Stephen Fry, Tracey Emin and Christopher Hitchens confess In Confidence

The new series, starting later this month, features the brothers Hitchens, Christopher and Peter, Tracey Emin, Sheila Hancock, Mike Leigh, Dame Cleo Laine, Stephen Fry, Baroness Williams of Crosby, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, André Previn, Jackie Mason and Danny Baker. With a third season commissioned, its roll call may soon bear comparison with that of Taylor’s old friend, the late Dr Anthony Clare over 25 years on In the Psychiatrist’s Chair on Radio 4.

Actually, and despite the clinical promise of his programme’s title, Taylor, a professional sociologist, eschews the psychoanalytical approach — except when, as in the matter of the Hitchens’ bitter rivalry for parental love, it is inescapable. “The trouble with Anthony’s programme was its title,” he says. “The psychiatry was usually very straightforward. Did you get on with your mum? Did you fear your dad?” He doubts, anyway, the validity of “the confession”, a word whose meaning existed somewhere between the torture chamber and the priesthood before being hijacked by psychotherapy and journalism.

“Every time you pick up the paper there is some damn pop star confessing how they got hooked on cocaine. I distrust intimacy in interviews. I think we have overdosed on intimacy. We have some belief that if only we can get at someone’s deep secrets do we understand them, but I find people who lean over to me in pubs and tell me all about their lives become rapidly very uninteresting because the quality of their personal revelations is often remarkably similar to everybody else’s. I prefer what happens in a conversation. To be awfully pretentious and maybe pious, I really believe that a conversation can generate greater insight than asking for intimate revelations.”

His model is, actually, farther distant than Anthony Clare. It is John Freeman, who on the BBC’s Face to Face, between 1959 and 1962, interrogated a pantheon of the famous, from Tony Hancock and Danny Blanchflower to King Hussein of Jordan and Carl Jung. “Everyone thinks they were intimate because Gilbert Harding [the early TV personality] cried, but when I looked at them again before making this series, I realised what they really promoted was good conversation.”

Taylor, who is 74, retired from academia and recently married for the fourth time (his bride is the former Woman’s Hour editor Sally Feldman), is still remembered fondly for his contributions to Robert Robinson’s Stop the Week on Radio 4, on which one of his foils in the weekly anecdotal jousts was Anthony Clare. The shrink’s shade will smile at the thought that, in his old friend’s programmes, at least, his legacy to broadcasting is not the science of psychiatry but the art of good conversation.

“If you have a conversation around a dinner table you can discover more about a person because you are away from the stock stories. People have so often prepared a version of themselves. I used to go into prison and talk to prisoners and they all had their sad story that they repeated and I never felt much was gained. I love the statement in a Saul Bellow novel, ‘I never know what I think till I hear what I say’.”

And what about his esteemed guests?

“What interests me is the way people handle celebrity. I came across a phrase in a book called The Culture of Narcissism, the “banality of pseudo-self awareness”. I think there is something rather banal about the way people are knowing about themselves as a way of dealing with celebrity. I want to get away from a shrink-wrap narrative, to something more human and honest.”

TRACEY EMIN ON SEX, SUCCESS AND CREATIVITY

LT: You get in a bit of a state sometimes before a new exhibition. If there’s going to be new work and suddenly nothing’s happening, it’s not working.
TE: I suffer from creative blocks, terrible, and when I’m not making art, I’m not creating. I feel like I’m dying, my soul dies. I can’t live, I can’t breathe, I’m horrible to my friends; it’s awful. If I’m not making art I’m not who I’m supposed to be.

You know how sometimes you wake up and you think “I’ve got no friends, I’ve got no friends” and other days you wake up and think “Everyone loves me, I’m fantastic, I love the world”? It’s a bit like that, so some days I wake up and think “I’m a useless artist, I’m terrible. It’s not real, I don’t understand it. Why am I an artist?”

