to this end of the castle in 1946 with his mother and lived there in discomfort. ‘The sitting-room fire smoked like mad, so if the wind was in the south-east you had to do everything in the bathroom, including a lot of paperwork. It was the only warm room in the house.’ They then made their own electricity. ‘It wasn’t a great success. We weren’t ever able to make enough to run more than one bar of an electric fire.’

The Duke’s home has Murray tartan carpets in the corridors. Downstairs are the gun room and reception rooms. He breakfasts on fishcakes or kippers in the powder-blue Adam-style dining room. He also eats lots of game off the estate. He changes, often into black tie, even when dining alone. He rarely wears a kilt. ‘It makes one look too much like a Scottish nationalist.’ He is immensely rich, despite the cushion in his creamy peppermint-coloured sitting room which reads: ‘To be rich is no longer a sin, it’s a miracle.’ ‘I’m rich in assets but poor in cash,’ says the Duke, whose only addition to the family collection in six years has been a silver cream jug. All the good 18th century cabinet-makers are represented in his furniture. His favourite treasure is a Zoffany painting of the third Duke and family.

Upstairs is the Long Corridor, 70 yards long and with walls covered in deer antlers. ‘That was how originally you got to your bedroom from the main part of the castle. According to my mother, if you were in the dining room and forgot your handkerchief in 1933, it was a five-minute trek to get it from your bedroom.’

Off the Long Corridor are the bedrooms, ‘grander than the reception rooms’, with their four-posters. ‘The beds have been here since 1750. They’re pretty comfortable.’ The Duke of Kent and Prince Philip have both slept here. He takes his jacket off to sit on the bed. ‘I expect I’ll die of cold, even in August.’

The bedrooms are numbered, not named. ‘This is ‘Second Best Guest’,’ he says, pointing to number eight with its double bed. ‘It’s all right if you have a couple staying, but if you have one person it’s unnecessarily large from the sheets point of view.’

The bed head in room 10, the eighth Duke’s bedroom, is decorated with a savage. It is his coat of arms. ‘It’s a wild man with a key in one hand and a dagger in the other.’ His motto is ‘Furth Fortune and Fill the Fetters’, which urges him to go forth and capture his enemies and shackle them. ‘Unlike most mottoes, it’s not a very good one.’

If he had to be confined to one room, which would he choose? ‘I think one’s bedroom is the most important room. One needs a comfortable bed.’ He has a single bed, presumably to be economical with sheets.

Finally there is the attic room. It is extremely cold in the winter, since it has four outside walls ‘and it was too expensive to bring central heating up here’. Luckily, the bath tub is in the bedroom itself. The Duke, who is 6ft 3in, has to sit with his knees up in his bath.

A SOCIALITE who shrinks from publicity, the beautiful Uruguayan aristocrat and fixer for Hello! magazine who is said to travel the world with a Louis Vuitton suitcase full of money in search of celebrities for the magazine, Marquesa de Varela has opened the doors of her garden in her stunning rented Knightsbridge home to give her first interview. The triumph of Hello! is largely due to the normally mysterious marquesa, its marvellous hit woman. She has formidable contacts with the rich and famous and is a friend of the Duchess of York’s mother, Mrs Susan Barrantes. It was the marquesa, with her jet setting and title, who scooped the world with her 48-page special on the Duke and Duchess of York. She is famed for her exclusive though not penetrating interviews. (At Mandy Smith’s bedside, she asked: ‘Do you cry a lot?’) She never gets too personal, nor does she try to trick anyone in her interviews, nor does she put any indiscretions in print. (The only person she really wants to interview who hasn’t agreed to her request is the Pope!) The glamorous and charming marquesa has carte blanche from her publisher to fly Concorde to her interviews.

The marquesa has also shown great strength of character in the face of tragedy. She has two wrecked marriages, is said to be a social climber and may not be entitled to her title, which she should have relinquished (under Spanish law) when she divorced her husband.

Known to her friends as Naneta (a nickname from her nanny meaning ‘little girl’), her real name is Julia Marin. The marquesa, who admits to being 48, has perfect unruffled poise, cleavage, wonderful chestnut hair and looks devastatingly sexy in a Miss Selfridge dress and Portobello market jewellery.

Marquesa, you put a book on dogs and elephants on the table for our photograph. Why? ‘I hope it’ll teach people to take care of animals. I have 60 stray dogs I have collected in Uruguay. I really love them, I really suffer for them.’

