Commercially, it may have been the right decision but mentally, it was all wrong It was too squeaky, too clean. Drugs were my only way out.”Donovan, who had been happily smoking pot since his teenage years, then rapidly developed a spiralling cocaine habit. With the benefit of hindsight, he has since proposed various reasons for his addiction: the fact that his mother, Sue, a TV newsreader in Australia, walked out on her family when he was just five years old; and that, at 24, he began to go bald.”If you’re blonde-haired and blue-eyed, you think that [the onset of baldness] is the death of your desirability. You don’t see the bigger picture and think you might be Sean Connery in 40 years’ time All I had was the ‘Jason Donovan look’. That was a major thing for me, and to see it ending – well, that’s what started me on drugs.”There were other possible reasons as well: he had been abruptly dropped by his record label due to diminishing sales; Kylie had left him for, among others, Michael Hutchence; his star was on the wane. Perhaps, I suggest to him now, it was also prompted by the consequences of his court case with The Face magazine – in 1991, he sued them for printing a photograph of him in a T-shirt with “Queer As Fuck” superimposed on top.

He won the lengthy court battle, but lost the respect of his fanbase as a result.Donovan is having none of it. “If you’re looking for a psychological reason as to why I took so many drugs, you won’t find it unless you know more about my own psychology than I do,” he says. “I’m not trying to be a smart arse here, but I don’t think you do. Look, the main reason I took drugs was simply to have a good time.”He has been clean for six years now, and attributes his newfound health to family life. He met the mother of his children, former set designer Angela Balloch, while appearing in The Rocky Horror Show in London.

By the time she became pregnant, in 2000, they were already drifting apart.”We had the kid, we split up, but then I sort of realised that, you know, children were a means for me to move on from my reckless days, so we got back together, had a second child…” He pauses for breath here, and pulls on the whiskers of his beard. “They say Davey is a baddie,” Nighy arches an eyebrow, “but I think he’s just a man who’s had very bad luck.”Even in the rare Nighy films that are failures, critics single him out for commendation. One wrote of the recently released Underworld: Evolution that “There’s only one reason to see this outrageously silly fantasy-horror extravaganza of vampires and werewolves – and that’s the fact that Bill Nighy is in it.”But all this praise looks unlikely to go to his head, as he remains appealingly deaf to the siren call of glossy-mag celebrity. This is Jason Donovan at 37 years old, a far cry from the TV hunk and pop star of old, but an undeniably voluble presence full of expletive-laden enthusiasm and a refreshingly blunt compulsion towards honesty.

They have to buy fruit and veg from Spitalfields market cheaply and sell it, for maximum profit The men spend £300 and make £300 The women wear revealing clothes and flirt with traders They pay £40 for more and better stock, making £1,000. “He’s not wrong,” he said.THE APPRENTICES: THE TASKS SIR ALAN SET HIS WOMENIn the first programme in the new series of ‘The Apprentice”, 14 contestants are divided into two teams, men versus women. The winner, Tim Campbell, still works for Amstrad, promoting facial care products. “He’s done very well with getting on with what he was told to do.” The product has done less well, admitted Sir Alan “He needs to rethink the marketing.

It has not been the greatest success.”One fan of The Apprentice, who has toiled quietly in an office for years, said he loved it because the sort of bumptious, high-flying, arrogant hotshots who made his working life a misery were usually shown to be full of hot air Sir Alan chuckled. She does not get involved in his business, and keeps a low profile. The mogul, whose father was a tailor, grew up in a council house in Hackney, east London.His Amstrad word processors were a household name at the start of the computer revolution in the Eighties. Other products such as an emailing phone have been less successful, but Amstrad still expects a healthy profit this year.The first series of The Apprentice had more than two million viewers, highly unusual for a business programme on BBC2. and all that stuff.”The Sugar attitude to women was questioned last year, when he fired a female every week for the first half of the last series of The Apprentice. “I have been disappointed by women in the programme,” he said then.