And so to Sleep

The ballet dancer Wayne Sleep is, by now, deep in the heart of the Australian rain forest, starring in I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here! I wonder if it's a good idea. There's something a bit undignified about being decanted into the jungle for a TV show. Fine if you are a D-list celeb with a failing career. But the man Dame Ninette de Valois, founder of the Royal Ballet, said was the greatest virtuoso dancer the Royal Ballet ever produced? A man who is in his mid-fifties? Who knows all the royals?

Sleep, when I met him last week, didn't seem to give a hoot. "George didn't think I should go," he admitted airily, referring to his long-suffering PA, George Lawson. "But I'm dying to get away from London. I love working with other people as a team, and I want to see how I cope.

"Normally I go on holidays with all the trimmings. Of course, George is going to be in the hotel where the partners are put up, leading the life of Riley."

Sleep, who is famous mainly for dancing Uptown Girl with Princess Diana in 1985, seems to lead quite a jolly life. On both occasions when we met he and George (they come as a double act, like Laurel and Hardy) were indulging in alcoholic lunches, once at the Groucho Club in Soho, once in a Thai restaurant on Shaftesbury Avenue.

While Sleep talked to me at the Groucho, George got quietly sozzled in the corner. "David Hockney always says George is the mind and I am the body. Which I resent rather," Sleep observed with dignity.

"Have you drunk all that?" he demanded later, when George weaved over to refill his glass. George confided that the two of them used to party with Bryan Ferry in the Sixties, and it was his idea to call Sleep's autobiography Precious Little Sleep - the alternative being Sleep With Friends.

Sleep may be the most charming man in the world, but he is petrified of the dark and insects, so the jungle might not be so funny.

How will he cope? "Well, I don't know," he admitted soberly. "At least there'll be other people there. It's being alone in the dark that I'm scared of. When my boyfriend, José, is away I look in each room before I go to sleep. I keep the radio on all night." And the creepy-crawlies? "Oh, I don't like them at all. I always take somebody sweet-blooded on holiday so they bite them, not me. I sleep with my clothes on."

He had just had his medical at Harley Street for the programme when we spoke, and was off the next day to see the psychiatrist, "which George thinks is going to be much more difficult".

On the show Sleep will be collecting logs alongside a motley selection of sort-of ares or has-beens: chef Antony Worrall Thompson, former EastEnders actress Danniella Westbrook (who lost her septum to cocaine), former footballer John Fashanu, the weather girl Sian Lloyd, Changing Rooms designer Linda Barker, cricketer Phil Tufnell, actor Chris Bisson (Vik from Coronation Street), a model called Catalina and the ex-pop star Toyah Willcox.

Sleep is currently 10-1 to win, trailing everyone except Worrall Thompson, though I think he might be the dark horse.

I asked if he knows any of his camping partners. "I know who Danniella sniff-sniff Westbrook is," he said, giggling and giving a few big snorts. "And John Fashanu's brother killed himself - he was gay.

"Antony somethingsomething is a cook. I met Danniella at the photo shoot and she was very sweet. Some people were saying she was married to quite a rich man and used to all the refinements, so they were wondering how she'll cope in the jungle. I taught Phil Tufnell some tap dancing the other night when we did an interview in Belfast and he was brilliant. He likes his glass of wine, but of course we're going to be in detox." He didn't see much of the last series. "I only saw Darren Day and Tamara Tra-La-La, whatever she's called. Tony Blackburn I hardly noticed, and he went on to win."

Sleep slurped his soup and tossed a chunk of bread into it. It was 2pm and we were in the snooker room at the Groucho Club, where Sleep once, as it happens, had lunch with his great mate Diana. The pair bonded over their unhappy childhoods - Sleep had a nasty stepfather and used to get so stressed as a boy that his skin fell off in flakes.

"Diana used to say, 'Filthy little faggot! What have you been telling my boys. Get away!' She had a great sense of humour," he recalled, and his elfin face lightened like sun after rain.