In the first issue of Hello! you had an interview with the Princess Royal at Buckingham Palace. Can you tell us about that? ‘I don’t believe in writing letters to anybody important to ask for an interview. It’s much better that their friends explain what I want. Princess Anne wasn’t funny at all. The first thing I said to her when I arrived was, ‘I’ve come here to do a nice, positive, happy story.’ And she replied, ‘Well, you’ve come to the wrong place.’ It was my first time at Buckingham Palace, my first Royal, and in a different language. She wasn’t at all easy, but she is intelligent and cultured.’

IS IT true that you carry a Louis Vuitton suitcase full of money round the world? ‘No. I hate labels. I travel round the world in my leggings and American knickers.’ American knickers? ‘Yes, like Reebok.’ Ah, American sneakers. ‘Yes. What is knickers?’

You have met so many stars, you must have some interesting stories. ‘We were in Khashoggi’s boat during Ramadan when he was one of the richest men in the world. Suddenly the photographer said there was a lot of blood running down the corridor of the boat. They were killing sheep on board. I couldn’t sleep after that. I was so obsessed about the animals they were killing in the kitchen.’

The world and his wife wanted an interview with Mandy Smith. But you were the one who got it. Why? ‘I got Mandy because I have suffered a lot, really a lot with my second husband. So I could understand Mandy. She is not the blonde bimbo everyone thinks.’

Why have you given me a world exclusive with this interview? ‘I kept saying ‘no’ to everybody, but I have nothing to hide. I’m fed up with people saying I’m frivolous and a social climber. You have been lucky in getting me. You just happened to call when I was fed up with people talking about ‘the mysterious marquesa’.’

You put the rich and famous at their ease. How? ‘Because I live like them. It’s easy for me to understand their mentalities.’

How did you get the interview with the Duke and Duchess of York? ‘Luck. I was never a friend of the Prince’s. I’d only met him briefly. But I was friendly with a friend of his. Prince Andrew is the most charming man I’ve ever met and Fergie is so natural. She often says things that the Press wouldn’t believe. I’m like the diary journalists. I have to keep a lot inside me.’

You are a deeply glamorous person, marquesa. Can you tell us about that? ‘Since I was 13 I had to be glamorous because I was beautiful and I was the daughter of a rich man. I had to be frivolous as well. But deep down I’m not like that. I love my family and I try to be good with people who work. I understand how tough it is to work.’

Who are your famous friends? ‘Fergie’s mother is one of my best friends. She was staying here until yesterday when she went back to Argentina. She always stays with me when she comes to England. I’m also very good friends with the Duke of Northumberland who is very weird and goes out with Barbara Carerra. I have lunch with the Duchess of York and many dukes and duchesses.’ You have worked for Hola! (the original Spanish version of Hello!) for 11 years and have a Midas touch. But why do you still work? Why don’t you find a rich man, marry and go to live in Texas? ‘That’s what I’d ask myself if I were interviewing myself. All my friends have. They’ve all got the richest husbands. It’s easy. If you want to get married, you just do it. ‘But I was brought up in Uruguay (the Switzerland of America) and we were taught in my family never to go with men for money. Not to look for help from outside yourself, but to have pride, honesty and morals, although I’m not a Virgin Mary.’

What would put you off marriage? ‘I couldn’t marry someone if I didn’t like the way he dressed. If someone has bad taste, he has bad taste in everything. He’ll buy the worst car and we’ll disagree on everything.’ You were married first for nine years, then 11 and have since been alone for 10 years. You don’t currently have a boyfriend. How do you manage? ‘It’s difficult. I’ve been alone for years. But not for much longer now because I’ve made up my mind not to be. After my disastrous marriages, I was hurt and upset and didn’t want to know about men. I have not had a lover for years. I have my morals.’

Can you tell us about your marriages? ‘I was crazily in love with two very handsome and very destructive men. First Montenegro, then the Marques de Varela. I didn’t marry because of money. I could have married 10 times better. I was a really beautiful and successful woman. I could have married many famous names.’

You have said you suffered a lot with your husbands. ‘The marques was a very cold personality. I’m the opposite. I was crazily in love with him. But he only looked at me because I was beautiful and like another jewel that he had bought. I suffered horribly emotionally. I was always looking for love and never found it. I’ve told you things about my marriage that I’ve never told anyone.’

