It’s an absolutely archetypal American face; you can read a multitude into it. Look long enough at Amy Adams’ pre-Raphaelite cascade of orange-red hair, her pale complexion – with its susceptibility, no doubt, to freckles and sunburn – the upturned chin, the tough-cookie set jaw, and the slender sloping nose, and soon enough you will discern the possibilities: Anne of Green Gables, Annie, if she was still young enough, or one of Willa Cather‘s doughty Nebraska Plainswomen – Thea Kronberg, perhaps, from The Song of The Lark – Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, eyes fixed for ever on the middle distance, or any number of western farmwives or lady-gunfighters. Take names from Henry James or Edith Wharton – Daisy Miller, Undine Spragg – and Adams can be imagined embodying them all with ease and subtlety. In her most recent movie, Trouble with the Curve, she’s the estranged daughter of another American icon, Clint Eastwood, no less, while in her most impressive – and unsettling – performance in several years, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, she is the womanly power behind the throne of yet another American archetype – Philip Seymour Hoffman’s avuncular, alcoholic religious fraud Lancaster Dodd.

Twelve years ago, Adams played the lead in Cruel Intentions 2; she was suddenly lucky second-string Hollywood cannon fodder with a string of teen comedies and horror spoofs behind her, and the usual Young Hollywood TV guest-credits – That 70s Show, Charmed, Providence, Smallville, and a memorable arc as Jenna Fischer’s redhead doppelganger on The Office. Ten years ago, she finally scored big, nabbing the showy part of girlfriend to then It Boy Leonardo DiCaprio in Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can. Nine years ago, the phone hadn’t rung once since Catch Me If You Can, and she was thinking about jacking in the thespian life altogether, until a little no-budget movie named Junebug came her way.

And look at her now: The Master is the second movie in which she has held her own in opposite Hoffman, the actors’ actor of our age, and she has already made two movies – Doubt and Julie and Julia – with Meryl Streep. She earned one Oscar nomination for Junebug and another for David O Russell’s The Fighter (she’ll get another for The Master, you watch), and will soon be working once again with Russell, a director uninterested in letting his performers settle into any comfortable groove. Next up, Superman’s girlfriend in Man of Steel. It’s all happening.

And yet, she says, she sometimes forgets who she is, and how famous. “I still think I’m like the poor girl from Colorado who worked three jobs to buy a car. That’s still my mentality, so I’ll be walking down the street, and I forget what I do and who I am. And someone will come up to me and say hi, and I’m thinking, I must know you, and I realise that, no, I don’t know them and they don’t know me. At all! Really, I’ve only been in the public eye since – in a bigger way – really only since Junebug and Enchanted, and I was already 30, 32 by then so I’d already had a whole life when nobody cared at all about me. I was more used to that.”

You get that feeling when you meet her. She’s open, welcoming, warm, more concerned about your comfort than her own (“don’t sit there with the hot sun in your eyes … try here”), and today she’s happier to be here than she sometimes is on these occasions. An assistant lays down a fat pile of posters for the movie and she asks: “Am I supposed to sign these at the same time – because I can multitask!” She looks up, leaving the Sharpie and the signing until later. “Sometimes you’re doing this and you’re revisiting a movie that wasn’t that great an experience when you made it, or there were conflicts with people you didn’t like or whatever. This one is nice to talk about, though.”

In Trouble with the Curve, she plays the estranged daughter of crotchety baseball scout Clint Eastwood, who tags along on his scouting tour when his eyesight starts to go, and tries to repair their relationship. So, given that Clint Eastwood occupies roughly the same space in the American psyche as the faces on Mount Rushmore and the dollar bill, how was it to be up close all of a sudden?

“He’s very warm and generous, and there’s a great humility about him. I’ve worked with people who project a lot more sort of masculine intimidation naturally – and that’s not him at all. I think also, having worked with all these people on his crew together for so long, he’s not at all guarded with them on set, so it makes the day go quickly and efficiently, and gets you through a lot of set-ups. There’s a bit of shorthand between people when they’ve worked together for that long – you feel like you’re being allowed into his family. That really helps if you’re playing a role like Mickie and you have to be this daughter confronting her father, which is not easy to do if you feel intimidated. And I wasn’t at all intimidated. When you could really make Clint laugh, he gets a really teethy laugh and it’s so rewarding to get one of those. I always felt a certain sense of victory if I could get him to laugh like that.”

And it’s a movie about athletes in which Adams competently knocks a number of pitches off into the wide blue yonder. I suspect tomboy tendencies in her youth. Did that come naturally?

“Not at all! Though I do come from a family of athletic people. I just don’t have a propensity for catching balls. My hand-eye coordination is terrible, so I had to train a lot. But I do love being, I won’t say it … it’s that line from Grease: ‘If you can’t be an athlete, be an athletic supporter.’” She titters away.

“Learning how to catch, how to pitch, how to swing, I worked with a coach. It was really empowering, cause I’ve never been good at it. I realised I just was afraid of getting hit in the face with the ball. Wisely so, I guess, given that my current profession calls for people with intact faces. Oh God, this … it’s like a minefield of balls-in-the-face jokes …”

She was an army brat until she was nine. How did that affect her?

“It definitely makes you a little bit more transient, which can turn out to be a good quality in life, and in fact has helped me in what I do. When you’re picking up and moving it does create … well, I can sleep anywhere, which is really useful, it turns out, on movie sets. But what it really does is teach you how to adapt and change and fit into a new group or school, and that really is a lot like turning up to a new movie project and finding your place.”

Ten years after beginning to make her mark, Adams still trails behind her the residue of innocence and naivete that gathered around her after she appeared in Junebug. Followed shortly after by her winning turn as an animated Disney princess cast into a cynical live-action Manhattan in Enchanted, Junebug limited perceptions of Adams’ gifts for a couple of years.”

Junebug was a small independent movie about what “back home” means to southerners. Adams played Ashley Johnsten, a Georgia girl so naive and innocent, so impossibly kind and sweet, that literally one ankle or elbow in the wrong place from Adams would have brought the entire movie to a calamitous halt. One is astounded that a figure so unworldly can be delivered with such absolute, unironic conviction – you leave the movie remembering almost nothing except her performance.

“I felt so free in that role. There were no consequences. I never knew if anyone would even see the movie. I wasn’t even sure at that point that I was going to continue acting. There was no studio nosing about. It was the most free I have ever been as an actor ever. You can’t go back to a time like that.”

Junebug was surely what earned her Enchanted, which largely thanks to Adams (and her equally gung-ho costar James Marsden) was an instant Disney classic, resting on the absolute conviction she gave to a character who talks to butterflies and believes you can make someone love you by singing at them. By now, with Catch Me, Junebug and Enchanted, she had played three eye-catching naifs in a row – which didn’t reflect her own view of her own abilities. “If you hold those characters up next to each other, similar as they are, there’s no way that they belong in the same world. But you really have to be careful you don’t become the go-to girl for that kind of thing.”

David O Russell to the rescue, then. “He met me and he said: ‘Oh you are so not a princess type – we’ll have to do something about that!’ He said: ‘I just want to expose that side of you, and give you the opportunity to shed the whole princess thing, because that isn’t who you are – it’s just one aspect of the work you’ve done.’”

In The Fighter, Russell gave Adams Charlene, the hardscrabble working-class Irish-American bartender who takes on boxer Mark Wahlberg and, better yet, the grotesquely toxic matriarchy that he calls a family. I remember she has a tonne of siblings.

“There’s six others – we are a baseball team!”

So she can fight? How many brothers?

“Four.”

So she can fight!

“Oh sure, but trust me, the sisters, the girls, we give just as good as we get in a family like ours!”

In one much talked-about scene in The Master, Adams, playing the imperious and scary wife of religious charlatan Lancaster Dodd, delivers a ferocious Lady Macbeth-like dressing-down to her husband as she furiously masturbates him over a bathroom sink. “That scene was in the script from the beginning. It was actually one of my favourite scenes upon reading it because it helped let me know who the character was, and how much control and the lengths she will go to to maintain it … Yes, people tend to remember that moment.”

The Master and the masturbator. Ladies and gentlemen, Amy Adams could be acting at this level for another 40 years. Plenty of archetypes to get to yet. I cannot wait.

• The Trouble with the Curve is released in the UK on 30 November

A few weeks ago, I made an ever-so secret birthday cake for one of my housemates. Chocolate, naturally: the cast iron crowd-pleaser of cakes. Searching for the perfect recipe, I was surprised to discover that somehow, in nearly three years, we hadn’t covered the subject in this column: a shameful omission indeed, so I turned to Twitter for advice.

Recommendations came flooding in, but one unwieldy name kept popping up, that of Scharffen Berger. The recipe in question, taken from that American firm’s Essence of Chocolate book, is (according to reports) a very similar beast to the almost equally popular Easy Chocolate Cake on the BBC website. It was a shoo-in.

The birthday girl loved her surprise, and indeed “that cake” hit many of the necessary buttons: moist, dark and crumbly, it was still going strong a couple of days later. But for me at least, it lacked something. And that something was chocolate: it just didn’t pack the cocoa punch I was looking for, a common complaint with chocolate cakes that look the part but don’t quite deliver.

Flavour is rarely a problem with a dessert-style chocolate cake of course, a creation so rich and gooey it generally has to be eaten in teeny tiny slivers with a fork. But I’m looking for a chocolate cake in the truest sense of the word. Not a torte, not a mousse, not a pudding, but a cake which actually tastes of chocolate. And that, surely, isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility.

Full of beans: the chocolate

Naturally the most important element of any chocolate cake – most recipes I use rely on cocoa powder, which provides flavour without weighing the mixture down, with the exception of Margot Henderson‘s steamed chocolate cake in You’re All Invited, which uses melted chocolate, and Florence White’s “Really Delicious Chocolate Cake” (you’ll have to forgive her, the 1920s was an excitable decade), which calls for me to grate 230g chocolate into the mixture, along with some of my knuckles. This is not an experience I wish to repeat, and happily, I can report there is no need: coarsely grated chocolate creates an oddly mottled result, and doesn’t melt into the cake as harmoniously as might be hoped, creating interesting pockets of chocolate.

Henderson’s cake, however, is the richest, most obscenely chocolatey of the lot – not feather-light, admittedly, but then that’s clearly not her intention. As I’m after a more cakey, less dense result, I decide to use a combination of cocoa powder and melted chocolate, and, at the last minute, throw in some chocolate chips to give a more interesting texture, in tribute to White.

The fat

Butter gives a pleasingly rich flavour to White’s recipe and is also used by Annie Bell in her Brooklyn Blackout cake in her new Baking Bible and by Geraldene Holt in her “favourite chocolate cake” from classic Cakes. London baker Lily Vanilli adds sour cream too, which makes her version tangy and dense, while Sebastien Rouxel’s recipe for Devil’s Food cake in Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Bakery uses mayonnaise. The explanation given is that he wanted it to be “moist and rich, but not oily from too much butter”. It indeed both of those things with a wonderful soft crumb, but all I can taste is mayonnaise. I can only assume they have a special neutral number reserved for this purpose in the Keller empire, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s like a weird cake-sandwich hybrid.

I’d also quibble with the term “greasy” – none of the cakes are at all oily, even those such as Nigella Lawson’s chocolate olive oil cake and the Scharffen Berger recipe which use oil instead of butter. This adds extra moisture, but I think it’s at the expense of flavour: I prefer a fluffier, richer result. Lawson’s recipe is, however, an excellent choice for both lactose and gluten intolerant cake lovers.

Milk or water are sometimes added to the final mixture – I’m with Bell in sticking with milk. It makes her cake beautifully soft – like a snuggly warm chocolate towel, if you will.

The dry ingredients

Despite the protests from my housemates, I’ve decided against testing any dense, flourless cakes, good as they often are, so all my recipes use some sort of starch in addition to the cocoa powder. Flour is obviously the standard choice, but White adds ground almonds as well, and Lawson makes hers gluten-free by using only ground almonds. As well as adding their distinctive, marzipanny flavour to the cake, the nuts make the cake denser – not ideal for what I’m after, much as I love them.

Raising agents, however, are essential: only Henderson doesn’t bother with any, and that’s because her cake is so moist and rich that it’s more like a mousse baked in a tin. White uses whisked egg whites, which struggle slightly against the ground almonds, giving an uneven rise and a slightly tough texture. Everyone else opts for baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, or a mixture of the two. I’m not sure it needs both, and baking powder seems to do the trick on its own.

Sugar-wise, fine-grained caster is the most popular choice, but Bouchon uses granulated sugar, for reasons left unexplained, and Holt suggests light or dark muscovado (pdf). I suspect dark muscovado will prove too bitter and treacly with the chocolate, but I think the deep caramel flavour of the light variety works brilliantly here, adding an extra layer of much-needed flavour.

Additions

Almost everyone adds vanilla essence to their cakes, but I don’t think it’s necessary: I don’t want anything to distract from the flavour of the chocolate. Vanilli also adds strong coffee: I love coffee and chocolate together, but as I can taste it in the finished cake, it’s out here – this chocolate cake is all about the chocolate. Holt pops in a pinch of cinnamon: a classic combination with chocolate, but I’m going to keep things simple.

Method

Vanilli, Bell and White all use the creaming method, mixing together the butter and sugar until fluffy and using this as the base for their cakes, while the Bouchon Bakery, Lawson and Henderson whip together the eggs and sugar instead before adding the other ingredients. Both help the mixture retain air, but the first bunch seem uniformly fluffier.

Margot’s recipe is quite distinct from the others, being baked for just 20 minutes then covered and left to steam until cool. It’s a quite brilliant idea, giving a rich, fudgy, wonderfully silky result with minimal effort. Sadly it’s not the cake I’m after, but definitely a recipe to bear in mind for future dinner parties.

Form and topping

Holt, Vanilli and Bell all make sandwich cakes with a filling in the middle, which I think adds both interest and extra moisture to proceedings: however nice the cake, it’s always going to be more exciting with a double layer of icing. Holt goes for a frosting on top, with cocoa powder, icing sugar, butter and muscovado sugar – it’s very nice but sets quite hard, which I’m not keen on. I prefer Vanilli’s cocoa buttercream, although I don’t think it requires double cream as well as milk.

Bell makes a chocolate custard, and slathers it between the layers of cake, blitzing one in the food processor to make a coating. Although I love custard, it doesn’t have enough body for my liking here, and like Holt’s whipped cream centre, makes me worry about things like refrigeration. I love the crumb idea though; it looks brilliant. To give a contrast of texture and flavour I’m going to use crushed chocolate biscuits instead – they add both crunch and a dark cocoa hit that I think works really well.

Perfect chocolate cake

I really believe this is the ultimate chocolate cake – fluffy and light enough to eat at tea time, rich enough to serve with a dollop of creme fraiche for dessert if you’d prefer. Most importantly, it actually tastes of chocolate – and that’s rarer than you might think.

50g dark chocolate, melted and allowed to cool slightly
250g butter, at room temperature
250g light muscovado sugar
½ tsp salt
100g cocoa powder
250g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
3 large eggs
250ml milk
50g chocolate chips

For the buttercream:
140g butter, softened
50g cocoa powder
200g icing sugar
Pinch of salt
2 tbsp milk
5 Oreo cookies

1. Grease and line the bases of 2 x 20cm springform cake tins with greaseproof paper. Preheat the oven to 180C (160C fan) 350F / gas 4. Cream together the butter and sugar with ½ tsp salt until light and fluffy.

2. Sift together the cocoa, flour and baking powder. Add the eggs to the butter mixture one at a time and beat until well combined, then fold in half the dry ingredients followed by the melted chocolate. Fold in the rest, followed by enough milk to give a soft dropping consistency, and then the chocolate chips. Divide between the two tins and bake for about 25–30 minutes until firm in the centre.

3. Allow to cool completely on a rack, then make the buttercream. Beat the butter until fluffy, then add the cocoa, icing sugar and salt and, if necessary, a little milk to loosen the mixture. Put one of the cakes on a serving plate and spread a third of the icing on top. Place the second on top, then spread the rest of the icing over it.

4. Blitz the biscuits to a fine crumb in a food processor and sprinkle them over the cake.

It’s a contentious subject, but what’s your favourite kind of chocolate cake: rich and dark, light and fluffy, Devil’s food, Curly Wurly or Mississippi mud? Are you an icing or a ganache lover – or should a good cake come unadorned? And just why are so many chocolate cakes more a feast for the eyes than the stomach?

Middle-income couples, recently identified by the Conservatives as the “struggling middle”, are increasingly unable to afford to separate when their relationships end, according to a new study.

Almost half the 2,000 counsellors at Relate, the charity that specialises in relationship counselling, say an increasing proportion of the 150,000 clients they see each year are being forced to remain living together despite having decided to split up. Couples with children are more likely to find themselves trapped than those without, but both groups are increasingly finding it impossible to bear the cost of setting up different homes.

“When we talk about Relate’s clients, we are not talking about people on low incomes. We’re talking about people in employment, on average to above-average incomes,” said Ruth Sutherland, the charity’s chief executive.

Sutherland said the charity, which was founded almost 25 years ago, had never seen this demographic of clients struggling with their finances to such an extent that moving into two homes and getting on with their lives was an impossibility.

“These are people who could previously afford to move away from each other when their relationship broke down,” she added. “But now, they are stretched just to pay their mortgage on top of the rising cost of living. When their relationship breaks down, they find they can’t afford two mortgages, on top of the cost of running two homes.”