You’re concerned about the truth, you are always wanting to be honest.
No, I’m not, no. The older I get the more irritating it becomes. You can’t be honest about everything all the time; if you are you’d be a f***ing idiot, wouldn’t you? ... Now my taste in what looks good isn’t the same as everyone else’s, it’s a little bit more honest than most people’s, but on the other hand ... if I just went round vomiting all the time and shitting everywhere and saying “it’s art”, it wouldn’t be, it would be a bad digestive problem. But the fact that I actually collate, I edit, I curate, I think about it, makes it art — that’s what the difference is.

Somebody asked you once about the famous bed and you said there came a moment when you looked at a bed you’d slept in and then almost a frame appeared around it, and you suddenly could objectify it.
What happened is I was in bed ... I was unconscious, maybe two nights and three days, off my face. I’ve never taken drugs, but it was alcohol and also an emotional state of depression. I got up out of bed and I crawled to the sink. It was in my little flat in Waterloo, and it was all dirty everywhere. And I got a glass and drank some water — I was so dehydrated — and then I went back into the bedroom and I looked and I thought “God, it’s disgusting, ugh”. Everything was so dirty, so filthy ... and then I looked again and the next thing I saw was my bed and I thought “that’s not disgusting, that’s not dirty, this bed has kept me alive, this bed has kept me up, kept me buoyant”, and as I looked I imagined it pristine white and beautiful, like Heaven or somewhere, and I thought “that’s really beautiful”. Then I took the bed and put it into a show in Japan.

Do you think your subconscious is something that’s gone a bit more now? That you need to think a bit more, your art is less automatic than it was?
For about ten years I thought it was possible that I could have a child. Not really, to be honest, but part of me was, well not hopeful even, so I think I let a lot of the spiritual side of me go and worked on the physical and the here and now, and now I want to go back to how I used to be. I want to be really thin again, I don’t want to eat any more, I don’t want sex any more. I just want to be free from everything that people need on this planet. I want to be on my way.

People out there are voyeurs of your life, you let them know so much.
Yes, but people who get to know me know that there is a lot more to me than what I give. It’s like Big Brother — I have been associated with that programme and I am nothing like that programme. I detest it. I’m not one-dimensional; I’m an artist, I work hard ... When I made my abortion film How It Feels ... some of the people who came to see that film ... weren’t art people ... they’d come because they were about to have an abortion or just had an abortion and a couple actually came and held hands and were crying because they had just had an abortion. So what I’m saying is my work isn’t about art, it’s about life experiences.

But if you make a work of art out of your abortions, does that mean to say that the abortions are somehow changed?
No ... Immediately after my first abortion the regret and the guilt I had was phenomenal ... I could not believe what I’d done, it was a mistake to me. The second abortion I had was absolutely magnificent and perfect. I could never have an abortion better. I went to the clinic, I had the abortion, I even got the f***ing Tube home. I did the right thing ...

I am not pro-life, I’m not pro-choice, I’m nothing. I’m just a woman that’s been through this stuff, and a lot of women do not ever have an opportunity to talk about it. There are a lot of women who go to work in the morning, they say that they need an hour off later for lunch, they have an abortion and go back to work in the afternoon ... when Cherie Blair was pregnant,when she was 46 or something, and she mourned and cried on the front of every bloody newspaper [after a miscarriage], I thought about every woman who was 46 and having to go and have an abortion that day because her husband or she couldn’t afford to have that child at that late time in life.

You once said that your children are hanging on the walls of Tate Britain. What did you mean by that? Did you decide that you didn’t have children?
No, I didn’t have children, I had art ... I’ve been shagging since I was 13; I had enough opportunities to have children but I never actually met anyone who wanted to have children with me though, ever.

When you lose a work of art, is it like losing a member of the family?
The only works of art I lost are the ones that burnt in the fire ... I was very philosophical about it but now I have become more and more anxious about the tent ... if I’d remade the tent I’d have got a million pounds ...

But you can’t remake, you can’t do another Water Lilies.
Sometimes an artist has to remake work again and again and again to gain its own authority ... Damien [Hirst] can make a million spot paintings but no one else can, and whilst Damien is alive he should ... keep making his language that he invented ... It’s the same with me ... I invented my language, and that’s what makes seminal artists different. There are so many brilliant artists out there ... but they will never be seminal because they didn’t crack a code. It’s like a scientist or an inventor — you have to crack a code.

