Nigel Havers

I’ve been head down for the past few weeks, preparing for my one-man show. The title is catchy – Nigel Havers Talking B*ll*cks. I’m not sure this was a good idea because in every interview that I have done, I’ve been told that we can’t use this word on air. I seem to hear nothing but four-letter words on the TV these days, so I hadn’t realised that people would mind the bollocks. It seems to be more offensive than the entire four-letter cannon. I am obviously not down with the kids. I have never done anything like this before and have been worrying about three things: will anyone come; will anyone find it amusing; why am I doing it in the first place? I remember Dawn French wailing down the telephone, saying: ‘Why am I doing this?

You find me in the south of France, holed up in that inn of near perfection called La Colombe d’Or in St Paul de Vence. I escape here twice a year and marvel at how little has changed since the 1950s, when it was Mecca for artists of all types, painters such as Chagall and Picasso (Matisse was an early fan between the wars) and stars of stage and screen, Brigitte Bardot, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, all looking breathtakingly cool, smoking of course. One can still catch a glimpse of the fabulous Dame Joan C and her husband Percy sipping ice cold glasses of rosé. It is a place where the living is easy but civilised – not something one can say about London these days. Oh London, what have we done to you? ‘To be tired of London…’ Hmm, sorry Dr J, but that is no longer true.

The past few weeks have been spent in the enclosed rehearsal spaces of the Ambassadors Theatre in London’s West End, preparing and finally opening in Private Lives. Shut off from the world as I am, we could have become a colony of North Korea for all I know. And yet some things do penetrate – who could fail to be horrified and appalled by the twin disasters in North Africa recently? These two devastating events have resulted in the deaths of an ever-rising number of tens of thousands of people. And yet they already seem to have dropped off our news coverage. Has the enormity of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami made the western world immune to such disasters? How can the latest news from the Strictly studio occupy more space in news outlets than Morocco or Libya? Madness.