Sutherland said that for parents, the cost of childcare was another devastating factor. Parents in the UK spend an average of 27% of their salary on childcare, compared with a European average of 13%. Twenty-five hours of nursery care a week for a child aged two or under costs on average £5,000 in England, rising to between £6,000 and £15,000 in London.

“To pay for the increased childcare demands that come with being a single parent has become a pipe dream for many people, even those in well-paid jobs,” said Sutherland.

Richer couples could find themselves in the same predicament as the difficult economic climate continued, Sutherland predicted. “I would not be surprised at all to see the problem creeping up the salary band,” she said. “This era of austerity we’re in is not like other hard times we have lived through.

“In the past, we’ve had a dip and then recovery, but now we’re in unknown territory about the length of time people are going to have to cope with debt, job insecurity, pressure from work and the mounting cost of childcare.

“The only thing we know is that people are going to have to cope with these problems for longer than they would ever have done so before.”

At least 40% of Relate counsellors said they were seeing more couples split up than two years ago, with money worries cited as a major cause.

“It’s vital for the future of our children, and thus the future health of our nation, that estranged parents manage their separation well,” said Sutherland.

“Children learn about relationships at home. If they see their parents undermining each other, arguing and being vindictive, then that’s the foundation on which they will build their own relationships. It’s not only the adults who, if stuck in a toxic situation, are going to be damaged.”

Which is why, said Sutherland, she was so concerned by another finding in Relate’s survey: that separated couples are increasingly unable to afford to complete their counselling courses.

At least 80% of counsellors said increasing numbers of clients were unable to afford to “properly start or conclude” their counselling programmes, despite being offered short, intensive courses of four to six sessions, charged from £6 to £45 an hour, depending on their income.

Over 70% of Relate counsellors said money problems including debt, a lack of disposable income, unemployment and rising living costs had worsened for their clients in the last two years.

Almost 90% of counsellors said money worries made their clients depressed, with 80% saying couples argued more as a result and 65% saying it affected their clients’ physical health.

“Let’s all be clear about the real cost of austerity: the impact of being in a relationship that isn’t working is toxic. It is harmful to your children and it permeates every other aspect of your life,” said Sutherland. “If the government wanted to protect the mental health of the country, both now and in the future, they would target these cuts differently.”

The rate of family breakdown in the UK was revealed in October statistics from the Department of Work and Pensions showing that 79% of children under one live with both birth parents. This drops to 55% by the time the children reach 15.

Nearly a quarter of people have continued to live with a partner, or know someone who has, because they couldn’t afford to live apart, according to a 2010 report from Shelter. “We also know that relationship breakup is a major cause of homelessness,” said Campbell Robb, chief executive of Shelter.

The 2012 total cost of family breakdown to the UK was £44bn, up from £42bn in 2011, according to a recent study by the Relationships Foundation. The study looked at the cost of family breakdown in five key areas of public policy: tax and benefits, housing, health and social care, civil and criminal justice, and education and young people not in education, employment or training (Neets). It concluded that the annual cost for each taxpayer was now £1,470.

“The government’s austerity policies are making things worse, and it doesn’t make sense economically,” said Sutherland. “What we want is for them to do a relationship and family impact assessment for every policy they consider introducing.”

Robb said the “shortage of affordable housing in this country is being felt further and further up the income scale”.

“We’re hearing from couples moving in together too fast to help with housing costs but then unable to move out if things go wrong because they can’t afford to live on their own. This has a huge impact on people’s home lives,” he added.

Robb said the housing crisis is “the result of … more and more people chasing fewer and fewer homes, which has pushed up house prices and rents far faster than wages have risen.

“Our research also shows that more and more people are putting off having children because they can’t find an affordable home,” he said. “Something is badly wrong when people who are working hard still face a constant struggle to get a decent place to live.”

Caroline Davey, director of policy at Gingerbread, the charity for single-parent families, said families in the low- to middle-income bracket were “increasingly struggling financially”. “When a couple separates this financial squeeze can make it impossible for them to forge new lives separately,” she said.

“With wages stagnating, higher risk of redundancy, spiralling living costs, and many families without any savings to speak of, it can be simply unachievable for a separating couple to afford to run two homes rather than one. The only alternative for some families is to continue living in the same home but as separate households.”

Davey warned: “This situation could become more commonplace in future as the financial downturn bites even harder on families across the income scale.”

She added: “Action is needed across a number of areas, for example strengthening the role of local authorities in supporting access to private rented accommodation, reversing the harshest housing benefit cuts, and sustained job creation.”

A spokeswoman for the Treasury said: “The government has taken action to help people with the cost of living, including freezing council tax and fuel duty and cutting income tax for 25 million people by raising the personal allowance. Action taken to reduce the deficit has helped to keep interest rates near record lows. And we have extended the offer of 15 hours free education and care a week for disadvantaged two-year-olds, to cover an extra 130,000 children.”

Case study

Adela and Tanek married in Poland in 2002 and came to Britain with their two children four years later. For a few years, they lived comfortably: Adela worked full-time as an administrator, and Tanek in a factory. “Our finances were fine – more than fine,” said Adela. “We were living well and saving money. The children were happy and life was good.”

Two years ago, however, the couple broke up. Adela moved into a studio flat. The parents shared custody of the children but Tanek had returned to university and, soon afterwards, Adela’s office closed down. Money became tight.

“Despite the problems, we would have had enough money but rents were going up and the cost of living rose sky high,” said Adela. “We found that we just couldn’t run two households, no matter how cheaply we lived. I didn’t want to move into a single room because I wanted the children to live with me for half the week.

“It was a difficult decision and a terrible step backwards, but we eventually decided we had no choice but for me to move back into the family home.”

They are forced to share a bed but Adela said that, in one way, she and Tanek were fortunate. “We get on well as friends but this situation is terribly awkward and very wrong. We want to get on with our lives and meet new people but we’re stuck together.

“We can’t afford a second bed and have nowhere to put one anyway. We don’t have a sofa we can sleep on and we don’t want the children to have to share their room with one of us.”

They hope that when Tanek finishes his degree next year, they will be able to afford to live separately. “But who knows?” said Adela. “The way the economic situation is at the moment, he might be unemployed for a long time.”

The name McAfee is ubiquitous and boring, a piece of antivirus software that pops up on computer screens around the world. The man behind this reassuring piece of technology is rather less reassuring and certainly not dull. John McAfee, a multi-millionaire dotcom guru, is on the run from police on the tropical island of Ambergris Caye. The authorities want to question McAfee, who is 67, about the murder of his neighbour, Gregory Faull. Now, according to a blog purportedly written by McAfee, the American entrepreneur is protesting his innocence and gleefully revealing how he hid from police by burying himself in the sand and by pretending to be a drunk German tourist.

The story of McAfee’s rise and fall is impossibly rich and strange. McAfee has likened his predicament to Julian Assange’s; others see him as a Kim Dotcom figure, a playboy-on-the-run, a poster boy for the decadent libertarianism of the dotcom generation. But McAfee is harder to pin down. Until the tanned, rich, priapic, yoga-loving eccentric hands himself in, he exists for all of us only on the internet. To some, McAfee is a gun-toting fiend and a fugitive from justice; in McAfee’s eyes, he is a teetotal tragic victim of a corrupt state and media sensationalism, a philanthropist dedicated to cleansing rural Belize of crime and poverty. People who know him variously describe him as generous, paranoid, impulsive and eccentric. Is he mad? Is he bad? Who is John McAfee?

It is hard to know what is real and what is not in McAfee’s story. He was born in England but was raised in Virginia. He still speaks in a courtly, southern style and is still emotionally scarred by his heavy-drinking father, who McAfee says, regularly beat him and his mother. Drugs – their presence and absence – have been one constant in his life. He drank heavily as a student, and was kicked out of university in Louisiana where he was studying for a PhD in mathematics because he slept with one of his undergraduates, who became his first wife. McAfee went on the same Nepalese hippie trail as Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, and was fired from an early job for buying marijuana. In 1969, McAfee discovered LSD while creating computerised timetables for a train company. By 1983, he had risen to become director of engineering for a Californian tech company but, according to an ebook rushed out by Wired journalist Joshua Davis who interviewed McAfee at length this year, he was also a voracious cocaine addict, who also sold the drug to his subordinates. He lost his wife, his job, his beloved dog and eventually turned to Alcoholics Anonymous. He claims he has been sober ever since.

A few years later, McAfee learned of one of the first computer viruses. He was not a programming wizard but, at his home in California, his employees devised some software to disarm viruses. What was really revolutionary was the way McAfee gave his product away digitally, via an online bulletin board. Soon he had 30 million users and by 1990 was collecting $5m a year from corporate licensing fees. As a student he supported his drinking habit by working as a door-to-door salesman and he never lost this panache; his hyping of virus threats saw his company valued at half a billion dollars by 1994. Apart from establishing a new model for e-commerce by giving away his software, McAfee’s other real legacy, says Davis, was the marketing of his paranoia. “What he was very successful at is infecting the rest of us with his own paranoia, which is an extraordinary accomplishment.” Two years ago, McAfee’s company was bought by Intel for $7.68bn but McAfee had long ago sold his $50m-$100m stake. To those who portray McAfee’s life as one of squandered opportunities to become the next Steve Jobs, Davis says: “He’s a guy who comes up with ideas. As a startup guy he’s been wildly successful.”

For two decades, he lived the quirky life of a dotcom entrepreneur with his second wife, Judy, in a mansion in the Colorado Rockies. He says he sold another internet telephony startup, Tribal Voice, for $17m in 1999, founded a yoga institute, wrote books about spirituality and helped build a rehab centre in Hawaii. Around the time of his divorce 10 years ago, he discovered lightweight aircraft called “trikes” and learned how to fly these machines a few metres above the deserts of New Mexico. He called this insanely dangerous new sport “aerotrekking”, built a desert ranch with an airstrip and hung out with a bunch of adrenalin junkies who called themselves Sky Gypsies. Five years ago, when he first met the journalist Jeff Wise, who, like Davis, has extensively researched his life, McAfee said: “Success for me is, can you wake up in the morning and feel like a 12-year-old?”

Four years ago, there was an abrupt change of direction. McAfee began selling his properties in Hawaii, New Mexico, Colorado and Texas. After apparently divesting himself of his US-based wealth, McAfee bought a villa on Ambergris Caye after seeing it on Google Earth. “He went to Belize because he could act out his ultra-libertarian dreams,” thinks Wise. It may have been a rejection of materialism but moving to Belize was also, Wise and Davis agree, motivated by McAfee’s fear that his wealth would be gobbled up by lawsuits – some serious, some trivial. Of most concern was a fatal aerotrekking accident which caused the death of McAfee’s nephew, Joel Bitow, who was flying 61-year-old passenger Robert Gilson. Gilson’s family launched a $5m claim against McAfee.

The semi-retired entrepreneur flung himself into life in Belize, setting up a cigar manufacturer, a coffee distributor and a water-taxi service. When he bumped into Allison Adonizio, an attractive 31-year-old microbiologist on an extended vacation, he became entranced by the idea of finding natural antibiotics in the Belizian rainforest – he’d fought off digital diseases, now he could fight organic ones.

So he did what millionaires do: he offered Adonizio the job of a lifetime and built her a lab in a new jungle property. According to an interview Adonizio gave to Wise, however, she revealed she was also tasked with another of McAfee’s preoccupations: finding a herbal compound to enhance the female libido. Then, it seems, McAfee got distracted, and began hanging out in Lover’s Bar, a terrible karaoke shack and brothel not far from his jungle home. His girlfriend of more than a decade – whom he had been with since she was 19 – left, as did Adonizio, and McAfee took up with a series of local women, including a gun-toting 16-year-old. He became passionate about ridding a local village, Carmelita, of crime and drug trade: he donated money for a school canteen, built a police station, gave the police rifles and batons, and began paying them. Increasingly fearful for his safety, he imported pump-action shotguns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition to protect his compound. He started employing local gangsters but says he did so because they threatened to kill him. At Davis’ final meeting with McAfee in August – during which he tormented the journalist with a game of Russian roulette – he found the millionaire living with five young women.

To the government, McAfee’s manic activity looked like that of a drug lord. McAfee’s compound was stormed by armed members of Belize’s commando-style Gang Suppression Unit in April this year. McAfee was freed after no illegal drugs of any kind were found. Briefly detained, McAfee was free but still a “person of interest” according to the authorities. And then, on 11 November, his life really began to spiral out of control.

Gregory Faull, a 52-year-old expat American businessman who lived near McAfee, was found in a pool of blood with a single gunshot wound to his head. Like other neighbours, he had complained to McAfee about the noise from the half dozen dogs McAfee kept at his home. The Belize police said McAfee was “a person of interest” and the entrepreneur went on the run, claiming this was the latest harassment of him. He feared for not just his liberty but for his life. Since then, McAfee has revealed more extraordinary stories: he claims the police poisoned his dogs, that he hid from them by burying himself in sand with a cardboard box over his head, and then returned to the crime scene in an assortment of elaborate disguises. Most recently, he has offered a $25,000 reward for the “capture of person or persons responsible for Mr Faull’s murder”.

Since then, McAfee has attracted saturation media coverage. Is he “bonkers” as the Belize prime minister said? Or is he oppressed? Or has the former addict returned to drugs? In 2010, McAfee posted about MDPV, a psychoactive stimulant found in bath salts, on a drugs message-board. He found it “the finest drug ever conceived, not just for the indescribable hypersexuality but also for the smooth euphoria and mild comedown”. More recently, MDPV has gained the alarmist soubriquet “the zombie drug” after a user chewed the face of another man in Florida. McAfee posted about how he was producing MDPV but then told Davis this was all an elaborate prank to try to generate 1,000 posts on the web forum. “My life is fucked up enough without drugs, and always has been,” McAfee told Wired magazine. Most recently, McAfee blogged: “I have repeatedly stated I do not do drugs and am seriously opposed to drugs.”

If it sounds weird that McAfee would lie about drugs, this deceit (or not) perfectly encapsulates his character. In hacker culture, messing with people’s heads is called “social engineering”. As Wise writes: “McAfee’s undertakings in this vein have been as plentiful and spontaneous as his ventures in capitalism, and range from the sprawling to the picayune.” McAfee appears to have posted all kinds of untruths about himself on the internet – about where he lives, and what he does. “One of his hobbies is he loves to hoax the press – that’s one of his great joys in life,” says Wise.

Is the blog another trick? Both Davis and Wise believe the blog is genuinely written by McAfee. But before he began it, the people he subjected to more myths and stunts than anyone else were journalists. This profile of McAfee is heavily reliant on the hard work of two American journalists who have got closer to McAfee than anyone else: Joshua Davis and Jeff Wise. Can we trust their accounts? Davis’s book is lucid but Wise is critical of his rival for publishing “McAfee’s often outlandish claims without qualification“. And McAfee has taken to his blog to slander Wise for making “a life work out of smearing my character”, alleging it was because his entourage once sent Wise’s wife incriminating pictures of the journalist with another woman on his first assignment with McAfee. Wise says these allegations are “absolutely ridiculously false” and a classic example of McAfee’s modus operandi. “It’s a fine line between clever PR and outright lying,” says Wise. “He’s impulsive. He likes to control people. He likes to get attention, get people to do what he wants to do, and especially do what they don’t want to do.”

“At the moment he’s very clearly trying to mess with everybody’s heads,” says Davis, who spoke to McAfee on the phone two days ago. He describes him as “extremely intelligent, extremely paranoid”. “I asked him: ‘What is the end game?’ and he said: ‘Stay out of custody.’” Davis thinks he is deliberately trying to confuse people – a rational tactic by a man on the run. After six months investigating McAfee’s claims about his persecution by the Belizean authorities, Davis concludes that McAfee is mistaken. “I’m more inclined to believe the Belizean authorities raided him in April because they just didn’t understand who this guy was and what he was doing.”

Researching McAfee through the internet and secondary sources, I feel no closer to finding out who he really is. Just as we are going to press, McAfee emails me with a number to call him on. Is the blog really him? “Of course it’s me,” he says in a calm voice, calling me “sir” throughout our 10-minute conversation. The suggestion he is a “person of interest” in the murder of Faull is “absurd”, he says. “What earthly motive could I have had?” One theory was that McAfee believed Faull had poisoned his beloved dogs. “I knew at the time he could not have killed my dogs – he was a dog lover,” he says of Faull. He says he is still in Belize and has no intention of handing himself in. “The last person who turned himself in was handcuffed behind his back and shot 14 times.” He hopes to draw attention to the injustices in Belize, the abuse of “hundreds” of local people by the GSU and the country’s retreat from democracy. He wants local people to force the resignation of members of the current government, including the prime minister. “Even the most sheep-like people will say, ‘boot these people out,’” he says of the regime.

If McAfee is famously tricksy, what does he think of his unofficial biographers? Is Davis’s account reliable? “Absolutely not,” claims McAfee but when I ask for details he only objects to Wired magazine using a photograph of him topless, wielding a shotgun. He has not read Davis’s ebook but takes issue with the portrayal of himself as paranoid. “I don’t see myself as paranoid. In April this year 42 soldiers stormed my compound and held me in the blazing sunshine for 14 hours without food or water.”

McAfee says he is not interested in promoting his “legacy”. What is his greatest success? “My greatest success was getting off of drugs and alcohol in 1983. That was the most difficult thing I’ve done.” And now? “I intend to stay in Belize,” says the multimillionaire on the run, “because this is my home.”