You don’t think perhaps “if I’d had children I wouldn’t have made these works of art”?
If I’d had children I would have hanged myself by now. I think ... the only children I can think about are the abortions that I had because that was the only choice. Miscarriage is another world, it’s nature, but the abortions — I made that choice to do that, and if I had had those children I would not be sitting in this chair now. It would be an absolute impossibility. I just wouldn’t be here, I know I wouldn’t.

Some say that when you talk about being raped you are too almost casual about it.
This is really controversial. I will say yes, I was raped. I had sex, unwanted sex, when I was young, but I wasn’t raped by 40 militia ... I didn’t have a bayonet put up into my womb and ... I didn’t become HIV positive at 6, for example, as a lot of girls are in Africa ... Rape is a category of having unwanted sex against your will — that happened to me, but in comparison to what a lot of women have to go through in this world, I got off lightly, I really did.

The other thing is, I like sex. I just started very young against my will. When I was 14 I had some good sex; yes, definitely... I wish I could be so free and easy about sex as I was when I was 14 ... If I had good sex with somebody it took me on to another heightened level, another place. That sounds awful, actually.

People say that early sex is just bungling and messy but then later in life it’s . . .
It wasn’t bungling and messy, it was brilliant. Some of the sex I had when I was young, I can remember it clear as day. It was excellent, fantastic .

But you don’t believe now, as some people do, that good sex is wonderfully transformative?
My friends tell me at the moment that I look glowing, that I look like ... I haven’t had sex for ages. You don’t need sex to make you glow — you need your heart, you need your soul, you need to feel alive, and the reason why I’m talking about sex like this is because I treasure it, I value it, like something sacred...

Because in your relationships you were always monogamous, weren’t you?
I have only been unfaithful once. Well, I did it twice in one night but once in my life have I been unfaithful ... If I could change something about myself I would like not to be monogamous, desperately, but I can’t help it ... that’s the way I am.

Do you think good art comes out of pain?
No, I don’t think anything good comes out of pain. Basically, if you are in a lot of pain you have just got to get over it ... I might make some art about the pain but actually I’d much rather make art about jumping in and out of swimming pools and flying on helicopters. I’d rather have a good life to make good art.

You spend time sailing in the South of France ... are these experiences, like your childhood experiences, going to become objects of art? Are they going to be as fertile?
My boyfriend has just left me — “Oh, we wonder why” we say — and my dad’s just died. Now it doesn’t matter if I was sailing in the South of France a week ago, those two experiences that I’ve just said are pretty fundamental and they would mean the same to anybody, and they have got nothing to do with wealth, money — it’s a life experience. My dad died, and unless you die before your father, your dad is going to die, and it is something we all have to go through, we all have to take on. So it’s not fair what you’ve just said to me because I’m human.

You don’t think that inspiration dries up? It does for some people.
No, my inspiration hasn’t dried up at all. One thing, I’m not as desperate as I was. I’m just not, and I’m much happier. This is going to sound silly, but I started making jam, right. If anyone has ever made jam, it is such a satisfying thing, it is so brilliant. At the moment I would just be quite happy making jam for the rest of my life.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS ON MALE FRIENDSHIP

LT: I was going to start off with some in-depth political question but I thought we ought to get the shit out of the way. How are you?
How am I feeling? I’m a prisoner of chemotherapy so everything depends on putting poison directly into my veins, so sometimes if I don’t feel terrible I think “Damn, it’s not working”.

Are you racing to settle scores?
Not racing because I like to think I was always in a hurry. I always had a sense of urgency about doing that. No, I’ll give you a morbid view of it if you like. I hate the idea that somebody like Henry Kissinger — who is, what, well into his eighties now, or Pope Benedict likewise — would live long enough to read my obituary when I had fully intended to be writing theirs, and I make no bones about it. That’s why I don’t ask for sympathy because I’m not intending to dish it out.

