Anthea and I will be back

Grant Bovey and I turn up at exactly the same time at the central London hotel where we've arranged to meet. He is instantly recognisable as the much-photographed, much-vilified husband of Anthea Turner. He looks like a walking, talking version of his usual waxwork-dummy self complete with long cashmere navy coat, brown lace-up leather boots, a navy blazer and tight powder-blue shirt. But he is relaxed and chatty and very, very tanned. "Bet you thought this was fake," he says, after we sit down for a coffee, flapping his shirt open, which I assume is to show that he's brown all over.

"Bet you thought I'd be the kind of man who would be permatanned." To tell the truth, I say, that's exactly what I thought. Grant Bovey looks very happy at that. "I knew it," he says. "I just knew it."

Of course, the real problem is that Grant Bovey, 41, is a very odd-looking bloke. He is well-groomed, with his blond-tipped, late Eighties George Michael designer hair and perfect nails. He has very white teeth. I can see why he's attractive to a certain type of woman with his slightly downmarket playboy looks. He's often on holiday.

In fact, he and Anthea and his three children (by ex-wife Della Bovey) have just returned from Dubai. Bovey loves Dubai. He thinks it's full of business potential. "I always look for a bit of business," he says, which is surprising for a man whose acumen seems to have deserted him on a regular basis, considering the amount of companies he's formed and left.

"The weather's good, the hotels are great and it's like a privatised country." But most of all he loves the security there. "The paparazzi aren't allowed in. They're building an island that's going to be full of private villas. What a great idea!"

So Bovey bought two villas in Dubai and is going to rent them out as holiday homes. "Do you think that'll work? Bound to. I've been puzzling over it, but I think it can't fail."

Grant Bovey spends a lot of time puzzling over things. Sometimes he puzzles about why his first marriage failed. He met Della nearly two decades ago and they were married for eight years until he had an affair with Turner. "Yes," he says, "but why did I go off with Anthea?" Because he fell in love? "'A medium told me I would," he says triumphantly.

"I believe in fate and the medium told me that I'd marry a darkhaired, dark-eyed quiet girl - that's Della - but I'd fall in love with a blonde wearing a red suit. Anthea did a promotional video for me when I tried to buy Nottingham Forest football club [a deal that fell through] so that was her."

The Boveys had known Anthea Turner and her then husband-cum-manager, Peter Powell, for years, so why did he fall for her then, at a party, five years ago?

"Well, we all always thought their marriage was strange. They slept in separate beds. It was a business arrangement, and I had always fancied her and something happened between us. Not what you think, I might add." He gives me a wink. "It wasn't like that. I was always faithful to Della. If Anthea hadn't been at that party and the two of us hadn't been drinking, which is odd because Anthea rarely drinks, it would never have happened."

The upshot was that he left Della and went off with Anthea, but then he and Della were reunited but that didn't work out because she found him secretly telephoning Anthea all the time. Then Della found solace with a dreadlocked landscape gardener called Anthony Constanduros and on and on it all went. "He was sleeping in my bed," says Bovey about Constanduros. In the end he tried to get his wife's lover banned from the house but, as he had no evidence, the judge dismissed the case. But surely his wife - belittled by his treatment of her and the awful public nature of the whole debacle, plus an illtimed book by Turner called Fools Rush In, which revealed far more than it should have done - had the right to take any lover she chose?

"But she was doing it to hurt me!" he says. Probably, I say back. "I made a pig's ear of it, didn't I?" he says mournfully.

He does, he says, take full responsibility for the entire mess. "I didn't behave brilliantly," he says. " I don't blame the press for getting at me then. I'm not saying I deserved it but I'm not going to whinge." But what really confuses him is why he and Anthea (now his wife) have been ridiculed ever since. "We can't do anything right," he says chirpily, grinning away. "I mean, so many things are attributed to us that aren't true, I don't even know where to start. I call them 'Grant- and Anthea-isms'. I laugh them off because I've got a thicker skin now but Anthea still gets upset."

He has a breathtakingly simple view of life. He takes consistently and obviously mad decisions - such as, first of all, doing a 14-page spread in OK! magazine with his wife Della when they were briefly reunited. "I can't promise I won't do it again," said Bovey in the interview when asked about his affair as Della sat rigid with her own rictus grin plastered on her face. "Oh that was a mistake," he says. "We did it for the money but it was a stupid thing to do. It hurt Anthea a lot and it probably hurt Della, too." But then he made exactly the same mistake two years later when he married Turner and the couple sold the rights to their wedding to the same magazine.

He seems genuinely surprised that the decision backfired. "If I had known then what I know now ... " he says, rolling his eyes towards the ceiling. "The whole debacle was very embarrassing, in fact I think it really affected Anthea's career."

The happy couple agreed an exclusive deal with OK! to cover the wedding - that part Bovey has no problem with. "It was £250,000! And Anthea had always wanted a really big, glamorous wedding - her wedding to Pete was very small and quiet. It didn't pay for the whole wedding, no way. But it made the final bill a bit easier to bear."