Up in the foothills of the Pyrenees, in a tiny village nestled amid breathtaking landscapes and eagles in flight, a man in a woolly hat pushes a wheelbarrow up a narrow street whistling to himself as the smell of woodsmoke drifts out of chimneys. The only sight slightly out of place are 20 zombies, staggering wild-eyed and bleeding, down the mountain path. But, unlike most of the bizarre things said about this place, the zombies at least make sense. “We’re making a pastiche film about the apocalypse for our university leaving do,” says Joel, 23, a pharmacy student from Montpellier dressed in a torn grey suit with two black eyes and a dribble of blood from his mouth. His student friend, a dwarf in a cow suit, adds: “Bugarach was the perfect setting. Everyone knows this village as the world centre of armageddon, we couldn’t resist.”

Bugarach, with its two narrow streets, 176 residents, little agriculture, scores of wild orchids and virtually no pollution, was barely heard of a few years ago. Now, it’s arguably the most famous village in France, known variously as “the village at the end of the world“, the “chosen village”, or as CNN put it, “the doomsday destination”.

According to a prophecy/internet rumour, which no one has ever quite got to the bottom of, an ancient Mayan calendar has predicted the end of the world will happen on the night of 21 December 2012, and only one place on earth will be saved: the sleepy village of Bugarach. The mayor, Jean-Pierre Delord, a farmer in his 60s, first spotted the apocalyptic forecast online two years ago after being alerted by a villager. He mentioned it at a council meeting, suggesting special security measures, perhaps army logistics, to handle an influx of visitors in December 2012. Someone at the meeting told the local press and before long world news agencies and Japanese TV crews were pacing the cobbles asking baffled villagers their views on armageddon.

The French government’s dedicated sect-watchdog, known as Miviludes, was soon on the case, keen to prevent any apocalyptic sect activity, or ritualised suicide by doomsday cults such as the Order of the Solar Temple, which lost members in ritual killings in the Alps in 1995. French government officials had spotted 2.5m websites referencing the Bugarach end-of-the-world phenomenon by the end of 2010. These have now mushroomed. Meanwhile, rumours of the impact on Bugarach got more outlandish, helped by media that couldn’t resist the saga of a rural doomsday. Planes from America were said to have been fully booked for December with passengers who had only bought one-way tickets, hippy cults were claimed to have built bunkers beneath the village, and half-naked ramblers were said to be seen wandering up the mountain in procession, ringing bells. This turned out to be far from true. But as D-day approaches, the rumour has created a heavy atmosphere among villagers, who are keen for all of this – though not the world itself – to end.

At the tiny town hall, the leftwing, independent mayor of 36 years, Jean-Pierre Delord is dressed in jeans and wellies. “The Bugarach sign at the entrance to the village has been stolen for the third time – that costs a lot of money, you know,” he sighs. Not to mention the pebbles taken from the mountain above the village and sold online as talismen, something he has filed a legal complaint about. Or the online sale of “prayers”. There was even one idea by a budding entrepreneur to charge hopefuls five euros to send their last wills and testaments to Bugarach to be buried underground there for the end of the world, but it never happened

“The village has always attracted people with esoteric beliefs, they were here before and they will come afterwards, but this is something quite different,” Delord says. This corner of southern France has long been a cauldron of mystic fables and occult conspiracy theories. Nearby Rennes-Le-Chateau, described in the Cadogan Guide as “the vortex of Da Vinci Code madness”, is famous for its riddles of hidden treasure and a supposed cover-up of Jesus and Mary Magdalene’s married life in France. All around is the countryside of the Cathars, the mysterious and persecuted medieval heretical sect, who have now inspired a local tourism drive. Nostradamus is said to have spent some of his childhood in nearby Alet-les-Bains.

But in Bugarach, says Delord, “it’s all about the mountain”. At 1,320m, the peak of Bugarach looms over the village. It sits alone, not part of a range, and some believe its spooky shape inspired the mountain in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Known as the “upside down mountain”, it is a geological oddity whereby the lower layers of rock are mysteriously younger than those at the top. It is also host to a bewildering number of caves. Strange sounds from underground and odd light effects at the top have for decades seen the mountain likened not only to a UFO landing pad, but a “UFO underground car park”, with regular spaceship vrooming and revving allegedly heard from within. UFO believers often travel here, looking for bits of spaceship amid the mountain rock. It has been claimed that the former French president François Mitterrand came here by helicopter to investigate.

Delord has no criticisms of anyone’s beliefs about UFOs, or otherwise, “It’s a magnificent mountain and people say they do see things – brilliance, lights, not necessarily extraterrestrials,” though he hopes aliens do exist somewhere in the universe. The number of ramblers who have climbed the mountain has boomed since the apocalypse prediction, from 10,000 in 2010 to 20,000 in 2011. Delord rejects suggestions by some that he stoked the media frenzy himself. But does he believe the world will end on 21 December? His eyes widen. “Of course not. This is the 183rd end-of-the-world prophecy since antiquity. But I can’t take the risk of a lot of people coming here, trying to climb the mountain and getting hurt.” He wants the local authorities to shut off mountain paths and control any crowds.

In the organic shop on the edge of the village, a couple of civil servants from Nice were just down from the mountain top, enthusing about the weird sensations: how their compass went haywire, the strange cloud formations “in the shape of a wide-toothed comb”. “There’s an energy that’s difficult to define but it does feel unique,” says Corine Leblanc, who has lived here for several years. But suspicions and counter-theories abound about the apocalypse prophecy. Could it be designed to distract people from a real debate about whether wind turbines should be built in the village, some ask. Leblanc’s partner, Patrice Etienne, worked in events management and communications in Paris for two decades and is sceptical. Could talk of the army closing off the mountain on 21 December in fact be cover for covert military operations and secret tests on paranormal activity? He’s cynical about details such as fears that cult members might arrive here to end their lives. “Why come to the only place on earth that will be spared the apocalypse if you want to commit suicide? Wouldn’t that be a bit like trying to drown yourself wearing a lifejacket?” he frowns.

“Is it that if you throw yourself off the mountain, then a spaceship would come by, scoop you up and save you?” wondered the owner of a guest-house in neighbouring Rennes-les-Bains, a spa-town known for its own esoterists, hippies and spiritualists, quick to add that she didn’t believe for a second that Bugarach’s mountain was an intergalactic Noah’s ark. Normally, she would be shut for Christmas, but this year after a slow summer she had bookings for 21 December, so far mainly journalists.

The oddity is that tourist bookings this year seem to be down slightly, not up. The usual walkers, eco-tourists and people coming for spiritual retreats seemed put off by news crews doing lives-to-camera on armageddon. One Estonian rambler had taken refuge in Rennes-Le-Bain’s thermal springs saying, “I went for one walk around Bugarach and was stopped by two TV crews asked if I’d prepared for the apocalypse.”

In Bugarach, looking round the tiny church, Barbara Delahaye, a Spanish tourist in her 50s and a fervent Catholic, said there was no harm in all the fuss. “As Christians, one must always be prepared for the end of the world, it’s not a bad thing to be kept aware of that.”

Marco, an Italian warehouse worker from Genoa, had driven here to spend two days “looking for traces of UFOs” on the mountain. “I expected more people to be here,” he says when he realises that he and a journalist are the only people at his guest-house that night.

In her restored terraced house, Valerie Austin, the local choir leader, summed up the odd atmosphere. “People come and look at us villagers as if we’re all peculiar and in contact with some other world. I’m just waiting for one of them to give us a banana, I feel like a monkey at a zoo. We, the people that live here, have nothing to do with this,” she says. Austin, a music teacher from Northumberland, moved here 24 years ago because “all the things I thought important in life seemed to be here: beautiful scenery, no pollution, clean water and kind of authentic, old-fashioned life-style.”

She manages a holiday cottage that lost bookings over the summer because “people who wanted a quiet holiday were put off by the media buzz”. The choir couldn’t plan their usual pre-Christmas concerts in local villages because they weren’t not sure whether there would be mayhem on the roads.

Does she believe any of it? “The Mayans couldn’t even predict their own downfall, could they?” she sighs.

One of the most far-fetched claims has been of an apocalypse-inspired property boom in Bugarach as people allegedly rushed to set up home near safety. If prices have gone up in recent years, it has only been part of the long-running general move of city-dwellers looking for the rural dream. For-sale signs dot the village and neither sales nor prices have soared. “Why would you buy a house if the world was about to end?” asked one villager.

John Argles, a builder from London, was mid-construction on his dream house by the stream. An “atheist and a realist” he was surprised when he arrived that people asked him if he’d come for Doomsday. “That had nothing to do with it,” he says. It was the nature, including its resident flock of vultures, that had tempted him. “It’s the nearest thing to utopia I could find.” He plans to meet friends for a celebratory drink in the local bar on 22 December.

Whatever its origins, the Bugarach prophecy has implanted itself in France’s collective consciousness. Nicolas D’Estienne d’Orves, a novelist and opera critic for Le Figaro, released a book on it last week, The Village of the End of the World. A documentary on the life of villagers, The World Stops at Bugarach, will air on French TV, fittingly, on 20 December. D’Estienne d’Orves says it was “impossible” to get to the bottom of the genesis of the Mayan Bugarach rumour. “It was grabbed on to because this is a place where there’s nothing, so you can easily project your fantasies on to it. It’s like filling a balloon with air,” he says. His book includes the letters received by Bugarach’s mayor over the past two years of apocalypse frenzy, including one well-wisher proposing to organise “The Bugarach music festival: a new world beginning for humanity” to coincide with the end of the world, in which he promised to get together Peter Gabriel, Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, Led Zeppelin, Jean Michel Jarre and the Black Eyed Peas.

The French government, however, is obliged to take it seriously. More than 700km away in his Paris office near the prime minister’s residence, Serge Blisko, head of Miviludes, says he would be advising local authorities on how to prepare policing and keep an eye for gurus and sects exploiting people. “After these moments, there can be a danger of psychological collapse. If fragile, vulnerable people expect an event like the end of the world and it doesn’t happen, they can feel let down and in anguish,” he says.

Meanwhile, on sale in the village is wine called “Cuvée Bugarach” labelled: “If there’s only one left, I shall be that one.” It helps “communicate with extra-terrestrials”, the blurb says.

Over the next weeks, the state will decide what level of security is needed in the village on 21 December, whether to close mountain paths and how to handle any visitors. Although if it’s snowing and icy, it would be almost impossible to access it by car via the death-defying canyon bends of the nearby Gorges of Galamus.

At the town hall, the mayor, while hoping the fuss would soon be over, was still proud of his village’s fame. “If I’d have have had to pay a communications agency for this kind of publicity, it would have been a fortune,” he says.

The Highway of Holiness community church – a few dilapidated rooms in a windswept industrial park in Tottenham, north London – used to be a lifeline for local youth.

More than eight out of 10 children across Tottenham live in poverty, and this ward is one of the most deprived in England. Yet until recently, the charity of the church’s largely immigrant, low-income congregation enabled the pastor, Alex Gyasi, to run an impressive schedule of after-school classes, a youth club, a cooking club and an in-house digital TV channel used to inspire young people to debate current affairs.

Since the government’s austerity drive began to bite, however, and word spread that Gyasi gives the destitute a space to sleep and a hot meal, the church has been deluged with requests it can’t refuse. Two years ago there were two homeless men sleeping on the thinly carpeted floor of the church. Recently, there were 50. When winter hits harder and temperatures drop, Gyasi fears the church will have 90 men crammed into every inch of spare space and he will have to turn people away.

The government’s deficit reduction plan, it said, would be weighted so “those with the broadest shoulders should bear the greatest load”.

It is too early to know what the exact impact of these cuts will be on those whom politicians promised to protect because, deep as they have already been, they are only just beginning. By April 2013, the end of this financial year, there will have been £8.9bn in cuts to welfare spending. Last week, it was announced that further substantial welfare cuts will be made in the autumn statement: an extra £6bn in 2015-16, then £10bn in 2016-17.

There are, however, two swaths of cuts that have already taken effect, affecting local authority spending and housing benefit. For the last 18 months, the New Economics Foundation (NEF) has been tracking how those cuts have hit the frontline in some of the most deprived wards in England: Aston and Ladywood in Birmingham, and five wards in the east of Haringey in north London.

Published on Monday, the NEF’s report, called Everyday Insecurity: Life at the End of the Welfare State, emphatically rejects the suggestion that the most vulnerable and those with genuine needs are being protected.

The report says the services that are being lost are cheaper ones that keep people away from far more expensive acute services, such as A&E, homelessness support and temporary housing. These are real cuts, the report insists, and they will be paid for in human, social and economic costs.

This is clear from the men Gyasi welcomes into his church. “We have men referred to us by almost every major hospital and organisation that deals with the homeless,” he said, leafing through a thick file of letters from hospitals, including University College London Hospitals, East London and City mental health trust, Guy’s and St Thomas’ and the Royal Free, as well as the British Red Cross, the Refugee Council and Tottenham MP, David Lammy.

“These rooms were supposed to be for our children and for our congregation. Now all that space is given over to the homeless,” he sighed. “To help the dispossessed, we have to deprive our own children. But we have no choice: we’re the last resort for the poor and marginalised. These are the people who fell through the net and kept falling.”

The NEF report argues that the true impact of the cuts is the erosion of day-to-day economic security for everyone.

“The whole notion of a social safety net is being unravelled,” said Joe Penny, co-author of the report. “The safety net has so many holes in it now that anyone, no matter how secure they might think they are, can slip through.”

According to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), the introduction of the benefit cap will see at least 11,390 households in the UK lose £150 a week – in Haringey this will make 6,900 homes unaffordable to families on housing benefits, a report by the Chartered Institute of Housing has said.

The safety net, according to Penny, was not tightly knit in the first place, but the voluntary sector filled the gaps. “The government is now eroding the voluntary sector [and] at the same time tearing massive holes in what local government can provide. Benefits are being reduced while council tax, rent and fuel bills are soaring.

“To compound the growing income insecurity many people face, some of the most practical and vital public services – such as legal advice, crisis centres and care homes – are being cut.” Society is, said Penny, getting to the point where anyone can have a crisis that pushes them down a spiral so precipitous that it is almost impossible to recover.

When the Welfare Reform Act comes into force next year, the swingeing cuts to working tax credits will see at least 200,000 couples lose up to £74.34 a week, according to a Child Poverty Action Group calculation based on 2012 rates. The £26,000-a-year cap to housing benefit will affect at least 56,000 households, the DWP has calculated, and they will mainly be large families, lone parents and disabled people.

The average affected household, says the DWP, will lose £83 a week from its housing benefit alone. Those who can no longer afford to live in the area will have to move away, potentially giving up jobs, taking children out of schools and exchanging local support networks of family and friends for communities of strangers.

Those affected will increasingly find they are no longer able to turn to their local authorities: the average 27% reduction in spending that local governments have had to make saw 24% of disabled adults having their support reduced in 2011. An estimated 800,000 elderly people in need of care now go without any formal support. The forthcoming 20% reduction in council tax benefits for everyone except pensioners will affect 36,000 people in Haringey alone, the NEF report has found.

A DWP spokesperson said: “Our reforms will introduce fairness to the welfare system by asking people on benefits to make the same choices about where to live that working families do.

“Housing benefit will meet rents of up to £21,000 a year and apart from the most expensive areas in London, around a third of properties will still be available to rent.

“We are committed to protecting the most vulnerable and councils have an additional discretionary fund of £190m to help families in difficult situations.”

But Penny says a “race to the bottom” is the new norm. “This is the thin edge of the wedge,” he said. “Guardian readers and those in the higher income brackets are being naive if they think this will not hit them. If services and infrastructure are removed, everyone will notice. Anything that local government don’t legally have to provide, they are going to have to get rid of.

“Even if Labour get in at the next election, they will not be able to afford to heal the cuts.”

But summaries and statistics cannot convey the cuts’ effects on individuals. The storm clouds can been seen at Citizens Advice bureaux. Markos Chrysostomou, chief executive officer of Haringey’s CAB, said: “We’re like the canary down the mine. We’re the first people who pick up what’s going on out there and what we’re seeing at the moment is a boiling pot whose lid is coming off. We’re trying to turn down the heat so it just simmers – but someone keeps stoking the fire.”

Demand for the borough’s CAB services has risen threefold in two years. Residents who want to ensure they are among the limited number of applicants the centre can see each day must start queuing hours before the doors open.

Recently, 87-year-old Aston Blackman woke long before it was light to get to the Turnpike Lane office for 6am. At 6.10am, he was joined by 66-year-old Younes Khalaifa. At 6.15, 31-year-old Sergio Araujo arrived. By 7am, there were 11 people in the queue. By 9.30am, there were 49. More turned up every few minutes after that but didn’t bother waiting: they knew that because of the service’s increasingly limited facilities, only around 25 people can see an adviser each day.

With still half an hour to go before the doors opened, Blackman was shivering and wet at the head of the queue. Pointing to a plank of wood overhanging a dustbin, he said: “I sheltered there. But it’s been very cold and dark. The sun has come up now but I’m still trembling.”

Blackman had received a £1,218.63 council tax demand for an original debt of £154,84 accrued, the council claimed, in 1997 – when he was 71 years old, despite already having been on a pension and entitled to full council tax relief for six years.

Despite the six-year rule, which means the council is not allowed to recover debt that it has not attempted to claim for that period of time, the letter threatened legal action unless the full sum was paid in seven days.

