Exclamation marks, no; aertex shirts, yes!

Jonathan Meades, the architectural, food and cultural commentator, appears on television in a pair of retro shades and a trademark Blues Brother suit. He looks like a poseur, and indeed studied drama at Rada. Lynn Barber, the ‘celebrity interviewer’, is the self-acknowledged scourge of pomposity and pretension. (Melvyn Bragg, among others, has felt the lash of her schoolmarm tongue.) Like Meades, Barber grew up in early 1950s middle-class England. An only child, she found a way out of the bridge/ canasta tea parties and sherry-tippling of Twickenham, her childhood home, to become a staff writer on Penthouse girlie magazine; her first book, published in 1975, was a sex manual entitled How to Improve Your Man in Bed (which, incidentally, my wife has still not read).

At 69, Barber claims to be the oldest ‘still-practising’ interviewer in Britain, a hard-drinking mumsy figure who likes a smoke and a laugh. Her memoir, My Curious Career, takes us through her student years at Oxford when she slept with a grand total of 50 men (How to Exhaust Your Man in Bed?), and on to marriage, children and her current post at the Sunday Times.