The sticking point, however, was that OK! had done a deal with a new chocolate bar, Cadbury's Snowflake, and the wedding was full of bowls of the stuff. At some point the photographer took a picture of the happy couple eating a his 'n' hers Snowflake and the picture was plastered all over OK! and the rest of the press. It looked remarkably tacky.

"Here's the truth. Everyone thought we'd had the wedding sponsored by Cadbury's but we hadn't. It was 2am, we were tired and it was our wedding day. The photographer asked us to eat the chocolates and we did it and we didn't think any more about it. The outcome was terrible. We were on safari when someone rang and told Anthea about the picture and she was so upset it tarnished the entire holiday."

His naivety is mind-boggling. Surely, between the two of them, they had enough money to pay for the wedding themselves? "Well," he says, looking a bit startled, "I suppose we did. But if someone offered you 250 grand ... it's simple isn't it?" But it was your wedding, I say again. "I know, I know,î he says, suddenly looking sorry for himself. "I just didn't think.î But didn't they notice stacks of unordered Cadbury's Snowflake bars littered all over the place? "Yes,î he says. Well, what did he think they were doing there? "They were for the guests. We didn't provide them.î If they didn't provide them, then didn't he wonder who did? "No!î he says.

He's like a rubber ball. Whatever way he is slammed and bounced, and with whatever degree of force, he just comes bouncing back again. He started life as a lad in Nottingham selling ladies' fashion out of a barrow and, really, that's what he still is now. He's a wheelerdealer who somehow seems to have survived despite a million setbacks.

"I like to do lots of different things," he says. "I like excitement in my life. I'm always brimming full of ideas. My parents died when they were in their early sixties. They died within a year and a half of each other and I just think I should live life to the full because I may have only 20 years left."

But what exactly is he doing? When I try to pin Bovey down, he comes out with lots of enthusiastic banter about this and that, but nothing very concrete. He had a very good idea for an internet game, he says (his face is shining with excitement) "but it didn't work out". He lost a lot of money in that venture, he says, but he invested at the wrong time. So now he's got a better idea.

"It's a text-messaging game. Loads of people can play it at the same time and it could go out at peakrate and the telecom companies could make a fortune." Has anyone bought the idea yet? "No," he says, "but I think they will."

Bovey is such an optimist that it all starts getting infectious. He says he likes to think positively about everything. "Some people think I've been a bad thing for Anthea," he says. (That's an understatement. A producer friend of mine told me that TV executives often play a game called "how to rehabilitate Anthea Turner's careerî and so far no one's come up with a winner.) "But we're very happy together and her career is bang right back on track.î

But it isn't. The last major thing she did was to front a satellite television show called Taste which was closed virtually as soon as it was started. The couple probably can't have children. "We've done four IVFs,î he says. "And that's probably it. But I feel very good about 2003,î he says. "I know it's going to be a good year.î

He says he's been more positive since he read a book called Fear. "Have you read it?î he says. "Jim McDonald gave it to me.î McDonald was his trainer for the infamous televised fight for charity, just after Christmas, against Ricky Gervais.

"I loved training for that fight,î he says earnestly. "I really respect sportsmen. I used to do business with Nigel Mansell and I watched him train. I understand how physically fit and mentally able you have to be to perform as a sportsman.î

Bovey took the training very seriously. "The first time I had to spar with someone I wanted to run away but then I learned I had to face that fear. That's what the book did for me." But he lost the fight against Gervais, even though he genuinely thought he'd win. It obviously rankles. "I'm fitter and younger than him," he says. "He's two and a half stone heavier than me! When the final bell went I assumed I'd won so I was pretty shocked. That wasn't a 'boxing match' as such. That was a fight. You know, 'I'll slug you. You slug me back'."

But here he still is with his faith in himself intact. He's had terrible failures, he's had county court judgments against him, he's been lambasted in the press, he's been beaten by an overweight fat comedian, but here he is, chirpy and bouncy, telling me his next scheme for business domination.

The chilling and wonderful thing is that he and Turner are obviously very happy in their own way. They don't have the mental depth to have the night of the long knives. They have made embarrassing and shameful faux pas which have made them look as if they are publicityhungry, money-hungry, celebrityobsessed, selfish wannabes without a hint of shame - yet they probably have a rather perky marriage.

I imagine them of an evening at the kitchen table in their £2.2 million Surrey mansion. Her: "Did you have a good day at the office dear?" Him: "Yes, I lost £300,000 on my latest internet venture and tried to take my exwife's lover to court for cocaine possession with no evidence at all which cost me £5,000 ... "

Her: "Ooh goody. Well, my new show Taste has been pulled from satellite TV because it got no viewers and I've been offered a chance to present a one-off programme about shopping and there's a game show in the pipeline ..."

And then they probably clink their glasses of wine to celebrate.