"I used to go to her Christmas parties at the Palace and it was hysterical, our laughter. People would wonder what we were laughing at. She'd just see somebody who looked like someone in the royal household, a servant or something, and have a giggle. Our humour was what really bound us. And the fact that I've never been impressed in the wrong way.

"The number of people who used to come up to our table who'd be doing deep curtsies and she'd be nudging me, going, 'Get her off. Get her off !' And you'd heave them up from the floor where they were curtseying and tell them to piss off - not in so many words. And she'd kick me under the table and we'd have a giggle.

Because she was never impressed by any of it. But then she was who she was and I am who I am. But she was genuine then. Very genuine."

Those were the glory days of their friendship, when Diana would ring him up - "Diana Wales!" she would bellow, when he asked which Diana - and invite him over for breakfast. She would send him little notes and visit him for cosy suppers at his mews house.

They had made friends rehearsing their dance at the Royal Opera House. Diana did it as a birthday surprise for Prince Charles, but afterwards Charles was supposed to have told her that he thought it was undignified.

Sleep chafed his soup ominously when I asked if this was true. "I don't know if he was fine with it by then," he said darkly. "Because I think things were changing in the household."

The only time Sleep showed any coolness was when I asked questions that might undermine the memory of his friend. Otherwise he was sweet, gossipy and hypersensitive. "It is warm," he remarked, for example, when I took off my cardigan.

He was wearing a cream Nehru-style shirt and his face looked sad and strained in repose. A friend of mine joked he would probably slip down the back of the sofa, but he doesn't actually seem that small when he stands up - he is 5ft 2in - and doesn't seem to mind about it.

Sleep's dance with Diana has overshadowed everything he has done before or since, but he doesn't seem to mind that either. "No, but the shock that zoomed around the world was very surprising to me," he said.

"It was her first sign of independence and the Palace got worried. I think they thought she was going to be the dumb blonde. And suddenly this thing started to grow. She was a late developer, and people say she was dumb.

"Well, aren't most girls who are protected from society? There are certain things they don't know that everyone else knows, and you go, 'Where have you been hiding for the past 30 years?' You can come out with the most mundane comments. But it doesn't stop you being very, very bright, and they wanted to nip it in the bud."

It was Sleep's time at the Royal Ballet that brought him into contact with the royals - Prince Charles, Princess Margaret, the Queen, the Queen Mother. He had won the Leverhulme scholarship to the Royal Ballet School at 12 - he missed the height-prediction test that would have torpedoed his career - and by 25 was a principal dancer. But, by 33, he was bored.

So, in 1981, he went off to star in the original production of Andrew Lloyd-Webber's Cats. He was credited with bringing ballet to the masses, but these days he doesn't dance much - certainly not every day and mostly tap. But in December he is going back to the Royal Ballet for the first time since he left, to be an Ugly Sister in Cinderella, which he is excited and scared about. He is also working on a play at the National Theatre Studio, "and I do a Christmas pantomime every year, playing a dame. And workshops around the country on Sundays. To 200 kids - it just inspires them".

In his spare time - such as it is - he hangs out at the South Kensington mews house he has been doing up for eight years.

"It's lovely," he squeaked, "with all glass skylights and I've dug down and made three floors out of it, and a big 30-ft sitting room all in white, with a glass floor so the light goes right down." He shares it with José, who is Spanish and used to own a bar. "He moved out and then moved back in and I think we've bonded. We've been together nine years and it's a very good relationship."

Sleep has come a long way from his childhood in Hartlepool, where he shared a room in a boarding house with his waitress mother - she had him out of wedlock before marrying the much-disliked stepfather. But under his sweetness he has a dignity that reminds you that he knows who he is and what he has done.

Which brings me back to the original question: why is he going to the jungle? What can he hope to gain?

"It's all for charity," he reminded me jauntily. "And it's not something I'd normally do in a million years."

How will he cope if people start throwing tantrums?

"I'm not too worried. I won't take it personally. I can always walk away."

I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here! starts this evening at 9pm on ITV1.