Blackman was bewildered and scared. “As far as I’m aware, I’ve paid my council tax on time for my entire life,” he said, wringing his hands. “I can’t afford to pay this. I live on a pension of £50 a week. I don’t have any savings. What will happen to me?” Blackman’s problem will be ironed out, his CAB adviser said reassuringly, but he was right to risk a chill to be at the front of the queue.

Chrysostomou admitted the bureau was struggling to cope with incredible demand: “We’re sitting here, facing an ever-increasing tide of demand with ever-diminishing resources.” He has had to stop funding for mental health work, and the centre can no longer afford to offer specialist welfare benefit advice. From next April, there will not be a single CAB welfare benefit specialist working in Haringey.

Hackney and Waltham Forest CABs, in east and north-east London respectively, have had a 30% cut in funding, and residents of those boroughs now come to Haringey for help. “People on the margins of crime and drugs will go back into crime,” Chrysostomou predicted.

Chrysostomou struggled to identify a group that would be unaffected by the cuts. “The reductions in council tax benefits will hit families who are working and on low earnings,” he said. “Single people, disabled people and large families will be evicted when the new housing benefit cap comes in.”

Chrysostomou has lived in Haringey for many years. He is a member of the civic council and helps formulate the policies of neighbourhood child poverty action groups. He says he has never seen anything like the suffering already caused by the cuts. “This need for subsistence charity like food banks is like going back to third world countries,” he said.

Three miles away from the CAB, Gyasi said he was receiving referrals from across London. “There is so little support from the state, local government and voluntary organisations that everyone is vulnerable now,” he said. “Men end up here for reasons that simply didn’t exist a few years ago. People struggle to survive on subsistence-level benefits, that are cut ever further, and yet have to pay more and more for life’s essentials. Or they lose their job and there aren’t any others to be had. Or their relationship breaks down and they can’t afford to run two homes and pay for their children’s food.

“We even have people here who have siblings living locally. But because those siblings are close to the tipping point too, they can’t care for their own kin without pushing themselves over the edge.

“If the government want the so-called ‘big society’ to step up and really fill the gap that has been created by the withdrawal of statutory provision, then we need some help – our coffers are emptying. “We do the best that we can, but very soon, we won’t have the resources to cope. There are more cuts on their way – and winter is coming.”

Sitting forward in an earnest fashion and pushing back his flop of brown hair, David Mitchell is explaining why the production company he has just formed with Robert Webb has gone into business with the BBC. At a time when a growing number of comedians, including Steve Coogan, Julia Davis and Chris O’Dowd, have been beating a path to Sky, it’s a bold move from the stars of cult hit Peep Show.

“Sky is making a lot of comedy at the moment, and that’s great,” says Mitchell. “It’s always good to have more choice for pitching ideas and more choices for the viewer. But my worry is that that money could be turned off in a second if someone in News Corp or whatever goes, ‘Hang on, what’s the return on this massive investment in British comedy?’”

Webb, reminding us that the two men are a double act both on and off the screen, quickly adds: “It’s great you’ve suddenly got two arts channels, but for how long? Once certain aims and ends have been achieved …”

Mitchell: “One also fears that the fact that the Murdochs’ influence within Sky is not now going to increase, and is therefore potentially reducing, then the interests of Sky in investing …

Webb: “… in anything other than football …”

Mitchell: “… might be reduced. I would say, for their balance sheet, that the money spent on football is probably a better investment than that spent on comedy.”

While they’re not ruling out ever working with Sky, Mitchell says: “It’s the sort of thing where you don’t know how long it is going to last. Whereas unless the BBC is destroyed …”

“Or manages to destroy itself out of sheer self-hatred and courtesy,” says Webb, who slips into the polite voice of a BBC mandarin: “You really want us to fuck off, don’t you? Yes, we are sorry about the licence fee.”

Mitchell: “Yes, we are responsible for the entire culture of the 1970s.”

Webb: “And for most paedophiles.”

Mitchell: “Yes, child molestation came out of a meeting at the BBC in 1972.”

Webb: “We were all a bit pissed, sorry.”

Mitchell: “Yes, and I’m so sorry it rains sometimes. And it’s my piss on your head.”

They roar with laughter. If only George Entwistle had made such an apology over the Jimmy Savile/Newsnight affair. In fact, somewhat presciently, given that our interview takes place before Entwistle’s departure, Mitchell reckons that the role of the BBC director general is “basically saying sorry all the time”.

After almost two years away, Peep Show is returning to Channel 4 this Sunday for its eighth series. The world has changed since we last saw their alter egos, Mark and Jeremy. Dictatorships have fallen and the eurozone has floundered, but the lovable (and sometimes unlovable) Peep Show losers remain locked together in career misery and relationship purgatory in that Croydon flat. Despite feeling rather tired after travelling to a literary festival to promote his new autobiography, Back Story, Mitchell sparks up: “They haven’t moved on much, which is sort of vital. Sitcoms often go off the rails when the situation changes too much.”

As for his character, Webb says: “Jeremy was going to move out at the end of the last series. You’ll not be amazed to hear he doesn’t quite do that.”

This new series promises “more agony, more pain”: office worker Sophie, played by the brilliant Olivia Colman, is missing, but druggy Super Hans is back, and gives Mark a job in a bathroom shop. Meanwhile, Jeremy becomes a life coach. There is also, apparently, a tragedy. Does it concern Mark’s baby? Should we prepare for an EastEnders-style cot death? They laugh and wave dismissive hands. “No, no,” says Webb. “It’s not gritty Bafta territory.”

Peep Show, which launched in 2003, has now overtaken Drop the Dead Donkey as Channel 4′s longest-running sitcom. Webb reckons the secret to its longevity lies in the fact that its writers, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, resist calls from Channel 4 to knock out each new series quickly. “They work very hard on each episode and the structure of each series – and treat themselves to the jokes at the end. That keeps it fresh and compelling. They’ve always been very strong and said, ‘No, it takes this many months to write a good sitcom.’

“Then there are the characters. Everyone can relate to two people who constantly feel, in different ways, they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mark and Jeremy, even though they want very different things, constantly feel they are in this peripheral puddle – stuck with each other while everyone else is having a party.”

After meeting at Cambridge university, Mitchell and Webb rose to success via the traditional route of Radio 4 and Channel 4, with a smattering of sketch, panel and comedy shows on the BBC. Unlike their Peep Show counterparts, though, the two have found personal happiness: Webb is married with two daughters; while, at the time of our interview, Mitchell is about to marry the writer and presenter Victoria Coren.

The pair’s next step is a BBC2 comedy drama series called Our Men. Due to air next year, it features Mitchell as the British ambassador to a country called Tazbekistan. Webb, who plays his man behind the scenes, describes it in the press release as “Yes, Prime Minister meets Spooks at a bad disco and Yes, Prime Minister is a bit sick on Spooks but Spooks doesn’t mind”. He wrote that, he says, “after I’d been drinking”.

What interests Mitchell about Our Men “is the genuinely funny and dark contradictions in terms of what Britain’s representatives are expected to do on our behalf. I think they are expected to achieve the impossible. We like to think of ourselves as a country that promotes liberalism and democracy. But we also like to make sure we’ve got plenty of money. I think they get a lot of shit if a deal that could be made for the country is fucked up because of an inopportune mention of a human-rights abuse.”

Webb is also about to appear in ITV’s Marple, in an episode filmed in South Africa over his 40th birthday. So do they want to do more drama? “Not really,” says Webb. “I’d like to keep it to every now and then. I can’t imagine getting bored with comedy or thinking comedy is beneath us suddenly.”

Mitchell, 38, agrees: “You’ve got to take that attitude. Because some people in drama, incredibly wrong-headedly, have the reverse view. They think, ‘You can stop doing this silly little comedy now you’re doing a drama.’ Thinking of it as a hierarchy is not helpful to anyone – but if there is a hierarchy, for fuck’s sake, comedy is better than drama!”

“It’s odd because some actors are very scared of comedians,” says Webb.

“They’re quite right,” adds Mitchell, “because you have to be able to make people laugh in comedy, which you don’t in drama. It’s difficult – they’re right to be scared. Obviously, the best drama is brilliant, but which would you destroy: Our Friends in the North or Fawlty Towers? Both amazing shows. It’s a hellish world but you’ve got to destroy one of them. Of course, you’d keep Fawlty Towers.”

Webb feels he and Mitchell were “put on this earth” to do sketch shows (or “comedy canapes” as Mitchell calls them) to counter the “very irritating way people can be snobbish” about comedy. But since they’re so busy, there’s less time for them to watch TV these days, although Webb says he is tuning into Fresh Meat “despite the fact I’m in it”, while Mitchell is getting through the 30 Rock box set.

Although he once said Downton Abbey‘s historical aberrations left him feeling it was just “actors standing there in hats telling lies”, Mitchell is now hooked. “I really enjoy watching it. I think it’s terrible. I think the script is just ludicrously shit.” Webb collapses with laughter as Mitchell warms to his theme: “But it’s all very pretty. I like to see a big house and some costumes. And I probably enjoy it as much for the shit script as for the nice performances. But what are they thinking? Have they even read it through? They set up a thing – ‘Oh, I think I might have cancer. Oh, I’m really worried.’ Next scene – ‘You haven’t got cancer.’ ‘Oh phew.’ And the whole series about the war. People pop back from the war as if it was the cornershop!”

They would like to write a sitcom together. But as Webb points out: “It’s hard to put your heart into it while Peep Show is alive – and of course it’s not in our interests to wish Peep Show away because I live in the house Peep Show built. It’s been so good to us, and it’s such fun. Every now and then, we try to have a meeting, or at least get together in the pub, to think about sitcom ideas. But they’re difficult to come up with.”

They do have other ambitions: Webb says he would like to play Iago in Othello (I laugh at this, thinking he’s joking, but he’s not); and Mitchell would like to do a play as well – he’s just not sure what one. “Every time I get offered a play,” he says, “I’m in a quandary: ‘I should do a play, better make sure I do the right play.’ I’m in that state of mind at the moment. It feels odd that somehow I got into all this doing plays and reviews at university – and now suddenly, I’m in a world where doing a play would be a weird choice that I’m worried to make. I’ve got to get through that.”

But Peep Show fans should rest easy. As Webb says: “We’re never going to be bored with comedy. I can’t imagine either of us going, ‘We’re too grown-up to fall over.’”

• Peep Show returns to Channel 4 on Sunday.

Nicola Probert is nervous. She hasn’t let her partner, Tony Hodge, go food shopping for the family on his own since the day he came back with a £3 DVD, a six-pack of premium baked beans and two milkshakes for the children – an extra £10 on the bill that meant their two sons couldn’t go to the soft play centre that weekend. Today, though, Nicola has no choice: she is recovering from a minor operation and can’t leave the house. She isn’t happy.

“Please don’t get Heinz baked beans,” she implores him, handing over the shopping list she’s written out in painstaking detail. “Even if they’re on offer, they’re more expensive than own-brand. Don’t get posh, individual packets of crisps either; get the supermarket ones that come in multipacks. And please don’t buy any of those offers they pile up by the front door of the supermarket – they’re always more expensive than the stuff you can find at the back of the shop.”

Tony sighs. Nicola tries to make amends. “We can afford some fresh meat this week,” she coaxes. Then pausing, adds: “As long as they’ve got their three-for-£10 deal still going.” The couple exchange a look of exasperation, then burst into exhausted laughter. Nicola, however, stops after a couple of seconds. “Sometimes I wonder what’s happened to our family,” she says sadly. “It’s not like we’re the poorest of the poor. A few years ago, we didn’t have to count the pennies like this.”

Nicola is a phlebotomist, taking blood samples from patients, on maternity leave after the birth of the couple’s second child seven months ago. Tony works full-time in the building trade. The couple live in Bristol on a household income of around £24,500 a year. They spend around £80 on food every two weeks. “We don’t have trouble keeping to our budget in other areas – although with fuel bills rocketing up, we’re fortunate our flat is a heat trap – but when it comes to food, it’s a constant struggle just to buy enough food to fill our stomachs,” says Nicola.

“It makes me furious. Affordable, nutritious food should be a right for everyone, not a privilege for a few.”

The couple are among the more than 13 million people who live in poverty in the UK, suffering what the Joseph Rowntree Trust says are food shortages on a scale not seen since wartime rationing. Food prices have spiked across the world but in Britain, where we import around 40% of our food, prices have risen at more than twice the EU average and families are struggling to afford food that has increased by 32% since 2007.

“Many people don’t think that in the UK – the seventh richest country in the world – people go hungry or go hungry for healthy food,” said Lindsay Boswell, chief executive of FareShare, the UK charity that feeds 36,500 people every day, redistributing high-quality, surplus food from the food industry to a network of community organisations that support vulnerable people across Britain. “But they do. Many families are feeling the pinch financially as a result of unemployment and redundancies, the high cost of living and government spending cuts.” Research is building up, pointing to the fact that people on what were once regarded as reasonable salaries can no longer afford to eat enough, much less eat enough healthy food. A recent report by Save the Children looked at 5,000 families with incomes of up to £30,000 a year and found that to ensure their children get enough food to eat, nearly two-thirds of parents skip meals, go into debt, avoid paying bills, and put off replacing worn-out clothing.

Giselle Cory, a senior research and policy analyst at the Resolution Foundation, says families on £42,500 are struggling and those on £50,000 could be next to discover they are no longer able to afford the food they want. “We’re very much not only talking about society’s poorest,” she said. “We’re talking about families who, a short while ago, could afford their weekly shop without a problem. These are the ones who are now struggling to get by.”

Two children in every school class are going hungry because their parents fail to provide proper meals, according to a study by the parenting website Netmums and the child welfare charity Kids Company, with an estimated one million children in the UK now living in homes without enough to eat. A Guardian teacher network survey in June found that four out of five teachers (83%) saw pupils hungry in the morning and 55% said up to a quarter arrived having not eaten enough. Almost half of teachers had brought food in for pupils who arrived at school with empty stomachs.

Most experts agree the problem of Britain’s nutritional recession is going to get worse, with the cost of the weekly shop continuing to rise by about 4% a year until 2022 at least, an increase almost twice the current rate of inflation of 2.7%. The average cost of a food shopping bill in Britain is £76.83 a week, an increase of £5.66 compared with last year, according to Which?. In a decade, the annual food bill for the average family will be over £4,000, up from £2,766 last year.

In Bristol, where the Hodges live, a recent report by Oxfam revealed that 26,500 people can’t afford to eat enough. At least one in every 16 parents say they skip one meal a week so their family doesn’t go hungry, with 41% saying they have been “forced” to buy cheaper food because healthy food has become unaffordable.

Emma Murray, co-founder of the Bristol North West Food Bank, has seen an increasing number of professional people arrive at her door, needing emergency food parcels. “We don’t just get unemployed council house families here by any means,” she said. “We had a gentleman here last week who lived in Clifton, the most affluent part of Bristol. He had lost his job and was mortified to find himself asking for our help. We had another professional woman the other day who was so embarrassed to be here that she couldn’t come through the door.”

Murray’s food bank has fed over 3,000 people since it opened 20 months ago, many referred from agencies, including GPs, health visitors, schools and job centres. “There’s a lot of disbelief about food poverty because families who have always been able to afford to live independently of the state are very ashamed about needing help for something as essential as food,” she said.

At the supermarket, Tony heads to the Branson’s baked beans piled up by the front door, £1.50 for three tins. “Last week, these were £1 for four,” he says. “It’s disgusting the way supermarkets try to squeeze extra money from families who are struggling and can’t afford the extra pennies, even with something as small as a tin of beans.” He makes his way down the aisles, gazing blankly from side to side. “Food doesn’t mean anything nice to me any more. It just makes me feel stressed,” he says. “The cheap things we can afford are so tasteless and pointless that I often can’t even be bothered to eat.”

Carefully choosing a small onion and a single floret of broccoli, he glances over at the peppers. “My oldest boy loves peppers. It’s the one healthy food he can’t get enough of,” he says. “But look at the price of them. We’d have to go without a meal just so that he can have a healthy snack.”

It takes Tony five minutes to scour the shelves for the cheapest jam. “To be honest, I wouldn’t be this careful if I wasn’t being watched, but it means I’ve saved myself about £2 on jam and the same on baked beans,” he says. “I’m itching to buy something that actually tastes nice and would be a treat but Nicola would go mad, and she’d be right to.” As he heads to the till, however, he grabs two Cornish pasties, on offer at two for £1. “Nicola won’t like that,” he says. “But I have to leave the house at 5am every morning and sometimes I forget to make lunch – or we don’t have enough food in for me to do it.

“It’s bad to buy those pasties, I know, but it’s less bad than if I have to buy something at work, where it’ll cost four times as much.”

Both the Department of Health (DoH) and the British Retail Consortium (BRC), the trade association representing retailers from large supermarkets to independent shops, insist that families can eat both healthily and cheaply. According to government estimates, poor households could eat within the official Eatwell healthy eating guidelines if they spent just 21p more on food each week. The DoH estimates that low-income households spend £16.49 per person each week on foods in the Eatwell categories. But, the department says, they could meet all the Eatwell goals by increasing their spend on food to £16.70 and spending £2.77 a week less on high-fat/high-sugar foods, £1.88 more on bread and other starchy foods and £2.22 more on fruit and vegetables.Prof Philip James, a former nutrition adviser to the government and president of the International Association for the Study of Obesity, rejects these claims.

“The reality is that anyone who does not essentially live independently of any state influence – that is, those who have no mortgage, whose salary has not been frozen and who have a handsome pension – is going to be affected by a government making some of the biggest cuts to local authority budgets at the same time that it is predicted food prices are going to rise even further,” he said.