I have spoken to your brother quite recently. I asked him, what on earth were you arguing about to such an extent that you had to have a treaty hung up on the wall to stop you arguing? And he couldn’t remember. Do you remember?
Not really, but it wasn’t about politics, it was more about my feeling that until his arrival I had things more or less arranged as I wanted them, namely the whole attention of my mother, the possibility of marrying her, the possibility of elbowing her husband out of the picture one way or another and supreme power, at least in the microcosm, and this plan had not taken into account the arrival of a sibling who was born slightly too near. I used to be not terribly interested in this new work on birth order and sibling rivalry and what have you but I think there must be something in it. I think it was probably unfortunate for both Peter and for me that he was born at a time when he was too near me to be a baby brother needing protection, or inspiring that kind of thing, but near enough to be a rival and smart and tough.

I said it is very vulgar and Freudian that you were both competing for your mother’s love, but he waved that away.
No, it is quite wrong to wave a thing like that away, it’s not waveable away. I’m sure I can remember telling him that he was adopted, for example, with a reasonable chance that he might believe it.

What a terrible thing to say!
Well yes, but when it is a matter of survival I’m not to be trusted. I’m very ruthless.

Because speaking to him, there was very little about his mother, but in your book it would be fair to say that she is the only woman in the book who is presented as a whole human being.
Yes, well I feel that anyone who is going to do a memoir has to give an account of both parents because it may tell more about you than you intend to. But you have got to do your best to show roughly what your provenance is in that way. Perhaps you’re right in saying that there should be at least one fully rounded profile of a female because I’m not going to try and do all the others in that. I mean it can sound as if it is too much of an embarras de richesse, but you can’t do it every time, and if you can’t do it fairly then you’d better not do it at all; so that’s why I begin the book by saying you’ll have to ask them or someone else, the book isn’t about that. If you can’t do it properly and try and be fair to all sides you just make a self-denying ordnance, which I do.

But with male friends . . .
I don’t mention my children either. Whether they asked me not to or not, I could feel that they would sooner be left out. Male friends are absolutely different.

Why is that?
Especially when you are trying to test the proposition — which I do on my chapter on Martin Amis — is it possible to have a heterosexual relationship with a man, and my answer is, not in so many words, but my answer is, pretty nearly, yes; as near as I could come. I was very stirred when I saw him being interviewed not very long ago — this year, since the book came out anyway — by Charlie Rose on PBS and, asked about me and our long attachment, he said when he looks back on it, it strikes him as being an unconsummated gay marriage. Now if you have any idea of Martin’s contribution to the world of the heterosexual and relative abstinence, if you like, from the world of the gay, that’s as nice a compliment as one is likely to get from a chap with whom one hasn’t actually got physical. So I think that’s worth relating, but if I tell some story about how it didn’t really work out with Juliet or so forth, I really would feel I was wasting my time and other people’s, and possibly hers. And then someone who wasn’t Juliet would phone up and say, so you had room for her but not for me. I could see all this coming, so I said I’m not doing it. The book is already nearly half as much again in length as the publishers asked for, and I haven’t yet finished the stuff about Chile, Poland, Cuba and Kashmir.

But a woman who read it . . .
Look, the book is about the struggle of ideas as refracted through some, but not all, personal relationships, but it is about the struggle for clarity in the ideological world.

Have you, it is a quotation that you use at the beginning of your book, from Hamlet, have you lost all your mirth?
No, I hope I don’t seem mirthless in the least. I wouldn’t say I have found any more funny sides to dwell on than before, but certain jokes at the expense of the species, about being born into a losing struggle, being created sick and then ordered by God to be well and all this, do seem even more pertinent when you have to live with the thought every day that it could be your last one.

