Free A Curious Career by Lynn Barber Page B

felt very happy, and lucky, and that seemed to reflect on what happened to me – I got even luckier, in everything.’
     
    TELL ME, dog-lovers: is it possible to train a dog to demolish a tape recorder? I ask, because after we’d been chatting for about an hour, and Clunes was beginning to show signs of impatience, his big black retriever Arthur stood up and very deliberately wagged his tail over my water glass knocking it on to the tape recorder, which gave a little scream and died. Clunes told me he was sure the tape recorder would recover if I put it in a bag of rice overnight but he seemed quite happy to think the interview was over. But – aha! – I had another tape recorder in my bag and ran to fetch it. However, I do feel that this is where the interview took a turn for the worse.
    It started when I quoted a line from the cuttings in which he is supposed to have said that his twenties were ‘like one long stag night’. ‘I never said that,’ he snaps. ‘One of your colleagues must have made it up. The press always makes things up. I’ve got a whole catalogue of things – I’ve had thirty years of it. When there was talk of us getting back together to make another series of Men Behaving Badly , the Observer said that we were all going to get paid a quarter of a million to do it – which meant that my tax office looked at my accounts and said, “There’s a discrepancy here.” Another paper photographed my mother outside her antiques shop so that they could say “Mum behaving badly” – making her cry and cancel going to antiques fairs. And later, when her house was on the market and we knocked fifty grand off the price, the Sunday Times added a nought to make it half a million, so they could have the headline “Market behaving badly”. But of course when I phoned they said no, no, no, we didn’t do it deliberately, it was just a typo. That’s pretty hateful, don’t you think? Or do you think it’s OK?’ No, of course I don’t think it’s OK, I tell him, while privately thinking obviously it must have been a typo.
    There is more, much more, a long catalogue of complaints against the press, going back for years. The odd thing is that if you read his cuttings, it is actually very rare to find a negative word against him. But when I suggest that he’s had a pretty good press on the whole, he says sourly, ‘Apart from them paying money to my ex-wife a couple of times.’ I suspect this is the nub. His first wife, Lucy Aston, has twice published kiss’ n’ tells, brokered, he says, by Max Clifford, describing her life with Clunes as ‘all cruelty and cocaine’. She said that he already had a cocaine habit when they married in 1990 but it got steadily worse to the point that he was snorting coke before he set out for work in the mornings. And, perhaps because of the coke, he had a ‘mercurial’ temper and shouted at her in public. Eventually Lucy booked them in for marriage guidance counselling, but Clunes skipped many of the sessions, or else refused to speak, and soon afterwards left her for Philippa Braithwaite.
    As revelations by ex-wives go, the Lucy Aston story wasn’t actually in the shock-horror class though I can see it must have made unhappy reading at the time. But if, as he claims, he is always being misquoted, there is one basic precaution he could take, I tell him, which would be to have his own tape recorder on the table. ‘That would make for a nice relaxed atmosphere, wouldn’t it?’ he snorts. ‘THAT would be bitter, that would be crazily consumed by it.’ But he DOES seem bitter. ‘Do you think I’m bitter? I don’t think I’m bitter. How should I react to it? Just say oh it’s just a bit of fun?’
    He is still smiling, while he carries on listing all the crimes journalists have committed – Bernard Ingham said this, Suzanne Moore said that – piling insult after insult on to my profession. There is a truly weird disjunction between his friendly manner and the