Even the government’s own statistics show healthy eating costs more. The Food Statistics Pocketbook 2012 shows that, in the past year alone, staples such as 500g of minced beef have risen by a fifth, from £2.20 to £2.80, while a 1kg bag of onions is up by 18%, from 87p to £1.02. Carrots, potatoes, eggs and orange juice have also seen steep rises. Although processed food has seen the sharpest price rise – 36% – since 2007, the next steepest rise, at 34%, has been in fruit. The cost of vegetables has risen by 22% over the same period.

The government assessment of food affordability paints a bleak picture of how the diet of the nation’s poorest 10% has deteriorated since the financial crash. Between 2007 and 2010, the most recent period analysed, low-income households cut the amount of food they buy by 11%. But while trading down to cheaper products has helped many people offset some of the food price rises, low-income households have not managed to trade down, possibly because they were already buying cheaper products, the report suggests.

In 2010, the poorest 10% bought 26% less fresh meat than in 2007, 25% less fruit and 15% less vegetables, raising concerns that the food industry and the government are not doing enough to promote affordable, healthy food choices for all segments of society. This, says Cory, corresponds to what Resolution sees on the ground. “It’s unequivocal,” she said. “When food prices go up and household incomes go down, people on low to middle incomes buy less healthy food and more unhealthy food. It’s a very real causation and, frankly, an unarguable one.”

Back in Bristol, Nicola is unpacking Tony’s shopping bags as he hovers anxiously. “You’ve done well,” she says finally. “This was a big shop and I was expecting it to cost £50 and you’ve come in at £46.19, even with those pasties.”

Tony peers over her shoulder to try to identify something he wants to eat for supper. There isn’t anything. He slumps down on the sofa and reaches for the remote control.

“It just all looks so cheap and nasty,” he says. “To be honest, just looking at it takes my appetite away.”

Ralph Fiennes could have been a diplomat in a previous life – the low, patrician voice, and the clothes. He is dressed on the morning we meet with an elegance that would not disgrace a Frenchman: neat cardigan, fresh shirt, polished boots. We are in Soho, in post-production offices – an editing suite like a gone-wrong sitting room, with a bank of computers at right angles to a sofa.

He is, by a month, on the youthful side of 50. And he has a smile of such disarming sweetness that the first impression is that something has gone bizarrely wrong. It is only retrospectively that the oddity makes sense: what he does best as an actor is torment. His eyes can convey a troubled history in a glance. They mark him out in every part, from MI6 agent in the new Bond film, Skyfall, to Voldemort in Harry Potter, an SS officer in Schindler’s List, TE Lawrence in A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia, and Coriolanus, in the film he also directed. They are extraordinary. But if the lightness in his face this morning is unfamiliar, it should not be taken as encouragement. By repute, Ralph is anything but biddable. It is as if he really were an ambassador, overseeing a country of unrest.

It is breakfast time, and we begin with Dickens because Fiennes is in the middle of a Dickens-fest. In Mike Newell’s new film, Great Expectations, he is one of a starry cast alongside Helena Bonham Carter’s zany cobweb of a Miss Havisham, Robbie Coltrane’s bullish Mr Jaggers and Jeremy Irvine – still fresh faced after War Horse – as Pip. Fiennes plays the unnerving convict, Magwitch, and captures perfectly that uniquely Dickensian mixture of the sinister and benign.

But he is also involved in a project even dearer to his heart. He is directing his second film, The Invisible Woman, in which he also stars – as Dickens. The screenplay, bys Abi Morgan, is inspired by Claire Tomalin’s splendid biography about Dickens and the secret love of his life: Nelly Ternan. I ask how it would be were Dickens able to join us for breakfast. Would we like him? “I think we would be greatly taken with him. He would amuse us with his anecdotes. He would be very much the host. He would want to make sure we were all right and had enough to eat. We would be charmed.” But would we get any sense of who he really was? “Possibly not. Whenever I meet people who are projecting one quality, I always think: what is the other side?”

It is a question with which Fiennes has been preoccupied during the making of his film, and will be my question too – but about Fiennes himself. What was Dickens hiding? “Everyone is quick to say Dickens was a bit of a shit, did not treat his wife very nicely … but he was churning with creative imagination. And if you don’t have that inside you, it is hard to get your head around it.”

Dickens was a compulsive walker, Fiennes says. “He wore himself out.” He had an “obsessive quality, and when pushed into a corner could act with emotional violence”. He was “profoundly sensitive, easily slighted, incredibly generous”. Fiennes talks of the “yearning” in the novels, Dickens’s recurring dream of finding a “perfect, harmonious place to live”. It is wrong, he believes, to dismiss this as sentimentality.

Dickens’s obsessive quality is something Fiennes understands. He is famous for his tireless approach to work, the self-criticism, the lack of complacency. What is most striking on meeting Fiennes is his concentrated quality. However, what drew him to The Invisible Woman was not Dickens but the character of Nelly (to be played by the wonderful, effervescent Felicity Jones). And now he springs to his feet and paces up and down, talking about Nelly, trying to imagine how it was for her: “He was 45 … she was only 18. And this man, this force that came at her, happened to be someone called Charles Dickens. And he came with his alpha-male charisma and imagination, and she had to weather it. And that was the story of her heart.” He adds in a quieter tone: “And that made me want to do it.”

Fiennes hadn’t read much Dickens before the film got under way but he has put that right. And he talks about Dickens’s feelings: the “shame, doubt and anguish” felt by a married Victorian in a love out of wedlock; the conflict between desire and duty, and the plain fact he “adored Nell”. Dickens would have “worked hard to show he was there for her”. I can hear in his voice his wish to believe in the unassailability of their love, yet he is swift to acknowledge how hard Nelly’s lot became: “Here was a woman harbouring the secret of a past life. She lived with what I call a ‘wound of intimacy’.”

Quite a phrase. It makes one wonder about the “wounds of intimacy” in his own life. He lived for 12 years with the actress Alex Kingston, whom he married in 1993 but then left for Francesca Annis, 17 years his senior (she was playing Gertrude to his Hamlet on Broadway), until that relationship also ended. The rest is mainly gossip.

And to spare Fiennes this morning I have devised – for light relief – a multiple-choice question. I tell him what he is in for and he laughs and sits forward on the sofa.

You don’t like talking about your private life because:

a) It is a bloody impertinence to be asked about it, and it’s not the interviewer’s business.

b) You are shy.

c) You prefer to be in control of the material yourself.

d) It involves other people, and that makes it uncomfortable.

e) None of the above.

He considers: “A combination … a) c) and d).”

This approach could revolutionise interviewing. And I can glimpse a playfulness there. But I want to know about his mother, who died of cancer when she was 55 and he was 31, and no multiple-choice answer could begin to cover that. She is one woman he will gladly talk about. “I was very close to my mother.” Jennifer Lash – Jini to her friends – was a painter and novelist (Bloomsbury published her last novel, Blood Ties). Born in England, she spent her early years in India, and seems to have been creative, unconventional, high-maintenance – a huge influence on her children. “She was an enthusiast,” he says. “She encouraged us all to engage. To really go into whatever we were doing, not to skate on the surface. To become impassioned.” But she had “an emotional fragility – often present – that we all felt strongly”.

Ralph is the eldest of six – seven, when counting his adopted brother, Michael. Sophie is a film-maker, and Martha a film director; Magnus is a composer and record producer, Joseph an actor, and only Jacob, a conservationist, has slipped through the artistic net. Ralph was himself initially balanced between art and drama, spending a year at Chelsea College of Art before going to Rada.

His directorial debut was last year’s Coriolanus, in which he also played the title role. I ask about the overwhelming scenes between Coriolanus and his mother Volumnia (played by Vanessa Redgrave), and whether the relationship with his own mother influenced them. “If you play a mother-and-son scene you call on your own history with your mother, just as if you are playing a scene with a lover you call on situations you have had with a lover…”

Making Coriolanus was incredibly hard, he says. What did he learn? More than anything, directing has taught him a lot about acting. He talks of the pursuit of “this weird thing called the truth” and is fascinated by the “transparent” moments when actors go beyond acting and “everything falls away, and this thing comes through which is very pure”. His task as director is to “winnow away” and harvest such moments. He tells a wonderful story about the Hungarian director István Szabó, who used to say (he mimics his Hungarian accent and a tone of kindly dismissal) “Yes, yes – very nice – prepared emotions.”

It is unprepared emotions that make a performance. He talks of the late Anthony Minghella. Fiennes played the romantic lead in Minghella’s The English Patient and he has been thinking about him while working on The Invisible Woman. “There are only a few directors who have a language for nurturing nuances of performance with any real skill. A lot of directors love their actors, admire and want to help them but he was exceptionally perceptive; he invested in teasing out, developing and nurturing.”

We are meeting on the morning Skyfall opens. I see it on the evening of the same day. The way Fiennes looks in the film is larger-than-life yet uncannily close to how he appears in the flesh. The receding hair swept off the brow, the noble nose – which in a less handsome face could be too much of a good thing – and, of course, the feted eyes. In the film it is also possible to identify that this is a face with a depressive streak, with a little frown for punctuation. It is a pukka performance: he addresses Bond with patronising seniority, advising Daniel Craig he is playing a “young man’s game” before sending him packing with the line “Good luck 007, don’t cock it up.”

Fiennes, along with the rest of the world, thinks Craig is “superlative …brilliant”. He also salutes director Sam Mendes and John Logan, the Hollywood screenwriter who also adapted Coriolanus. Is Bond a part he would ever have liked to play himself? “As a teenager I was obsessed with him. When I was younger I might have fancied my chances … and actually, there was a moment 15 years ago when a few phone calls were made …” But he is too much of a thinker to play Bond, and, by his own admission, a lousy sportsman. And where would the torment fit in? Bond doesn’t do torment, no matter how tough the going.

So, in lieu of any action man openings he is about to star in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, a comedy about Monsieur Gustave, a concierge. But he has no plans to direct any more films: “I have loved it but it is a crazy test.” Is it because he worries too much? “Isn’t there such a thing as healthy stress?” he replies. I have never understood what that is. He laughs: “There is adrenalised stress. I love the shooting: ready – turnover – action … You don’t know what is going to happen, and I don’t just mean the acting but the weather, the light …” He compares the uncertainty to theatre, where his roots are.

How often does stress lead to anger? “I get angry easily but I sit on it, repress it. I have learned that anger is not cool, it is ugly, even though it might feel momentarily cathartic.”

His anger as Coriolanus – a seething impatience under the skin, an imperious yet suffering eye (he can do disdain like nobody else) – was terrifying. “I know …it is in me, all that,” he gives a helpless laugh. “But I really feel the best place for it is in performance.”

In Great Expectations Magwitch says: “We can no more see to the bottom of the next few hours than we can to the bottom of this river.” How good is he at living in the present? “I need to work on that. I live in anticipation. To be purely in the present is really hard.”

What does he do to get away? “I love to travel away from this culture and be in India or Greece, or Jordan or Russia, or China …”

He lives in Shoreditch, where his brother Magnus was once memorably quoted as saying Fiennes lived “like a monk who has won the lottery”. He doesn’t know how much longer he will be there. Why not – is Shoreditch too trendy? “It makes me feel so old,” he laughs.

Fiennes was born in Ipswich and spent the first six years of his life growing up in Suffolk. His photographer father Mark Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes (cousin to the adventurer Sir Ranulph Fiennes) was farming outside Southwold. It is, we agree, a stretch of coast that remains unselfconsciously itself. He loves that part of the world. “That is my early childhood, that coastline.”

Would he consider living outside London? “Very much, I really would want that.” I can’t help thinking back to his remarks about Dickens’s yearning for the perfect, harmonious place to live.

Did growing up as the eldest of six give him his taste for solitude? “I like solitude.” But when pressed he hesitates: “I live on my own. It seems to work. It gives me a kind of headspace. Which I feel I need.” And he gives me his I-am-my-own-worst-enemy smile.

Great Expectations opens on 30 Nov

Serena Williams: the tennis player whose serve smashes records

It’s in the serve. Serena Williams may have won 30 Grand Slam titles, 46 women’s singles titles and four Olympic gold medals, but if you want to understand why she stands head and shoulders above her rivals in tennis, just watch the explosive moment at the start of a point as she propels the ball towards her opponent at up to 109mph.

To Williams, it’s a mystery to her how she generates such incomparable power. “Actually,” she remembers, suddenly, “when I was younger Billie Jean King said, ‘You have a great serve, it’s so natural,’ and I thought, ‘Really? Cool.’” Williams’s serve has since become the most talked-about part of her game, and the most feared by her opponents. This year at Wimbledon she broke the record for the number of aces in a tournament (102), and put a record 24 past the world No 1 Victoria Azarenka when they met in the semi-final. “Yeah, I feel like that kinda just started,” she says. “But I never hit my serves very hard. Like, I can hit it hard, but I don’t normally hit it super hard.”

You wonder what would happen if Williams did hit it hard. Her serve is already as fast as the average serve on the men’s tour and her second serve is regularly quicker than Andy Murray’s. Coaches and experts concur that it is the best serve the women’s game has ever seen, and Pete Sampras, who Williams modelled herself on when younger, has described it as “flawless”.

Most astonishing is that Williams’s raw strength is all natural, and not the result of hours in the gym. “No, honestly, I was born like this,” she says, in a laidback drawl. “To this day I don’t lift weights and I never have. I probably never will.” She thinks she inherited good genes from her parents – they’re both tall – but her physique has developed in a very different way from her sister Venus. In fact, Serena says she used to be the less powerful of the two. “When I was younger, I honestly would hit so soft,” she says, recalling the days she and Venus honed their skills on the cracked courts of LA’s unsavoury outskirts. “I was really small for my age, and it took me a long time to grow big and to grow strong. I think that’s kinda helped me learn to fight, you know what I mean? I learned to fight and be mentally stronger.”

Williams is happy to be seen as a “power player”, although she doesn’t think her own game is that different from that of her sister. “I’m more stubborn,” she admits. “If you have a great shot then I want to hit to your great shot. So Venus is… eesh… a little smarter.”

So will we see her recreate the famous Battle of the Sexes, when Billie Jean King took on Bobby Riggs (and won)? “Maybe one day,” she smiles. “But I don’t think I’m ready yet!”

Tom Sietas: the diver who can hold his breath for 22 minutes

For Tom Sietas, thinking is the enemy. Thinking uses oxygen – something he simply can’t afford when he’s suspended under water for considerable lengths of time. “The more emotional your thoughts, the worse it gets,” says Sietas. “So if you think about the last fight with your girlfriend, your heart rate goes up.”

Freedivers are known for mastery of both their body and their breathing, but Sietas’s abilities are in a league of their own. Since he began his freediving career in 2000, Sietas has redrawn human boundaries in dynamic and static apnea – holding your breath while swimming or stationary – and broken 22 world records, most of them his own. For his last feat, in May, he took to a water tank and held his breath for 22 minutes and 22 seconds, beating his own record by five minutes.

The 35-year-old from Hamburg had no idea of his capacities until he left school. “I was always attracted to the underwater world when I was a child,” he says, and a gap year in Jamaica was his indoctrination into the diving world. “It was basically all I did, going to the sea and trying to see some rays or whatever beautiful fish I could find. My scuba instructor discovered me diving very deep and he told me there was a sport I might be interested in. And after two or three years, I could increase [holding my breath] for so long, like nobody else on the planet. I was surprised!”

The science behind freediving is still relatively undeveloped, but Sietas’s lungs are 20% larger than those of the average man of his size, and the fact that he is also relatively slight – meaning he does not have to get a lot of oxygen to his muscles – also helps. More important, seemingly, is his ability to relax his body at will. What does he think about while holding his breath for 20 minutes? “You focus on the muscles themselves, lose any tension, accept the urge to breath – find it enjoyable if that’s possible.” He has even been known to fall asleep while underwater. “I don’t know if it’s special,” Sietas says with a modest shrug, “but the more difficult the situation gets the calmer I get.”

There have been a few close calls: once, when diving alone in a lake near Berlin, he lost touch with his orientation rope and found himself several metres down, lost, and “really scared”; another time, off the coast of Egypt, his weight belt failed to detach and there were only two options – free himself or drown. Luckily, he managed the former.

The next world-record attempt is on hold while Sietas finally finishes his studies – he plans to qualify as a metalwork teacher. Until then, his breath-holding skill has a rather more modest application. “It’s very useful in a public bathroom,” he says.

Judit Polgár: the girl raised to be a chessmaster

Judit Polgár’s father had a theory. An educationalist in Soviet-occupied Hungary, László Polgár was convinced that genius was made, not born. So he decided to demonstrate it, taking his three daughters out of school and concentrating them, from a young age, on a particular specialist subject. The subject was chess: and Judit became his proof. The 36-year-old is now the greatest female chess player of all time and the only woman ever to reach the top 10 in the world rankings.

As Judit points out, László himself was no chess prodigy. “As a teacher, he was good for only a very short time!” she laughs. “But they are genius pedagogues, my mother and father. They know very well how to convince, to lead the child in a way so that we were happy playing. And little by little we got more serious.” Judit and her older sisters began by playing just 10 minutes of chess a day; by the time she was 12, it was 10 hours. Then in 1991 she broke the then record to become the world’s youngest grandmaster, at just 15.