STEPHEN FRY ON FAME, DRUGS AND DEPRESSION

LT: How did you react to what critics had to say about your recent one-man shows?
SF: Don’t tell me please ... if you tell me I will walk out of here because I don’t want to know what they said, I really don’t ... Absolutely no newspapers do I read ... I don’t care whether they are good, bad or indifferent but I do not read them, it is a waste of time; it is as if you spent your life, because you get funguses, avoiding stepping in puddles and then someone throws water at your feet. I haven’t read a newspaper since [12 years ago]. It’s fantastic, I can’t tell you. It’s bliss ... I couldn’t recommend it more highly and I have yet to meet anybody who reads newspapers who knows more about what’s going on in the world than me.

Has there come a point in your life when you have thought “that’s enough fame”?
Oh yes ... I feel very overexposed. I feel I would love to close down for a number of years in some way and just be in the country making pork pies and chutneys and never have to poke my head out of the parapet. Also — and this sounds like it’s complaining ... and the British public would rightly say, how dare you — but it is exhausting knowing that most of the time the phone rings, most of the time there’s an e-mail, most of the time there’s a letter, someone wants something of you ... If it was ... to write a very funny ten-line thing about something or other, then at least I’d feel they were asking for my talent, such as it is, but that’s so rare now. They just want an appearance, a quote, a tweet, something ... they want to touch the hem of the fame not the hem of the person, if you know what I mean ...

If, say, during an ordinary week you are stopped four times in a shop ... that’s nothing. Four times an hour, it’s quite a lot more. Four times a half hour, phew. It’s tiring you know because your face is a rictus and because now the culture is that everybody has a mobile phone that has a camera. One person stops you and the procedure is “Oh, can I have a photograph, mate, can I have a photograph”. You go, well, I’m in a bit of a hurry, can we do it while we’re walking? But of course they stop, so you stop, and you then have to find someone to give the camera to because they want to be in the picture ... [then] there’s a little crowd gathering and you are just beginning to get a little bit sweaty and a little bit hot.

That’s the problem, it’s the scale of it ... so you resort to not travelling on the Tube or not walking round the street any more and going in a big black car with a driver. And people see you getting out and think: “Oh, he thinks he’s so grand, doesn’t he?” Well no, it’s not that. I’d rather walk, but sometimes I just can’t.

Someone once explained to me, I don’t want to spend my time with other celebrities but they are the only people who recognise my preoccupations. Is it possible to have a private domain that doesn’t leak into the public?
Not all my friends are celebrities ... all the friends I had from university are still my friends. It sometimes can be tricky, and inasmuch as there are certain luxuries I’ve got used to ... I can’t see the point with all the money I’ve got of ever turning right when I get on to an aeroplane. I just would never do that, and so if I am going on holiday with friends it’s tricky. I don’t want to travel differently from them but I don’t want to take a plunge in lifestyle and luxury just because I’m with them, and it is a kind of bullying if I buy them the tickets, hurtful to their pride, so one tries to find a tactful way of being on a different flight so that doesn’t happen.

I’m a member of the Groucho Club. I don’t go there very much but I can recall the hierarchical sorting of people that goes on: the A list here; the B list over there. Friendships seem to be intimately connected to work.
There is an element of that, and certainly back in my Groucho days when there was a lot of playing snooker with the boys from Blur and Keith Allen and Damien Hirst and so on. And it must have been rather forbidding for those who popped their head up from another room and saw us all and thought “Oh, they’re a sort of clique”. But yes, it’s true, one can relax in front of such people because you know who each other are. Each has as much to lose in terms of if we are behaving badly. None of them is going to sneak to the newspapers because they’ll be as likely to be suffering from it — whereas when you have a group of strangers in there you don’t know and because it’s time off you just want to be able to relax. But those sort of days are behind me now, I have to say!

You say in your book The Fry Chronicles that the next C you are going to come on to is cocaine. Am I allowed to have a preview about what you’re going to say about your cocaine nights?
Well, there were 15 years pretty much of pretty chronic cocaine-taking in different ways, but oddly enough ... in my most hyper frames of mind, I found it was a wonderful drug to take to calm me down. Most people took it as a stimulant but I ... tended towards the end to take it alone at home and play word games, mind spinning. I’d do very difficult crosswords, the Spectator and Everyman crosswords ... I would spend hours on these.

