‘OK, OK – on the Northern food thing, I did fuck up. The ITV audience is full of Northern housewives.’

An accomplished anecdote artist, and possibly the most candid man in showbusiness, director and Sunday Times food columnist Michael Winner made a raucous return to his alma mater last night, regaling an enamoured Union audience with the usual self-congratulatory ‘this-is-your-life’, adorned with shameless but jaw-dropping references to a myriad of famous friends: ‘O.J. Simpson? Double murderer. Nice man.’

A former Film Editor at Varsity, the aptly named Winner gives off the strong impression of one who has sailed through life. Sustaining a fifty-year directorial career with barely a whiff of critical success, while continuing to cast a magnificent array of Hollywood icons for the duration, takes some serious doing.

In a subsequent interview, I probe Winner for an insider’s perspective on British film. Not one for pulling punches, he responds to recent government proposals to finance commercially-viable films as, ‘the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard’. He is unapologetic in his regard of films as vehicles for turning a profit, arguing that public money shouldn’t be diverted to filmmakers who cannot make ends meet.

Impatient with the independent film scene, Winner offers a damning perspective on the arthouse productions championed by many a cultural commentator. ‘UK films will never match up to the American standard’, he says. ‘The American film is a national commodity; the British make films to impress their friends in Hampstead’. Having abandoned England for Hollywood at an early stage of his career, he is nostalgic on the subject of the Golden Age, and the icons – an astounding number of whom populate his films - whose charisma endured from one film to the next in a way that modern day character actors never seem to achieve. He describes his late friend, Marlon Brando, as ‘the greatest actor in the history of cinema’.

The pearls of wisdom he imparts to the audience are a little incongruous with the luminous events of his career: ‘The successful people are not clever or flashy. They plod on regardless.’ Fondly recounting deviant behaviour at Playboy parties and inside jokes with Orson Welles, one struggles to think of him as a ‘plodder’. Another from the Piers Morgan school of success, I suspect a career built on affability which conceals a will of iron.

Winner is a showman, if nothing else. He chuckles endearingly at his own humour, while the wife supplies openers to stories he’s forgotten. It is all totally rehearsed, but rather lovely all the same. He is serenely impervious to criticism – a jumped-up kid at the front who heckles about the integrity of his journalism is laughed aside so deftly it might never have happened. One suspects this isn’t the first time Winner has come face-to-face with his detractors.

‘The secret of success is longevity’, he says, and half a century on from his first film, I guess he’s done alright.