“Christ, I’ve made Earl Grey.” Giles Coren is struggling with the tea bags, all of a fluster, and perhaps pissed, it seems, after a “boozy lunch” at a restaurant he’s planning to review in his weekly column. He’s come home clutching a DVD copy of his cycle of new adverts for Bird’s Eye. He admits that his childhood self, dreaming of becoming “the Saul Bellow of North London”, would have considered journalism rather demeaning, let alone the “cheesy shit” of the television and advertising worlds but that, ultimately, “they offered me loads of money, I don’t care. Everything I do is a joke.”

That said, there’s little doubt that Coren does care – he’s certainly not joking when he lambastes Britain’s “absolutely moribund literary culture,” our national readership’s penchant for Ian McEwan-style “beach read” Jackanory, “the same novel every two years.” A fantasy Nobel Prize for his first novel, Winkler, found form in the “Bad Sex in Fiction” Award, dubbed by Coren as “shameful, posturing shite,” judged by “all these old pederasts, these fat, bald, old bollockless men.”

It strikes Coren as bizarre that his literary agent pays little attention to his scores of ideas for fiction, yet is “wetting himself” with excitement at the prospect that he might appear on I’m A Celebrity… (which he isn’t). Coren also asserts that he has no place in the world of the media celebrity, among the Fran Cosgroves and Callum Bests, and is genuinely confounded by the supposed attractiveness of “a dim, really thin, slightly hairy, slouchy bloke with big cheek bones.” Admittedly, his disdain is born of “a mixture of contempt and envy”, and Coren concedes that “if naked young women were throwing themselves at me, that’s a bridge I would cross when I came to it, but it’s not been that way.” Heedless, then, of David Baddiel’s advice to “just fuck loads of ’em, ’cause that’s what I did” (hard as it is to picture Baddiel in the role of rock ‘n’ roll lothario), Coren opts instead for long-term stability with his twenty-five-year-old lawyer girlfriend. Burgeoning fame dictates that “I can’t even have a cheeky shag on a weekend away now, because there’s an outside chance that someone might recognise me. So in fact, it makes you more faithful.” Through fear rather than principle, it would seem, but apparently this “doesn’t matter. I don’t care what the reasons are.”

a good verbal thrashing threw the restaurant’s PR team into frenzied panic

As the “boozy, garlicky kind of bleurgh” rapidly takes over, Coren musters the energy to feed me one last anecdote, about a “really shit” restaurant he visited for breakfast a few days ago. As a prominent critic, his opinion evidently inspires not inconsiderable fear, and the threat of a good verbal thrashing threw the restaurant’s PR team into frenzied panic. He received letters and phone calls, explaining that “the head barman had just learnt that his mother died of a brain tumour twenty minutes before. Is it true? Who knows, but what sort of restaurant gets in touch with a critic and gives that as his excuse? First of all, if my mother dies of a brain tumour, I say to my boss, ‘Excuse me, my mother’s just died. Do you mind if I just…?’ If I’ve decided I’m so dedicated to being a barman that I’m going to see out my shift, then why don’t I at least make fucking coffee to take my mind off it?”