Would you use the word “addiction”?
Oh yes, absolutely ... it is part of the psychology of taking it and having it, which is what you get addicted to rather than simply at a blood-chemical level . . . I found it extremely easy to stop but it took me a very long time to get to a position where I was ready to.

Recently someone was being attacked by the Daily Mail and others for the fact that she had warned her daughter that heroin was very nice, was very good, was very pleasant.
I did this once years ago when I was talking about Ecstasy and I said I could see why it was called Ecstasy for two reasons: one you are rather outside yourself, but also it is a rather ecstatic feeling, it is rather wonderful. I got into terrible trouble, and the mother of Leah Betts was contacted and made her statement to the Daily Mail and all the rest of it. I mean it is self-evident that these things are enjoyable, that’s why people take them, but for me, especially as someone who no longer has it, for me to say that “God I loved it, God it’s wonderful and God it makes you feel good” is really just asking myself to be spanked publicly by the newspapers. Everyone writes about heroin extremely well ... and when you think of the best sex you’ve ever had and multiply it by a thousand or whatever the phrase is, of course they say [that about] crack cocaine too. My friend Sebastian Horsley, when he writes about crack in his autobiography, I think if you are an honest reader the fact that it is unbelievably welcoming and thrilling and rushingly gorgeous an experience is what frightens me ... The thing about coke is that it is much subtler. If you have a line of coke it doesn’t really do anything, you wouldn’t notice it. I haven’t gone p’ting! and passed through into some amazing effect. It is much, much more subtle.

Do you think about yourself as an addictive personality? You have written about sugar . . .
The sugar was laying out the terms for tobacco and cocaine, with the candy cigarettes and the white powder and the illegality of it, and the transgressive nature of the whole. That is what I bought into from the earliest age and have rarely escaped from. It’s why I don’t go into casinos because I know I would be addicted within a very short time.

Your condition, cyclothymic disorder, is sometimes described as bipolar light.
But always you have dead bodies — that’s the point. You can do the Janet StreetPorter “Oh why can’t they walk it off, it’s only celebrities talking about their moods” — and they kill themselves. And it’s a morbid condition and any doctor will tell you that it is one of the most serious morbid conditions that is present in Britain. The fact that I am lucky enough not to have it so seriously doesn’t mean that I won’t one day kill myself. I may well, and then people won’t ...

It is always worth remembering ... that mostly what one is talking about is not celebrities on interview shows talking about how, on occasion in their life, they are slightly unhappy and sometimes it’s slightly bouncy. They are either hiding, because why should they bore everybody with their turmoil, or out of good nature, any more than I would show you my genital warts. There is a time and place for everything, and we’ll take your word that you’ve got them, but must you really show them to everybody? Similarly with my mental disorders, why ... would anybody want to see them? But it is worth saying, for the sake of those millions out there whose lives are utterly blighted and whose prospects are more or less hopeless and who turn so often to drink and drugs as finally being able to control them, albeit in such a black way. But in my case, as you rightly say, it is a light enough form most of the time. I know how easy it is to think that it must be a celebrity designer-accessory problem in the same way as homosexuality is seen to be one because only people like me talk about it.

Naturally someone who works in an office doesn’t want to talk about their mental instability because they’ll either get teased, bullied or fired. That’s the problem. It’s the stigma of it that’s enormous and if there is one thing that fame gives you that’s good, it is that you are essentially immune from that kind of stigma. It doesn’t affect my prospects of getting cast, the fact that I’m gay ... [or] the fact that I have mental-health issues sometimes. It does almost everybody else, and that’s why we bore on about it and that’s why ... people like Janet Street-Porter — who is a friend of mine but she can be stupid about these things , or at least deliberately provocative — [say] “Oh why do celebrities bang on about it?” Well there’s a good reason.

Do you feel that you would like someone to come along and rescue you from the charge that you are style and not content?
No, no I wouldn’t ... I genuinely do not want to be thought of as more serious than I am, I want to be thought of, if I want to be thought of at all, as anyone should be thought of, with honesty ... That is to say, I really think this about them and I really think that about them.