How did you meet the Marques de Varela? ‘He asked a friend of mine, ‘Who is the most beautiful and successful girl in Marbella this summer?’ Of course it was me. So we had a blind date. The minute I saw him, I was in love. He is so handsome, intelligent. And he knows how to command a woman.’ Is it true that you aren’t entitled to your title? ‘My husband said I could keep it. Unless I remarry, I’m the Marquesa de Varela.’ Marquesa, you live in the same jet-set way as the stars who grace the pages of Hello! How important is money to you? ‘Money is not important, I swear. But I don’t want to sound phoney. Money is important to everybody. It gives you freedom and you can buy whatever you want. In Uruguay, families depend on me. Families who used to work for my father on a farm. Each month I say I want to fire them, but I can’t do it. I’m not rich by European standards.’

You have homes all over the world. Can you tell us about them? ‘I have a small flat in Madrid and a house in Knightsbridge, but there are builders there. I have a farm in Uruguay, a new house in Montevideo and a farm in Punta del Este.’ (She phones the following day and says: ‘I own more property that I forgot about. I have a flat in Buenos Aires, another farm in Punta del Este and two flats on the port, a farm in San Jose and I’m looking for a house in Miami.’) Is it true that you were so penniless when your first marriage broke up that you lived in a Madrid boarding house? ‘No, with friends. My father said that if I wanted money, I had to come home. But I had failed in my marriages and was considered a disaster. They were always complaining about me, so why go back?’

You have three children: Bruno, 14, who is studying in Uruguay; Valeria, 21, who was one of the top models in Spain; and Natalia, 23. Can you tell us about being a mother? ‘I was a mother and stayed at home and cooked when I was married to Montenegro. I began working for Spanish television when my second marriage was finishing. Now Bruno is looked after by my mother and one of my daughters. I am in South America from December to April.’ You had your first boyfriend when you were 14, didn’t you? ‘That is right. I had lots of boyfriends. When I was 18, I had three at the same time. It was a disaster. I was terrible, I must face it. But having fun was very important to me. I always say ‘yes’ to everything. I never feel depressed.’

How have you made such wonderful friends? You have an address book second to none. ‘I met them socialising when I lived in Greenwich Village. New York is the centre of the world. I met John Kluge, already one of the richest men in America, Al Pacino, Mrs Randolph Hearst…’

You have a warrior spirit and are independent and forceful. How would you describe your character? ‘I’m strong, for self-protection, but not tough. I’m sensitive, very easily hurt. I’ve helped so many people get their positions in work and they never thank me. I’m very disillusioned about human beings.’

You also look as if you have a fiery temper and are the sort of woman one wouldn’t want as an enemy. ‘Yes, if someone crosses me, I’ll never forget. I can explode, but nothing too dangerous.’

Are you ruthless? Will you walk over people? ‘I will never betray anybody. I’ve never had a relationship with a married man if that’s meant walking over his wife. It’s different if a married man comes and says: ‘I love you…’’

CAROLINE PHILLIPS asks TV guru Michael Barratt to help in her quest to become cool on camera and just like a very, very famous weather girl.

SOME are born great, others achieve greatness, and others have it pinned on them through being television presenters. This is why I want to be Tania Bryer and have spent weekends on Learn to be Tania Bryer courses. The media training industry has mushroomed like satellite dishes over the past decade. And when it comes to training, I’m a course-aholic.

I start off in Hillside Studios, Bushey, in front of a camera, surrounded by floor manager, sound technicians, lighting and cameramen. (Hillside started as a place to train clergy to put over their message on television; now it trains everyone from chef Wozza to prison screws.) For this exercise, I’ve been told to think about press intrusion but the voice through my earpiece is nattering about bike trips in Amsterdam.

The cameras are about to roll. Suddenly I remember the recent transport minister on television proclaiming the road behind him utterly safe, just as two cars crashed. And Dan Quayle getting muddled on the box about the Nazi Holocaust. ‘It was,’ Quayle said, ‘an obscene period in our nation’s history, no, not our nation’s but World War II, I mean, we all lived in this century, er, I didn’t live in this century but…’ (People think it’s easy to be on television, until they try it.) ‘Stand by,’ says the voice in my ear. ‘Two to go, one to go, 30, and…’ The floor manager motions as if to cut his own throat. The cameras start to roll. My brain takes a vacation, my smile becomes Sky-high and my mouth feels as if it’s been in the desert for 46 days without water. Nearby is the control room (glad someone around here feels in control) with its bank of monitors.

