Me and Nigella Lawson: it’s time the truth was known

Actually, I only spent one evening with her, back in 1996 or 1997, and it was purely for work purposes. At the time, she was a freelance journalist, and I’d invited her (at someone else’s suggestion) to try out as a presenter on Midnight Hour, the BBC 2 live political chat show I was editing at the time. The format was simple: one presenter and four guests gabbing about politics on a studio set for 30 minutes to an audience of 300,000 insomniacs.

Like most men who meet Nigella Lawson for the first time, I suspect, the word that popped into my head was Caramba! (or it may have been Crikey! or Blimey! or even Ding Dong!). We had a chat about the programme format (she’d watched a few episodes in preparation) and went through the guests we’d lined up (we were auditioning them as well). I can remember nothing about that conversation, apart from the fact that she was terribly nice and evidently very, very nervous. I’m sure she’d appeared as a guest on TV many times before, but she’d never presented anything, apart from a very brief stint as a radio talk show host (she was fired for admitting on air that someone did her shopping for her).

As I handed her over to the producer, I remember wondering whether any political programme had ever been presented by anyone this beautiful. If she turned out to be any good, I could see the ratings rocketing on the nights she was presenting. Perhaps, I thought, Scottie's heading uptown! As we approached the time for the recording (it wasn’t being broadcast, obviously) the producer told me that our presenter was in a bit of a state. She’d told him that she felt like a fraud, because we were all such experts at our jobs (a few nights working with me would undoubtedly have dispelled this notion). I had another chat with her, pointing out that every presenter worth their salt felt the same way at the beginning (not true, actually) and that, besides, apart from the production team, only one or two executives would ever see the tape. Relax!

Then, as Nigella was ushered onto the studio floor, I sauntered into the gallery to join the producer, sound man, vision mixer, director and technical ops chappie.  I sat at my desk, put on my headphones, and prepared for a comms check (i.e. could our presenter hear me yacking in her ear). I looked up just as the main camera came into focus, with Nigella in the centre of the picture.

I’m not making this up – every man in that control room let out some sort of primeval sound: a mixture of groans, gasps and oophs!. I was aware, of course, that TV cameras tended to make some people look better than they did in the flesh. But as my experience was limited to news folk or political obsessives, this usually meant that some ordinary-looking people found themselves temporarily bumped up to Business Class. Now I discovered that when a TV camera “likes” a naturally beautiful person the effect can be quite extraordinary. In the glare of the studio lights, she looked ethereal, unreal, like an alabaster sculpture of an impossibly beautiful woman - and yet vulnerable and dramatic. There was nary a hint of the ripe, curvy, licking, fondling, almost cartoonish screen vamp she would turn into.

Then the only woman in the gallery snapped, “Oh, for God’s sake, you lot – grow up!” and we all started breathing again.

As I said goodbye to her after the pilot, I remember thinking it was a pity that someone so lovely, so bright and so articulate was destined never to make it in television. Two years’ later Channel 4 broadcast her first series about food, a star was born, and that was that.

I was often in the same room as Nigella after that, but only because her daughter was in the same year as my son at school, and we attended the same parents’ evenings (her other half, old grumpy-bollocks, never put in an appearance, naturally). Of course, she didn’t know me from Adam, but I caught her looking at me out of the corner of her eye once or twice, as if trying to recall an unpleasant experience in which I might have played a part.

Today, she has been granted a divorce from Charles Saatchi. None of my business, of course, but I can’t help feeling pleased and relieved for her, especially as she will no longer have to put up with the pathetic, aesthetically-worthless pseudo-art with which he surrounds himself.