As you know, the problem in life for all of us is to see this thing, anything, in its right size... People just see me as, he’s not an intellectual but on the other hand he’s not a dullard. He is not the cleverest man in the world but he’s not the stupidest either. He’s not the funniest man in the world but he is not the least funny. He’s that, that’s what he is. He is Stephen Fry. He’s not Alan Bennett, he’s not Tom Stoppard, he’s not Oscar Wilde, he will never be those people, try as he might, but he manages most of the time to be himself ... We may dislike it, think it’s overdone and self-conscious definitely, but then ...

SHEILA HANCOCK ON LOVE, DRINK AND FEMINISM

LT: The men in your life have often been heavy drinkers. Your dad, your first husband and your second husband, John Thaw. You say in your book “I like drinkers” and that would strike many people as a very, very strange statement.
SH: No, that would be wrong. I have seen personally and certainly in the world at large the huge damage that drink is doing, particularly in our society at the moment. I think it’s a scourge, I really do, so it would be silly to say I like them, but there’s no doubt that the men in my life had a volatility that came from the drinking, very often, and I must be drawn to that, otherwise why would I continuously have done it? So there is a part of me that likes the drama of that.

What is the drama of that?
Well, not knowing what is going to happen next, having men that are not predictable, having men who would be absolutely wonderful one minute and vile the next and just not being able to say, not being able to know ... and also they were usually very amusing, very funny. I don’t know, I honestly don’t know. It is well known that people who are involved with people who have addictive problems have a problem themselves, that’s why you go to something called Al-Anon, which is to support people who are involved with alcoholics or drug addicts ... and the first thing they tell you is forget about them, you’ve got a problem and that is your problem, that you are drawn to mad living, a kind of insane thing. It is much nicer when it stops, believe you me. It is much nicer when it stops.

Let’s talk a little bit about politics. You loved Germaine Greer, you loved The Female Eunuch.
Oh, yes, it totally changed my life. Up until then I had really, without realising it, I thought that women were absolutely not as important as men, that we were there to look after men. I was in a play at the Royal Court, actually, and I was so amazed by this book and I got three other women in the company to read it and it flabbergasted all of us, so we formed a thing called The Group, where we used to sit and talk about this revolution of thinking. We meet up every Christmas at Peter Jones, which is opposite the Royal Court, and toast. This meeting has been going on all these years and gradually we’re dying and one of us has already gone so there are three of us and a photograph at the table and we were shrieking with laughter. The waiter came up and said, “What are you laughing at?” and we said we were wondering which one of us was going to be sitting here with three photos. But it was huge, a wonderful book.

Were you the first woman to direct at the National?
I was the first woman to direct at the Olivier Theatre at the National and the first woman to be artistic director of a company, the touring company at the Royal Shakespeare Company, yes.

If we return to Germaine and to your statement that you were deferring to men because you were besotted, isn’t Germaine going to say that you shouldn’t have been besotted in that way?
Well I don’t think she’d say you shouldn’t have been besotted — she is a great believer in love — but I think she would think that you should stand up for yourself and have your own life as well as ... not live your life through a man. But then I didn’t, really, I was always working, I always had my working life.

You’ve said that the children’s needs had to be disregarded at times in order that John’s could be attended to.
That’s probably true, yes, that’s probably true, to my everlasting shame, but that’s where I was at at the time. We mustn’t be so critical of one another, we really mustn’t. Life is so complex, it’s so complex, you can’t always do the right thing, much as you want to. You can aim to do the right thing, the Quaker principles of honesty and simplicity and equality. They are wonderful objectives but incredibly difficult to constantly do because things happen in life. I sound like an American politician: stuff happens! But it’s true, you are constantly being thrown off course.

The only way to deal with life is to keep struggling back and try and get back on course. It’s not a bowl of cherries, life is not great, you have great wonderful moments, but most of it is hard graft.

In Confidence begins on Sky Arts 1 HD with Sheila Hancock on March 17 at 10pm. sky.com/arts