Her most significant legacy has been to explode the myth that men are “naturally” better than women at chess. During Judit’s career she has inflicted defeat on Boris Spassky, Garry Kasparov, and nine world champions. “When I started playing, there was an even bigger gap between men and women in chess than there was in most physical sports,” she says. “Generally it was not accepted that women are able to reach the same level. Obviously I don’t agree… and I showed them that I’m right.”

The family were ostracised both by the Hungarian chess federation and the Soviet government for their unusual methods. “There were so many difficulties that it made us very happy for every small result that the other one achieved,” says Polgár. Judit now has children of her own, and works with schools charity CSC, as well as having her own foundation. But she’s not taking her children down the same path her father took her. “I can’t really advise people this is the way to do it,” she admits. “My parents had to give up their own profession to care only about us. My children only play for fun now.”

Judit Polgár will compete in the London Chess Classic 2012 from 1-10 December (chessinschools.co.uk)

Daniel Tammet: bestselling author and autistic savant

“I don’t want people to say: ‘Wow, this person is a genius,’” says Daniel Tammet, “because it can be very lonely being a genius. And I’ve struggled so long with loneliness in my life, I want to reach out to people.”

That “reaching out” is the starting point for Tammet’s award-winning writing, which explores how it feels to be a high-functioning autistic savant – a person who has extraordinary abilities of memory, mathematics and language. The 33-year-old from east London has memorised pi to 22,514 decimal places, can perform lightning arithmetical calculations in his head, and once learned Icelandic in a week. They’re not achievements he likes to boast about. “It’s only a very small part of the story,” he says, “and outside of the context it makes me sound almost freakish.”

Instead, Tammet prioritises his writing talent, so he can communicate the unusual synaesthesia he experiences – he both “sees” and “feels” numbers as unique entities – and help scientists and his readers to understand more of the way the mind works. He has been called the “Rosetta Stone” of savantism, and his award-winning book, Born on a Blue Day, has been translated into 23 languages.

Growing up in “a very poor working class” part of London, Tammet had eight siblings and describes his upbringing as “extremely lucky, in a way. If I’d been a single child I’d have been spoilt rotten, perhaps, and it wouldn’t have done me any good at all. If I’d been born into a family where they played piano and practised chess all the time I might have become one of those wunderkinds, but I wouldn’t necessarily have been happy.”

He now lives, very happily, in Paris. He loves France because “there isn’t such a boundary between literature and mathematics there… mathematicians write novels, and that crossover inspires me.” In fact, being misconstrued as a brilliant mathematician is one of the clichés he most longs to avoid. “Mathematics is abstract, and abstraction is even more difficult for people in the austistic spectrum. I can’t do algebra at all!”

Thinking In Numbers by Daniel Tammet is published by Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99. To order a copy for £15.19, including UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846

Yuja Wang: the pianist with the fastest fingers in the world

If you want to see the fastest fingers in the world, you don’t need to hang out at a John Wayne filmathon – just look up Yuja Wang on YouTube. The 25-year-old has been called the most gifted pianist in the world, and it’s thanks to her extraordinary, quicksilver hands. Critics have hailed her “jawdropping dexterity” and “athletic prowess”, describing her as a “phenomenon”. One wrote rapturously of her “long, slender fingers” before admitting – “at least I think her fingers are long… they moved too fast to tell.”

Wang laughs – her hands are actually, she says, quite small. “Yeah, I hear that a lot,” she giggles. “But I don’t think of how fast I’m playing when I’m playing. Perhaps it’s a visual illusion thing, because I’m really petite, so when I play those big Russian pieces, it’s really physical – I have to move quicker than other people. Maybe it looks more impressive.”

She’s being modest. Wang’s skills are in demand from the world’s leading conductors – Daniel Barenboim, Michael Tilson Thomas, Charles Dutoit – and she plays with orchestras from the London Philharmonic and the Berlin Staatskapelle to the Boston Symphony. Evgeny Kissin has said she is as technically proficient as the world-renowned Lang Lang, and Wang, who hasn’t heard this before, is instantly thrilled – “I really admire him, he was my idol in my childhood!”

She grew up in China with a dancer mother and percussionist father, and started playing the piano when she was six. Within half a year she was on stage. “I didn’t practise that much, but I progressed pretty fast,” she admits. “It just seemed that everything was easy.” She went to the Beijing Conservatory and, at 16, having moved to New York, was signed to Deutsche Grammophon.

Since then both her fashion sense – Wang rocks some fabulously sexy outfits on stage – and her fearless demeanour have become a trademark. “I fake really well!” she says. “Sometimes those big concertos are very strenuous and it’s emotionally exhausting. I always get nervous before a concert but I look really cool. It’s the biggest deception.”

And what about those extraordinary hands – do they need special attention? “Yes, it’s easy to overwork them,” says Wang. “My solution is to go for a massage.”

Learning to dance like a horse is really, really hard, even when you have a good teacher – and mine is the best in the world. He is a stocky, soft-cheeked 34-year-old Korean man wearing a shiny dinner jacket, co-respondent shoes without socks and enough make-up to make Katie Price seem like an ambassador for the natural look. Psy, short for Psycho – real name Park Jae-sang – is also the biggest pop star on the planet right now. He is credited with demolishing cultural barriers while getting the world dancing. I should be in good hands. The video for his song “Gangnam Style”, released in July, is officially the most “liked” ever on YouTube – 5m times and counting. It’s the second-most watched after Justin Bieber’s “Baby”, with more than 700m views (again and counting. In this story everything is forward motion). It has gone to No 1 in 28 countries. It is entirely in Korean.

The track, shamelessly mocking the pretensions of people who falsely associate themselves with the fashions and styles of the sprauncy Gangnam district of Seoul – a kind of South Korean Beverly Hills – has been called a “force for world peace” by the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Not bad for a bunch of dance moves involving a wide-legged strut as if riding a horse, hands crossed at the wrists as though gripping the reins, followed by a whipping gesture. Flash mobs 30,000 strong have danced Gangnam style. Boris Johnson claimed to have danced Gangnam style with David Cameron at Chequers one weekend. Barack Obama has promised to dance Gangnam style for Michelle in the White House. That’s how to keep a relationship alive.

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As a result, Psy has been called upon to teach the dance to others. He has taught it to Britney Spears. He has taught it to Justin Bieber. And now the poor sod has to teach it to me, a man who, when they were handing out the feet, was clearly in the queue marked “fish”. We stand in the middle of a ballroom at London’s Dorchester Hotel, watched by his entourage and a photographer and video crew there to record this moment for a posterity which won’t thank us for the effort. He shows me the double hop from one foot to the other, a rhythmic shuffle which must be mastered first before you can bring the crossed wrists into play. I lift my right foot to copy him, and…

But let’s leave us there for the moment, standing in the middle of an empty ballroom, me with one pigeon-toed foot raised, Psy staring at me as if afraid I’m about to fall over. (I just may.) It is a few hours earlier, we are at the headquarters of BBC Radio 1 and the Psy roadshow has just rolled into town. The night before, he was addressing the students at the Oxford Union, in the English he learned during four years as a student in America. Now he has a shiny limo, a herd of lens-tumescent paparazzi and a crowd of fans waiting for him.

He left South Korea a month ago, on an international tour which he confesses has taken him by surprise. He uploaded the video to YouTube on 15 July. Within days it was being talked up on Twitter by the likes of Robbie Williams, Katy Perry and Tom Cruise. It would secure him a management contract with Scooter Braun, who also manages Justin Bieber, and spawn countless YouTube parodies. Among them there’s a tail-coated “Eton Style” by the school’s pupils, another by a bunch of Klingons, a “Jewish Style” and almost inevitably one that mashes together “Gangnam Style” with the scene of Hitler in his bunker from the film Downfall.

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I will hear Psy interviewed for radio and television during our time together, and unsurprisingly there will be a number of stock lines to which he will return, made no less true for repetition. “I don’t call this success,” he says to the DJ Scott Mills, to a reporter for Radio 1′s Newsbeat, to Jonathan Ross and eventually to me. “This is a phenomenon. This is not made by me. It’s made by people.”

He knows the difference. The fact is that while Psy may be new to many of us, success is not new to him. “Gangnam Style” is a single from his sixth album. He has been topping the charts in South Korea for a dozen years, which means that the character who has been unleashed upon the world – and it is a character – is fully formed. What matters is understanding that character, the way he’s ripping it out of people claiming to be classy in the way they are perceived to be in Gangnam, where Psy himself grew up.

“I’m not that good looking,” he says, and there’s no point arguing with him. For all his charisma, he is unexceptional. What he does have, though, is brilliant comic timing; a way of using a caricature of Asian implacability that is simply devastating. “That’s why ‘Gangnam Style’ works,” he says to me. “If someone handsome uses that phrase it’s just awkward. But if someone like me uses it, it’s funny.”

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The success of this latest song has been heralded by many as a break-out for K-Pop, a particular brand of shiny, glossy and heavily manufactured music that dominates the Asian charts. Except that K-Pop broke out a long time ago. Driven by the power of social media, K-Pop acts such as Rain, the Wonder Girls and SM Town have been filling huge arenas across the US since 2006. By the same token, while Psy is Korean and his music is most definitely pop he is not mainstream K-Pop. In a highly conservative society, most K-Pop artists are groomed through a fame-school system for stardom – dance lessons, singing lessons, how to deal with the media – before being unleashed on the public with a highly innocuous product calibrated to offend as few people as possible.

Psy is completely self-invented. The son of an affluent businessman, he flunked his way through school. Sent to study business in Boston in the late 90s, he packed it in for courses in contemporary music at the prestigious Berklee College of Music (also not completed). He has never shied away from causing offence. His first album, Psy from the Psycho World, released in 2001, brought him a fine for “inappropriate content”. His second album brought complaints that its content might have a negative impact on children and was banned from sale to under-19s.

There was an arrest for marijuana possession and a run-in with the authorities for failing to show enough commitment to his duties under military service (a serious issue in a country still officially at war with North Korea). As he puts it now: “Before ‘Gangnam Style’ I was not a good attitude artist. I was bad ass. They don’t have an expectation of me on the moral side.” No matter. He has still been given a state honour for “increasing the world’s interest in Korea”. Not that he’s especially delighted. “That’s a huge responsibility. I don’t want it. I’m not responsible for ‘Gangnam Style’. And now I have to be good.”

We troop into the studio of Radio 1 DJ Scott Mills for a pre-recorded interview. Mills is credited with breaking the track over here and helping it to number one. In a masterstroke his production team asked the Radio 4 continuity announcer Kathy Clugston to read the lyrics to “Gangnam Style” in her cut-glass BBC voice: “I’m a guy, a guy who has bulging ideas rather than bulging muscles; a guy who goes completely crazy when the right time comes.” It merely emphasised the comedy.

Mills asks him what he plans next. Psy says he will do another album, but only half in English. The rest will still be in Korean. The fact is that countless K-Pop bands had tried to break into global markets by singing in English and it simply hadn’t worked. “I didn’t make any effort to make this happen,” he says. “The next time I have to do it on purpose. If it maintains I’m fine. I don’t feel the pressure.’

He receives a certificate from the Guinness Book of Records for the most-liked video on YouTube. Psy says it is the first certificate he has ever received, and we sense he’s not entirely joking.

Then comes the inevitable request by Mills to be taught the dance, something Psy reckons he has now done more than 1,000 times. Watching the process, the appeal becomes obvious. First, the dance is absurd, ridiculous in the true sense of the word, so that even if you do it right it’s funny. And if you do it badly – or at least not too badly – it doesn’t really matter. What’s more, there’s the simple fact that you can learn it all. “Gangnam Style” was not simply a hit to be consumed; it was something to be participated in. Hence the parodies. Hence the cult.

Over at the Dorchester Hotel Psy and I delay our dance-step moment for a while. The night before, while talking to the Oxford Union, he had apologised for the quality of his English and said that, had he been able to speak in Korean, he would have had them rolling in the aisles. I ask him if the language barrier is frustrating. He agrees it is. “In Korean my lyrics are witty and have twists. But translated into English it doesn’t come over. I’ve tried writing in English, just for me, but it doesn’t work. I’ve got to know everything about a culture and I don’t.” Still, he says, the single went number one all over the world without the wit. “I suppose this means I still have weapons left.”

Psy, he says, is a character. “It’s a product made by me. It’s the most dynamic part of me. I like the word artist, but I don’t like the word artist inside my house.” He is married with two children. “When the shows are done I just want to go home and be myself.” He admits a regret at the way he is now portrayed and compares it to his debut a dozen years ago in South Korea. “Back then I was just the funny guy with dance moves. They didn’t talk about the composing or the stage presence, and that’s the same now. I suppose it’s just a matter of time.”

That said, he confesses to having put what even he regards as a ludicrous amount of effort into the dance moves that became “Gangnam Style”, sweating across a month with his choreographer to come up with something that would work. “We went through many animals. There was snake, there was kangaroo…” How does a kangaroo dance? He looks at me, face placid. “It hops.” I deserved that. It is clear that he finds the fallout from those 30 days of deliberation unnerving. “Just one song did this. It’s too much. It’s too huge. They don’t even want another story. People need time to figure me out and I need time to show myself to them.”

I almost feel guilty asking him to teach me the dance, but he doesn’t object. That said, as we make our way up the stairs he lets out a hiss of air.

I say: “You sighed.” He gives a thin smile.

“Psy sighed.”

But when the cameras are turned on he does the thing, not even flinching when we have to start again because of a muted microphone. He shows me the steps and I try as best I can to get my various limbs moving in the right direction. It feels like a piece of Ikea flat-pack furniture. I sense exactly how it’s meant to look, but getting there will be a struggle. It is a mark of Psy’s genius and forbearance that somehow he gets me doing The Dance. I am Gangnam style.

The next day he has his appearance on the Jonathan Ross Show. Then it’s off to Frankfurt for the MTV awards. He’ll fly from there to Los Angeles for the American Music Awards, up to Canada and then back to Europe. The Psy Roadshow has a long way to go. He has many more people who need to learn the steps. The small man from Gangnam is conquering the world one bonkers horse ride at a time.

Nate Silver is a new kind of political superstar. One who actually knows what he’s talking about. In America, punditry has traditionally been about having the right kind of hair or teeth or foaming rightwing views. Silver has none of these. He just has numbers. Lots of them. And, on the night of the US presidential election, they were proved to be right in quite spectacular fashion.

For weeks and months, the election had been “too close to call”. Pundit after pundit declared that the election could “go either way”. That it was “neck and neck”. Only it wasn’t. In the end, it turned out not to be neck and neck at all. Or precisely what Nate Silver had been saying for months. On election day, he predicted Obama had a 90.9% chance of winning a majority in the electoral votes and by crunching polling data he successfully predicted the correct result in 50 out of 50 states.

“You know who won the election tonight?” asked the MSNBC TV news anchor, Rachel Maddow. “Nate Silver.”

Twitter went into meltdown. The blogosphere went Nate Silvertastic. Sales of his first book, The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction leapt 800% overnight and went to number two in the bestseller charts. And whole portions of the media decided that this wasn’t just a personal triumph for Nate Silver – it was the triumph of the nerds. One man and his mathematical model had bested an entire political class of journalists, spin doctors, hacks and commentators.

Silver doesn’t look much like America’s latest and hottest new television celebrity. Or “the new boyfriend of the chattering classes”, as the Washington Post called him. The 34-year-old Silver is a pretty convincing Clark Kent pre the Superman makeover. He’s so unassuming, he shuffles, head bowed, into the room, looking almost embarrassed about the idea of being interviewed.

Poor Nate. It’s a lot to live up to. He pushes his glasses back on to his nose. “It’s been a little crazy,” he says. But then, he doesn’t really see it being about him. “I’ve become invested with this symbolic power. It really does transcend what I’m actually doing and what I actually deserve. And I’d be the first to say you want diversity of opinion. You don’t want to treat any one person as oracular.”

It might be a bit late for that, however. The day after the election, he went on The Daily Show and Jon Stewart saluted him as “Nate Silver! The lord and god of the algorithm.”

In other circumstances, if Silver had been a different sort of personality, a more egotistical one, this all could be a bit much. But this is also a story about the underdog coming out on top. In the weeks before the election, Silver’s critics (largely on the right, angry that he was predicting an Obama win) attacked not just his methodology, but also him.

Dean Chambers of UnSkewedPolls.com railed against his “voodoo statistics“, claimed he’d been “smoking the wacky weed” and finally pronounced him a “thin and effeminate” man “of small stature” with a “soft-sounding voice”.

There was more than a touch of homophobia to the criticism (Silver is gay), not to mention an aversion to scientific rationalism that has come to characterise certain segments of the conservative right. (Gawker compared the attack to “something like a jock slapping a math book out of a kid’s hands and saying, ‘NICE NUMBERS, FAG.’”)

But in some ways, it seems like the adulation has been harder to handle. “It does make me nervous. Because I guarantee that we are going to start getting some things wrong,” he says. The “we” is his blog, FiveThirtyEight (named after the 538 electoral college votes), which he set up in 2007 to provide a more data-driven analysis of politics and which, in 2010, he moved to the website of the great cathedral of American news and politics, the New York Times.

It’s a fact that reinforces his Clark Kent credentials. We’re sitting in the Times‘s super-slick Manhattan skyscraper, with its multimillion-dollar view of the Midtown skyline. And yet, in the days before the election, it was Silver’s scrappy little blog that was driving 20% of its traffic. (It’s perhaps not a coincidence that DC Comics announced last month that after 70-odd years, Superman would be leaving the Daily Planet to set up a blog.)