Now the course leader, science programme presenter Su Ingle, is interviewing me on camera. ‘Have you ripped anybody to shreds of late?’ she asks, sweetly. (Presumeably talking about my work.) Doing this naked would probably be only marginally worse. I try to think myself into being Tania, the girl without whom the launch of a new range of Hermes shoelaces or opening of a (Gucci) plastic bag would be incomplete. To look relentlessly happy, like Tania, the darling of the social circuit.

Unfortunately, I’m wearing a too-shiny-for-television shirt, distracting earrings and clip mike which turns out to be the communications industry equivalent of a ball and chain whenever I move. But I develop a good line in monosyllabic replies. Answers matched only by the length of my Bryer-style skirt. Then we wind up the interview. (Telespeak for turning the cameras off.) Su later tells me that she once did a programme live, with a temperature of 105 degrees and a nurse standing nearby spraying her with water.

Next I’m in solitary confinement in what they call their ‘remote studio’, to give what they call an ‘immediate reaction’ to sticky questions. Ready to turn my brain from Moscow coups to chiropody campaigns. Looking straight at camera, peering into its disconcerting lens. I cannot see my inquisitor, only hear her questions. I do brilliantly. But then we both (the former weather girl and I) have a degree in politics. There’s no question about it, I am Tracey Sunshine, as Tania is known. Time to wind up, again. Now fast forward to another place, another time. Remind yourself of gravelly voiced Michael Barratt, the former Nationwide presenter turned media consultant. Known in the TV world as Grumpy, he is straight-talking and professional. He has nine children, was the first person to expose the Kray twins on air and thinks television is full of giggly girls who have been given their jobs because of their sex appeal. I follow up my training with him. This also gives me a chance to nip into another outfit, like my heroine.

GRUMPY says he wants me to ‘grasp the basics’, and has set up a temporary studio in his office for me to do so. The camera perches precariously over his desk. First of all I have to interview Joyce, who teaches people how to talk on the phone. Telephone voice training she called it. It is clear that (like Tania) I am thus well en route to becoming a pin-up for the troops in Ireland.

Next I have to ad lib to camera for two minutes about election night and five about travelling around Australia on a bus. Then I interview Grumpy. ‘Michael, you were hugely successful. Now you’re stuck in Maidenhead doing corporate videos and training. What happened?’ He says that’s a daft question and I wonder whether I should show him my Tania Bryer legs and Esther Rantzen knees. Lis Howell, former programme director of GMTV, once told me she’d make a feature of my pegs. The Phillips Factor. ‘Excellent eyes, good face, your fingers give away your nervousness,’ encourages Michael. ‘I’m getting excited about you. You’re improving fast.’ Michael was known as Take One Barratt, because he always used his first take. But that’s clearly not going to be my style. ‘In my experience the best performers in television are shy people,’ says Michael, hiding behind his jazzy tie.

I have my home videos of myself on the box, which I was given after the courses; ‘pilots’ I like to call them. So where do I go from here? Just as I’m beginning to despair of being Tania Bryer in this lifetime, I’m summoned for a screen test with producer Vicki Barass, of the hit show The Good Sex Guide. She is looking for a presenter to report from the front line of women’s experience on topics like body hair, family meals and feminine wiles. To look at the big questions of our times, like who gets the worst deal – wife number one or two?

My screen test takes place al fresco in the busy shopping precinct of South Molton Street. This is what you have to do when seeking the giddy stardom of satellite TV meteorology.

‘As women work, are men’s biological impulses going to change to fit this new social trend? Is his first smouldering stare going to assess not the size of your bra cup but your wallet?’ I announce to the camera and passers-by. I’m an exhibitionist, loving it. People stop and stare. The waiters in the cafe congregate at the window. At last I am a Waif (one of the Why am I famous brigade?) THEN I have to do vox pops and ask strangers questions: ‘Are men scared stiff if they think they’re talking to a woman who is cleverer than them?’ I ask. ‘And do you think you’re clever?’ ‘Erm, yep,’ replies a bald artist who is chewing gum. ‘Do men like women to be more stupid than themselves?’ I enquire of three harridans. ‘Sphlunk, vosh splosh yert,’ they say. Presumably they’re not English.1 It’s astonishing how you can accost strangers in the street and they will reveal intimate details about themselves if you’re accompanied by a camera crew. ‘I’m very brilliant,’ confides an Italian psychologist with giraffe eyelashes. That makes two of us…

Anyone want to hire me (no previous experience) to read their weather maps?