Because if Silver is not the Superman of Big Data, he’s definitely Supergeek, its pin-up boy. And he’s singlehandedly shown that most political punditry is about as effective a method of truth-seeking as the ducking stool.

It’s always been about the numbers with Silver. “I’ve just always been a bit of a dork,” he says. Growing up in East Lansing in Michigan, his local baseball team, the Detroit Tigers, won the World Series when he was six “and there were all sorts of stats and that was it really”.

After graduating from the University of Chicago with a BA in economics, he spent four years working as a consultant for KPMG. Then he discovered online poker. “It was in the days when there were a lot of people coming on the sites who really had no clue,” says Silver. He, on the other hand, was good enough to take their money, jack in his job and “for a while lived the poker dream”.

Poker is something of a lodestone in Silver’s life. It taught him about chance and the role it plays in life. “And it gave me better training than anything else I can think of about how to weigh new information, what might be important information and what might be less so. Our basic instincts tend to be not very good. We tend to overweigh new information.”

Finally, he says, there was “this tenuous relationship between skill and luck and the ambiguity between the two. When I made this money, was I lucky or was I good? You can never know.” He estimates he made about $400,000 (£252,000) from online gambling, enough to pursue his other love: baseball. The sport was changing and Silver became one of a few people who saw the potential for it to be more factual and data-driven. He set up a website, Pecota, which modelled a system for forecasting the career prospects of Major League Baseball players and which he later sold to Baseball Prospectus.

It was a battle between old-school scouts and a new wave of statistically minded newcomers, a struggle that came to be told in Michael Lewis’s bestselling book, Moneyball, and later a film starring Brad Pitt. By 2007, Silver was casting around for something new.

“I was looking for something like baseball, where there’s a lot of data and the competition was pretty low. That’s when I discovered politics.” He was anonymous initially, calling himself Poblano, until a few months later he outed himself.

Silver thought that by taking the available data and applying Bayesian theory to it, he might have “some small edge”. There is a lot of data in American politics and Bayesian theory, a way of calculating conditional probabilities, has been around since an English clergyman, Thomas Bayes, first formulated it sometime at the start of the 18th century. It was not, as his critics have been quick to point out, exactly rocket science.

But then Silver is the first to agree. He’s not even the only one doing it. Others had equally good results. At its heart, it’s absolutely bog-standard statistics. He aggregates polling data. The twist or the “secret” to his model is what weight he gives to that data. How it’s performed historically, what biases it might have, what other information can be brought to bear upon it.

Yet, in the rarefied world of US politics, it’s proved spectacularly more accurate than what was around before. Or even in British politics for that matter. We don’t have the same abundance of polling data that exists in America, so its use here might be less successful, but it didn’t stop the Daily Telegraph’s Janet Daley weighing in on the US election. On polling day, she declared a victory for Romney, on the grounds that Obama’s campaign didn’t “feel” like a winner to her. Others had a “hunch” that Romney would edge it. With competition like this, says Silver, it really wasn’t so difficult to do something just slightly less medieval.

“Numbers aren’t perfect, but for me, it’s numbers with all their imperfections versus bullshit. You had people saying, ‘You can’t quantify people’s feelings through numbers!’ But what’s the alternative? Me sitting at my Georgetown cocktail party saying that I know how people in Toledo, Ohio, are going to vote better than the actual people of Toledo, Ohio, who answered a survey? It’s incredibly presumptuous. And truth is an absolute defence. So if they got it right it would be one thing, but they didn’t. They’re consistently quite wrong.”

Silver doesn’t work the Georgetown party scene. He doesn’t meet the lobbyists, spin doctors, campaign managers and press officers. He doesn’t, in short, play the system, because political reporting, both in the US and the UK, is a system, a system that can at times resemble a cartel. In Britain, the you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours atmosphere of the lobby came under scrutiny during the expenses scandal, a scandal it took a journalist outside politics to bust apart. In the US, Silver describes it as “transactional”.

“Once in a while, you’ll get the occasional scoop, if you’re well-behaved and play the game. But it’s all just a game with a lot of vested interests at work. I try not to talk to the campaigns because it’s mostly noise.”

What’s interesting is that the campaigns, most especially Obama’s, understand the importance of data. They hired a “chief scientist” and according to the campaign manager, Jim Messina, set out to “measure everything”. Numbers told them who to target and how to target them.

In this context, Silver’s skills seem not just relevant but vital. The liberal media don’t care, perhaps, when it’s their side winning; they may next time around. Because this is military-grade spin, targeted like a drone strike at the level of the individual. The political class has responded by waving the equivalent of a crucifix at it.

Mark Henderson, the British author of The Geek Manifesto, observed on his blog that Silver’s recent prominence just goes to highlight the anti-scientific bias at the heart of so much of our media, how, for example, “in the past two years, Melanie Phillips has been on Question Time more than all scientists put together”.

Silver’s background and methodology mark him out from the rest of what in the US is sometimes called the “gang of 500″, the familiar faces with familiar views who are wheeled out on Question Time-like political programmes.

It’s a small, self-referencing cohort that the echo-chamber of Twitter has only amplified and distorted, leading to what Silver believes is the worst kind of “group think”. He gives as an example the presidential debates “where the conventional wisdom solidifies very quickly. I was 15 minutes late for the first one, and by the time I got home, it had already been decided”.

It turns out that what he calls his “dorkiness” is actually the secret to his powers. “I’ve always felt like something of an outsider. I’ve always had friends, but I’ve always come from an outside point of view. I think that’s important. If you grow up gay, or in a household that’s agnostic, when most people are religious, then from the get-go, you are saying that there are things that the majority of society believes that I don’t believe.”

What made you more of a misfit, I ask, being gay or a geek? “Probably the numbers stuff since I had that from when I was six.”

It’s one of quite a lot of things he’s started to worry about: that his prominence will mean he won’t just forecast future elections, but also influence them and that he’ll lose his outsider’s edge. “You get these different opportunities, but I don’t want to be corrupted and drawn into these scenes.”

He’s looking for the next low-hanging fruit, an area with lots of data and “not much competition”. Economic news, he thinks, is ripe for the approach. And local government, though “not in a predictive way”. He did a brilliant analysis a few years back of New York neighbourhoods, which allowed you to weight your biases (green space, say, and good schools) and then used reams of data from mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office to provide a personal analysis of where in the city you should live.

Then there’s the $700,000 book deal he struck after his success in predicting the 2008 election, on the grounds that, as he says candidly in his introduction, his publishers wanted “a triumph of the nerds” type book. At the time, nobody knew quite how triumphant he would turn out to be. But then, nor did Silver have much of an idea of where the book would lead.

“I thought it was going to be more like, ‘Here’s how taxi drivers work out how to pick up customers.’ And, ‘Here’s how online dating sites work.’ There is some of that, but there’s a more philosophical element that emerged from it. “It’s the intersection between objective and subjective reality. We are confronted with all this data, but oftentimes we screw it up. Having more information doesn’t necessarily make us any better at predicting what will happen in the world.”

In the book, Silver evaluates things that we’ve actually become quite good at predicting (the weather, surprisingly), things we are bad at predicting (share prices), things we are bad at predicting but think we are good at predicting (the economy) and things that could possibly be predicted but we have a track record of not predicting (terrorist attacks).

Before meeting Silver, I had, earlier in the day, met Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, the book published in 2007 that claimed that the world we had created was too complex for us to understand and that it was only a matter of time before the global financial system collapsed. What do you think of Nate Silver? I asked him.

“He’s the real deal,” said Taleb. “What he’s doing is absolutely proper stuff.”

Silver is delighted when I tell him this. I’m not sure if it’s the comparison to The Black Swan or the unsteady feeling I get standing next to the New York Times‘s vertiginous floor-to-ceiling windows, but later that night, I reread Silver’s chapter on terrorism and feel a bit spooked.

He plots terrorist events before 11 September according to something known as a double-logarithmic scale and finds that an atrocity of that type wasn’t actually unimaginable; statistically, it was likely to happen within our lifetime. It wasn’t a black swan. What’s more, there’s a mathematical case to be made for an upcoming attack that “might kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands”.

I hope this isn’t Silver’s black swan moment and it’s just me doing what he says we shouldn’t do: cherry-picking information according to our biases. Because if Silver teaches us anything, it’s that human judgment is fallible. That Wall Street traders are chancers, pundits are clueless and economic forecasts imaginative works of fiction.

On the other hand, it turns out that elections are easy to predict. You just have to be lucky or good. Or, as in Nate Silver’s case, both.

The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver is published by Allen Lane

Ach, Louis Walsh. You know the one – lisping Irishman on The X Factor, cries easily, tells contestants “I really, really believe in you … you are the real thing”, puts through terrible people (Wagner, anybody?), pronounces Wagner with a W, makes his acts sing rubbish songs, votes for acts if they’re Irish, responsible for Jedward’s infamy. You’re never quite sure why he’s there, but he always is.

Walsh walks into the London hotel in a Prada suit, pink shirt, looking smarter and stronger than X Factor Louis. He sits down, grabs a coffee, starts talking and doesn’t stop. A whirlwind. “What music do you like?” he asks. “I love music.” And before I know it he’s raced through the history of soul music, glam rock, Roy Orbison’s wife Barbara, Bowie’s early appearances with Marc Bolan, and the conversion of Cat Stevens to Islam. Phew! Exhausting. “I’m a fan,” he says with a huge grin. “I like music even though I’m working on X Factor.” He laughs at the absurdity of it all.

At first I think he’s trying to make a Louis-Walsh-Knows-His-Music point. Then I realise he’s just a man obsessed. “What’s the first album you bought?” The Slider, by T Rex, I say. “Ha! I’ve got that. Black and white cover. Great.” Any second, I think he’s going to suggest swapsies.

So how come Walsh, music junkie extraordinaire, ended up managing boybands? Ah, there lies a story, he says. For 20 years, he was an agent for lots of Irish rock bands. He organised tours, kept them going, and made sod all money. Then he went to see Take That. He thought he’d hate them, but he loved them. “And I thought, I’d like to do that. I had to make money.” After that he managed Boyzone and Westlife (“Forty-four million records sold, 16 No 1s,” he says, as if playing word association). Later came a partnership with Simon Cowell, then the offer to judge on Pop Stars: The Rivals. He’d never considered television before. “I was hardly chosen for my looks.”

But enough about him. Back to music. Favourite musicians you’ve interviewed, he asks. I mention Sinead O’Connor. “There’s a lovely bunch of people!” he says with giddy abandon. Walsh is fabulously bitchy and indiscreet. Who would have thought he was The X Factor’s very own Dorothy Parker?

On Pop Stars: The Rivals, his band, Girls Aloud, beat Pete Waterman’s boyband, One True Voice, in the final. “Pete was my hero at the time. He’s never talked to me since.” Has he seen him? “I believe he’s alive! Is he in a home? Ha ha ha ha ha!” He looks at Sara, his friend and possibly the most honest publicist in the world. “You know he took it really badly, don’t you?” he says.

After Girls Aloud won, Walsh won the right to manage them. In her autobiography, Cheryl Cole suggests he wasn’t up to much, and only contacted them twice. Yes, he says, there were problems. “You want the real story? OK, I’m going to tell you. There was a girl in Ireland called Nadine Coyle, and I said, go for this show. She is an amazing vocalist. A real, real singer. So I pushed her in the band, and I said Nadine is the lead singer.” From then on, there were problems. “I never worked with them very well ‘cos they kind of scared me, the five girls together.” Why? “Five girls! Five girls is a bit scary.” And he does look terrified. “They were all a bit scary. Generally, girls don’t like each other. That’s the problem. I couldn’t help them with their hair, makeup, all those things. And from the moment I said Nadine was the best singer, the others alienated me.” Not surprising, I say. “Well, she is the best singer! By a mile. But she didn’t marry a footballer. If she’d married a footballer she’d have been a big star.”

Cole went on to be a judge alongside Walsh in X Factor. Was there still tension? “Yes. Cheryl knows how to work it. Cheryl is all about Cheryl.”

There have been rumours she will return to the show as a replacement for Tulisa, whom Walsh adores. So what if it’s a choice between Cheryl and Tulisa? “Tulisa,” he says without a beat. “She works hard; she’s honest. I did say she’s a chav in a tracksuit, but she’s a good chav in a good tracksuit.” He looks at me, defensively. “She’s a lovely girl.” I know, I say. “OK, I thought you were going to slag her off. I’m always getting ready to defend her. We bonded from day one. I was dreading meeting her. I thought she was going to be a right little knacker. You know, a real toughie.” Who would he less like to meet on a dark night in an alley, Tulisa or Cheryl? “Oh Cheryl.”

I tell Walsh I’m surprised by him. What d’you mean, he asks. Well, I just expected him to be … wetter. Ah, that’s the TV, he says. “It’s because I’m Irish and act the eejit. But that’s my role on the show. I act like I’m a bit stupid.” He loves Ireland, says the Irish are the best people in the world, and splits his time between Dublin, Miami and London, where he stays in this hotel.

Walsh finds it hard to explain how he’s different from the TV Louis. It’s more than playing the eejit, he says, and looks at Sara. “Sara. Help me. Sara Lee knows me really well. I take my job very seriously on the show.”

“He’s much more serious on the show,” Sara says. “There have been years he’s taken it so seriously I have worried about his health.”

“Well, you know why,” Walsh says to both us. “Because the acts are depending on me to get them through. It’s life or death to them.”

Although Cowell is now giving his time to X Factor USA, Walsh still thinks of them as a double act. “When I’m with Simon we always laugh. I’m very like Simon. We’re in this business of selling music and selling dreams. But people don’t realise he’s actually brilliant fun. He’s so much nicer than people think he is. He never curses, is never rude to people. Ever.” He clarifies. “Off camera, that is. People think he’s this tough, ruthless, money-making machine. I don’t think he loves money that much.” Who likes money more? He thinks about it. “I’d say me … because I don’t have as much as him.” How much is he worth? “Enough. I like to be able to buy things. I buy a lot of art. I buy Andy Warhols.”

“He has the most amazing art collection,” Sara says.

Like who? “Hirst, Hockney, Herring. That’s just the Hs.” He grins.

Does he have to do everything Cowell says? To an extent, he says. Take his hair. “Simon said, ‘Darling you’re losing your hair,’ and I said, ‘Darling, I’m not.’ Then he showed it to me on camera and I was. He said, ‘Darling, you should get your hair done.’ Everything is ‘darling’ with Simon. So I said, ‘OK darling, I’ll get it done.’”

How much did it cost? “I don’t know. I didn’t pay for it. That’s why I’m telling everybody I got it done. That was the deal!” He invites me to have a touch. “See, it’s all real,” he says proudly.

You’re looking good for 60.

“I know. I know!”

He looks different from when he was first on telly. Has he had plastic surgery?

“No, and I’ve never done the gym in my life. I’m a fat fuck.”

“You’re smaller than you were,” Sara says. “Last year was a big weight loss.”

“Oh, my eyes!” Walsh shouts, as if he’s just remembered. “I’ve had my eyes done. No Botox. But I had my bags taken away about three years ago. Sharon Osborne, my good friend, sent me to her doctor to have my eyes done in LA, and it made me look 10 years younger.”

Has Simon had much work done? “That’s his own hair. But I’d say everything else has been done. He’s very vain, and he’s looking younger.” He giggles. That’s all I’m saying.”

This year’s X Factor has been disappointing. I tell him my kids – a reliable X Factor barometer – are bored with it.

“I think the press are trying to slag it. It’s like the Manchester United of TV programmes. Everybody wants to slag it off, but they’re still watching it. We’re still doing 20 million people in a weekend.” Aren’t the figures falling? “A little bit. But nothing much.” Isn’t Strictly Come Dancing beating you? “No, I don’t think so … I honestly don’t think so. No.”

Sara gives him a look. “Well, figures-wise, it is,” she says.

The problem, I say, is the judges – they are dull.

“No,” he protests. “No, we’re really getting on. There’s a really good chemistry between us. There’s no tension.”

Perhaps that’s the problem, I say.

Sara nods. “I think Simon has a point. There isn’t enough tension this year.”

“We’re probably missing Simon Cowell, and maybe Sharon Osborne,” Walsh concedes. Would he bring them back? “I’m all for that.”

So you’d dump Gary Barlow? “Well, he has a lot of work to do. He has a tour to do.” And Nicole Scherzinger? He shrugs happily. “It’s nothing to do with me.”

But you wouldn’t want to get rid of Tulisa? “No, no. You need two girls. You could have Tulisa and Sharon.”

Walsh is open about everything but his private life. It’s not that he’s uptight about it, there’s just something rather old-fashioned about him. I ask if he’s gay. Ach, who cares, he says. “My sexuality is irrelevant. Next question.”

I ask how it affected him when he was falsely accused of molesting 25-year-old Leonard Watters last year in a toilet. Within seconds the giddy, giggly Walsh is almost in tears. In January, Watters was jailed after pleading guilty to filing false reports to the police, and Walsh is suing the Irish Sun. “People knew it was untrue, but they still put it on the front page. They tried to ruin me. They are just vile people. Nasty people. The funny thing is they have an anti-bullying campaign in the Irish Sun at the moment. It’s the most ironic thing.”

His eyes are red, and he looks at Sara. “You know the real story. It ruined me. I’ll never get over it, I’ll be quite honest with you. I’m wary of everyone now, of everything I say, everyone I meet, always looking over my shoulder – I was never like this before. It was the worst thing that happened to me. All I have in this business is my name, and I would have lost everything. People would have said there’s no smoke without fire.”

Is it true he was suicidal after the story emerged? “I thought people wouldn’t believe me. How can I go home? My family in Mayo. I thought about it. I had the sleeping tablets. I have to be honest, Sara got me through it that night.” How? He laughs. “We had to sleep together.”

She corrects him. “We stayed in a bed together.”

“We were in a room up here together for 24 hours,” Walsh says. “I was in this daze. By the way, the guy’s in jail now. I hope he’s reading this in jail. The fact that somebody set out out to destroy me is a real strange thing to deal with. I’ve blocked this whole thing out of my mind. I hate talking about it.”

Anyway, he says, enough misery, let’s talk more music. He tells me how Bowie is still his hero, gossips about who’s sleeping with who in pop, talks about the fox in his back garden who is a dead ringer for Ed Sheeran, and says somehow they’ve got to find a way of stopping melodramatic Christopher Maloney from winning X Factor. (“The other contestants call him shake and fake. He keeps getting really big votes, though.”)

A while ago Walsh suggested he would retire in his mid-50s. What happened? The grin’s back on his face. Well, he says, how was he to know how things would work out? “Why would I retire now? I’m having a great time.”

Actor Sheila Hancock, 79, with Jack (17), Molly (15), Lola (14), Talia (nine), Charlie (eight), Alfie and Louis (five), and Rosie (two)

Sheila Being a grandma is lovely. There’s a feeling of continuation. I know that when I go, which will be shortly, there will be people going on who have in them a tiny bit of me or John [husband John Thaw who died in 2002]. And that’s nice. What I’ve most enjoyed is seeing them change and develop. I’m not that keen on them when they’re weeny; they don’t do much. Then suddenly, for example, Jack is a man. That is so odd. And these girls are suddenly young women.

It’s totally different from being a parent. It’s wonderful – you can lead them astray. I don’t have to conform. It started with the teeth. I used to say, “Oh, I can’t be bothered with all this toothbrush business”, and now they’ve all got braces!

One day I was babysitting Charlie and Alfie, and they wouldn’t sleep, so I got them up and we were all watching the wrestling when their parents got home. It was past midnight. The parents were pretty fed up with me. But I think it’s good for them to have a place where they can go and be naughty.

In some ways I’m quite strict – in terms of morality, honesty, things like that. And manners. When we’re walking along the pavement, I often say, “Move over” if people are walking towards us, because I think good manners are just consideration for other people. As for their table manners, they are appalling. It isn’t as though they’re slightly bad – they’re dreadful.

I tell them it’s my mission to get them married off to royalty so I can have the dowager cottage in the grounds. It’s a running joke: “Oh God, I’ve got to give up, I’m never going to get you married off.”

They like the fact that I drive fast cars. I used to have a Jaguar XJS and now it’s a Mini Cooper S. When I had the Jag, I’d roar the engine for them: rrrrrraaaaahh. I’ve just got a speeding fine. I’m not proud of that. I drive within the limit on the whole.

Sometimes I embarrass them, like when we go into shops and the music is blaring out and I’ll ask shop assistants to turn it down. We are the most noisy family. The kids have a terrible time; they can’t get a word in edgeways usually. We always fight over the boat race. People think it’s posh, but actually it’s a big working-class thing.

I learn from them what the younger generation are doing. I hear their ghastly music. I’ve never been one of those nanas who pretends to be young. I am interested in their point of view and what they do, but I loathe the kind of nanas who pretend to be swinging and go to discos.

When their parents criticise them for not doing well enough at school, I tend to take their sides. They’ll say, “He only got a B” and I think that’s a fantastic mark. I don’t like their parents driving them, because I was a driven person. I want them to be young and enjoy themselves. They can be a gardener or cleaner if they want, as long as that’s what they want to do and they do it well.

I don’t spend as much time with them as I’d like to. Most grandmas now have a regular day where they look after the grandchildren: they’re like carers. I’m there sometimes to babysit, but that’s about it.

I much prefer grandmotherhood to motherhood. I do feel a responsibility towards them, but ultimately they are not my responsibility. It can work badly if something bad happens and I want to do something – I can’t. I have to allow their parents to do it. Jack had a brain tumour when he was young. It was horrendous, and you always wish you were the parent so you could be hands on, but all you can do is let them do what they think is best. You can put your oar in: I phoned every specialist in the world when he was diagnosed. I think the most difficult thing for a grandmother is not to interfere – to keep your mouth shut when you should, even when you disapprove. When there’s behaviour going on and you think the mother should say, “Stop it!” you can’t. As it happens, I have three daughters who turned out to be amazing mothers. God knows why!

Lola She says how are you ever going to marry a prince when you eat like that? She hates us eating with our mouths open, and not using a knife and fork properly. She speaks her mind. I like it sometimes, but it’s quite embarrassing.

Molly The first time I saw her sing and dance, in Sister Act, I was so impressed. It showed me how cool my nana is. Me and Lola persuaded her to come to Topshop one Christmas. If you go to a public place and the music is too loud, Nana asks them to turn it down. It’s the most embarrassing thing in the world.

Jack Acting looks too much like hard work. Seeing Nana work so hard, I don’t think it’s for me. I’ll probably do history at uni. She always takes my side in an argument. If I get a bad test result and my parents complain, she’ll always say, ”Oh, he works so hard.”

Talia I’ve been to Jigsaw with her. She’s got good taste in clothes. People do recognise her. I can see people looking at her.

Model Daisy Lowe, 23, with her grandmother, Lee Davis

Daisy Growing up, I spent most weekends with Grams and Gramps. My mum had me when she was 19, so it was like, “Hey, free babysitting!” We’d go to the zoo or park, and if I ever got ill Grams would make her chicken soup, which made me feel a million times better. It was a good deal: I got to have fun with them, and they got a new lease of life by having me, a sort of fourth child.

Grams talked to me like an adult from a very young age. I’ve always felt like her mate. She has amazing style, and when she was younger she had a straight fringe and long, dark hair, and looked quite a lot like me. As a kid, I used to love jumping on her bed and singing Spice Girls songs, or getting out her amazing old Chanel, Vuitton and Gucci bags to pose with. She always used to tell me that a glamorous older lady should have a Chanel suit, although she didn’t have one herself. So when I first worked with Chanel and they asked me to write about their show in London, I said I would do it only if I could get a suit for my grandma. I gave it to her for Christmas and she cried.

I was the first grandchild, and there are a lot of arguments among the other nine grandchildren because they think she plays favourites with me. It’s not true: she loves all of us equally. She’s very generous and gives all of herself to everyone, which I try to emulate.

We make sure we see each other every week – I’d get an earful if I didn’t. We’ll meet for breakfast or even just a cup of tea, and if I don’t have a booming social life, we’ll all go for dinner with my aunt and uncle on Friday night. I think I’ve inherited from Grams a love of spending time with my family.

I’ve also inherited her love of cooking. Last weekend she taught me how to make roast pumpkin soup so I could impress my friends. And we’ve been talking about setting a date for the chicken soup lesson. I haven’t dared to learn that one yet – I think that’s when I’ll officially become an adult, so I’ve been putting it off.

Lee Davis When Daisy was born, it was such a novelty. Now, I’ve got 10 grandchildren, but for the first five years it was just Daisy. She was like a little doll to us: absolutely adorable.

Daisy was always extremely bright. Her uncles wanted her to go into law. At first, we were sorry she didn’t finish her A-levels, but she’s achieved so much with her modelling, and not everyone has to go to university. We’re very proud of her.

Daisy always loved trying on my bags and shoes, but nowadays the roles are reversed. I’m always popping round to hers and saying, “Can I borrow that?” She’s got an amazing wardrobe. Of course, I’m only 5ft 2in and you’ve got to be 5ft 10in to borrow her clothes.

I can’t even remember when I told Daisy the only thing I ever wanted in my life was a Chanel suit. It was a long time ago. We were all down in Somerset to spend Christmas with the family, and Daisy gave me the suit for my present. Well, I nearly died. I burst into tears. I thought: wow, a Chanel suit, I never thought I’d have one of those. But then, that’s Daisy. She does things like that.

Tony Benn, 87, with granddaughter Emily, 23, who stood to be a Labour MP at 17 and is now an investment banker

Tony I’ve enjoyed having grandchildren. I’ve got nine and I’ve tried to get to know them all. I think the main function of the old towards the young is to encourage them. They say the nice thing about grandchildren is that your children come and take them away, but that’s a bit cynical. I don’t take that view.

We discuss politics all the time in our family. Emily came to help me canvass in Chesterfield when she was two! Then she pushed literature through letterboxes in 1997. It’s nice to feel that politics is a hereditary characteristic – both my grandfathers were involved, then my father and my son, and now my granddaughter.

All the grandchildren call me Dan Dan. I don’t know why. Even my children call me Dan Dan now. You name your children, then your children rename their grandparents. That’s their privilege.

Emily is very musical. Her brother Daniel is a cellist and they play together. I come to some of the concerts. I’m not musical, and I’m very proud of their ability. I went down to Emily’s election campaign two or three times, and on one occasion she conducted an orchestra. It was tremendous.

Politically we’re quite different. She’s linked with New Labour, whereas I never joined it. People used Bennite as a term of abuse. When Hilary, my son and Emily’s uncle, was elected, he said, “I am a Benn but not a Bennite.” I went up the following night, to speak for him in the byelection, and I said, that’s exactly my position: I’ve never been a Bennite.

I was seen as being very dangerous and now I’m regarded as a national treasure. It’s a way of writing you off: you’re a kindly, harmless, old gentleman. Well, I may be kind and old and a gentleman, but I’m not harmless. I got a death threat the other day. I was so chuffed – I hadn’t had one for ages.

I’m a product of the 1930s. I remember fascism, the Spanish civil war, I was in the second world war. I campaigned in the 1935 election when I was 10, again in 1945, and in every election since.

When I was young, my dad said to me, “Always say what you mean, mean what you say, do what you said you’d do if you have a chance, and don’t attack individuals.” They’re very sound principles. If Emily says what she thinks and means what she says, then, as far as I’m concerned, that’s fine.

We see a lot of each other. On Christmas Day, they all come here, they sort out this room, lay the table, bring the food, cook it, take everything home. It’s the one day I’m a guest in my own home. I’m not the greatest cook, nor the greatest eater. I often forget lunch altogether. Then I’ll have a pizza in the evening. Hilary said to me years ago, “Dad, if the world ate the grain instead of feeding it to the animals and killing them, there would be enough food for everybody.” That struck me as a totally convincing argument, and from that moment on I never ate meat. My wife also became vegetarian, and so is Emily.

I have a great respect for all my grandchildren. The next thing I’m looking forward to is being a great-grandfather. When your son becomes a grandfather, it’s time to hang up your clogs.”

Emily I think Michael, my oldest cousin, came up with the name Dan Dan. Now everybody calls him that, even my dad. I remember going canvassing with him in Cheltenham when I was two – I’m not sure how much is memory and how much is down to the videos I’ve seen.

I’m New Labour and I supported the invasion of Iraq. I’ve always said my interest in politics is nothing to do with my grandfather – no offence, Dan Dan. I got interested before 1997, because I thought the country wasn’t on the right track. Public services could have been much better. I realised I was a lot luckier than some of my friends who didn’t have the same opportunities as me, and that sat uncomfortably with me. Dan Dan was there in the hall at conference when I gave my first speech, which was really nice.

All my cousins are very close, and close to Dan Dan, and he keeps us all informed about what the others are up to. He says, “Do you know Sarah’s done this, Michael’s done that.” Dan Dan’s the font of all the grandchildren knowledge.

My ultimate dream is to become a ballet conductor. Dan Dan has always encouraged us in everything we want to do, whether it’s teaching or music or politics. Last year he came to Oxford to watch me play in the women’s football team, and in the evening he watched me and my brother perform in a concert. When the family get together, we all play football, except for Dan Dan. He’s not the world’s keenest sportsman.

I wasn’t around when Dan Dan was known as the most dangerous man in Britain. When I was canvassing, he was very supportive, but actually we don’t talk about politics that much. We’d rather talk about family and what everybody’s doing.

We all go on holiday as a family a few times a year to the house in Essex – Christmas, Easter and bank holiday weekends. On Christmas Day, we go to Dan Dan’s house. He’s not the greatest cook. Nothing irritates me about him, but I do wish he’d cook better food for himself.

Cookery writer Anna Del Conte, 87, with two of her grandchildren, Coco Cardozo, 14, and Kate, 10

Anna Coco always loved cooking. I think she was the greediest of all the grandchildren. Or at least the most interested in the art of cooking – all of them are interested in eating. Coco started helping me very early on. You can make children do anything when they’re little. She would ask, “How do you do this?” and I would show her. Often, she’d come to my house after school and I would have the dough prepared for gnocchi or pasta, so she could enjoy rolling it out.

The whole relationship is different with your children and grandchildren. The love is the same, more or less, but it’s far more enjoyable with the grandchildren. There is a feeling of not being responsible. Of relaxing. My approach has always been the same: if you’ve got to look after the children, and you’ve got to cook, why not do it together and make it fun. I’m not good at inventing games. I can read stories, yes, but the thing I could do best was cook. It’s a lovely way to spend time together. I’m very lucky. It’s marvellous to have a job your family appreciate.

Coco In Nonna’s old house, the boards where you cook were really high, so I had to have things piled up to stand on. When I was really little, I just did the mixing, then I moved on to rolling dough.

One of my favourite things to cook together is pasta; you have to hang it up over the ends of the chairs and tea-towel rails. I’ve always loved rolling gnocchi and marking it with a fork, then seeing how high I can flick it into the bowl. I loved making lady’s kisses – little almond biscuits – and I encouraged Nonna to do more puddings.

We thought of doing a cookbook together. We got really excited and planned the recipes, and Cooking With Coco was published last year.

I’ve always had a dream of owning a restaurant. It would be called Ristorante Della Nonna and I could teach people Italian cooking, and we’d make lots of Nonna’s recipes. She has taught me to cook and I’d like to pass it on.

Irene Zervos, 70, with her granddaughter, the Olympic weightlifter Zoe Smith, 18

Irene I’ve not always been in Zoe’s life. I chose her name, and knew her until she was 10 months old when, sadly, I had a long falling-out with Niki, my daughter, over something very stupid and personal.

Although I didn’t see Zoe for many years, I was kept fully informed of things that were going on in her life by other family members and friends. One friend, whose daughter was at Zoe’s gym, invited me to come down one day to be nosy. Suddenly there was Zoe, a tiny girl, just 13 years old, trying to get past. “Excuse me,” she said, all sweet and innocent. I wanted to get hold of her and tell her who I was, but I felt stupid. I didn’t know what to do, so I just walked away.

I got back in contact with Niki over Facebook four years ago, and it was as if those years had never happened. I’ve since been a very big part of Zoe’s life and everything is back on track for a normal nan/granddaughter relationship. Zoe even likes me to go shopping with her, and I take it as a compliment that a teenager is willing to take fashion advice from a pensioner.

I’ve been to see Zoe at various championships, but I’m certain that if it hadn’t been for her I never would have watched weightlifting. I must admit, I do sometimes think: what on Earth does a little girl like her want to be doing that for? But she’s good at it. And where else would you be surrounded by all those big, muscly men?

To say I am proud of her is putting it mildly. I bore my friends rigid talking about her. I’ve watched or listened to just about every interview she has ever given, and I’m always amazed at how professional and eloquent she is. I’ve got a big album in the wardrobe of every article that’s been written about her. If I miss anything, you can bet a friend will have found it and forwarded it to me.

I wasn’t able to go to the Olympics, but watched at home with my neighbours. Anyone listening would have thought it was a madhouse with the noise we were making, screaming at the TV: “Lift! Lift! Stand!” I couldn’t be more proud if I tried.

Zoe Growing up, I only knew my nan from photos and what I’d been told. I knew my mum was once close to her, but they didn’t speak any more. She just existed somewhere else in Kent. When you’re young, you don’t question these things.

I do remember seeing the lady in the gym who I said, “Excuse me” to, but at the time I didn’t have the faintest idea who she was. It’s very weird to think you could walk past someone you’re quite closely related to without even knowing it.

I didn’t know what to expect when we all met up again at Bluewater shopping centre when I was 13. I was curious about this person I had always imagined didn’t want to know us. I remember things felt normal almost instantly. She was very friendly, put us at ease, and treated me to a Nando’s and a new top, which definitely won me over.

Nan’s now my shopping partner. My mum hates shopping and she would always say, “Ooh, I don’t like that” whenever I picked something out. Nan’s stylish and knows what suits me. She’s the person I took to choose a smart outfit for the Olympic ball. I do the fun stuff with Nan, like shopping and eating out. I save being babyish for Mum. I know I can lie on Mum’s lap and have her stroke my hair. I can’t imagine Nan doing that – she’s a bit scarier.

Now my nan’s back in our lives, the family feels huge. I seem to have about 900 relatives I’ve never met, half of whom live in Cyprus, where Nan’s family are from. We hear stories about them, like my great-uncle who was the head of his village during the invasion. It makes me feel quite exotic. I think Cyprus is probably where I got my massive Mediterranean bum from, too.

I’ve always thought of nans as little, shrivelled old women, hunched over with a stick or sat in a rocking chair knitting. Nan is nothing like that. She drives a Shogun, and she’s the one in the restaurant sending back food and making everyone laugh. She’s a cool, glamorous person. If I grow up to be anything like her, I’ll be happy.