Blackburn is back

Six months after he was crowned King of the Jungle in I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here! DJ Tony Blackburn is in the middle of one of the most unexpected comebacks since Christ.

He has been voted Oldie of the Year by The Oldie magazine, has left Capital Gold after 14 years to present the national breakfast radio show for Classic Gold Digital, is recognised wherever he goes and his earnings have rocketed. He is absolutely loving his reinvention at the advanced age of 60.

"People treat me differently now," he says. "They were always nice to me, but now they're particularly nice. I had this slightly cheesy image before, telling silly jokes and being silly. Now I think people realise I know what I'm doing a little bit. Not quite as stupid as they thought."

Blackburn smiles and props his cheek shyly on his hand, covering a huge, bat-like ear. We are in his hotel suite in Cardiff, where he has spent the week guest-broadcasting a local radio show. He is shy and sweetnatured in person, with his Herman Munsterish hair plastered stiffly to his head, and his thin legs, sweetly offering drinks and ringing his wife, Debbie, to check if she is in fact 43. They also have a six-year-old daughter called Victoria.

There is no sign of the weirdness you can't help noticing from comments he has made in the past. Blackburn has claimed, for example, that he has no friends, has slept with more than 250 women, and he once lived for 15 years on lentil soup and processed peas. But he has such a gentle way about him, you feel awful asking about it, like an elephant stomping on a mouse.

John Peel said 10 months ago that his fellow DJ was the weirdest man he had ever met. Blackburn says he finds that quite hard to understand and hurtful. "Why would he say that? I emailed him the other day to ask what I had done to upset him. He didn't reply. I hope it's because he's jealous. I met him for the first time on Radio London. He is the first to admit he wasn't a very good disc jockey. He didn't understand music to start off with.

"What I do get upset with him for is that he never gives me credit for pioneering soul music. I did the first soul show in this country, and Stevie Wonder turned up out of the blue to say thank you for my pioneering music. So I just can't understand why he continually goes on."

But Blackburn has got the last laugh on his old Radio One rival. The offers are flooding in and this morning he began his new show. "Breakfast is the key programme of the day and it's the most important show," he explains, his blue bloodhound eyes rolling towards me. "It's peak time, and it's a show I've always enjoyed. Some people don't like it because you have to get up very early, but it's the best show to do, and I only sleep four hours a night anyway. I think if you go to bed too early you don't have anything to talk about."

He has got a new lease of life at an age when most people are thinking about retiring - The Oldie magazine ceremonially presented him with his Senior Railcard the other day - and he says the experience on the reality TV game show in the depths of the Australian jungle had a huge effect on him. He spent his time doggedly collecting logs as the tantrums of his fellow inmates raged around him.

Blackburn says that, despite this, he found the calm which had eluded him all his life. "I know it sounds a bit weird, but I found a real inner peace. It's changed me totally as a person. I'm much calmer. Of all the things I've ever done, it's probably made the biggest impact on my life." He certainly has had more than his fair share of angst. He tried to commit suicide in the mid-Seventies when his young actress wife, Tessa Wyatt, left him saying she hadn't loved him even when they got engaged.

She said she felt he bulldozed her into marriage. Wyatt moved out taking their son, Simon, who is now 29, with her. Blackburn poured out his grief on his radio show, begging her to return day after day, and then took an overdose. "I was looking at Fawlty Towers on television and shoving these barbiturate sleeping tables into my mouth because I wanted to go out laughing," he recalled.

His collapse undermined a career that until then had been wildly successful. Blackburn, the first voice on Radio One when it began in 1967, was taken off his plum shows one by one, and in 1984 he left the station altogether. The wilderness years followed. He embarked on 17 years of singledom, slogged gallantly on local London radio shows and worked up an act taking the piss out of himself, going round universities wearing "glittery gold jackets and a medallion the size of a plate".

This was the miserable period when he lived alone on processed peas, and his cheesy persona became a tired joke, but he seemed to find comfort in the world he created on air. "I suppose that is the way I'd like the world to be. A sort of Disneyland," he muses.

His life began to look up when he remet Debbie - whom he had acted with in panto a decade before - at a play. "I wrote her a note inviting her to dinner," he says, and their romance quickly led to marriage. But his professional life continued to flag until his unexpected inclusion in I'm A Celebrity ... Debbie, who is now a theatrical agent, was totally against him doing it "because she didn't think I could cope. She didn't think I'd be very good at it." But he went ahead anyway. "It could have backfired," he admits, "but I knew it wouldn't. I'm more in control of what I do than people realise."

Though Blackburn seems quite childish in some ways, agreeing to do anything he is asked without any sense of his own dignity, he is certainly canny about managing his image. In her famous outburst in the jungle, fellow contestant and comedienne Rhona Cameron said that the DJ was slower than the others, but he claims to me, in a careful bit of damage limitation, that she didn't mean he was stupid - "What she actually meant, and she's apologised ever since, is that I am in a world of my own."

He is very close to his 80-year-old mother and talks to her every day. His father was a doctor, and he says he had a very happy childhood, though it must have been overshadowed by the fact that his younger sister, Jackie, was born disabled - she has spent her life in a wheelchair.

They lived in Poole and I have to say, it doesn't sound that happy: Blackburn ran away from his public school, Millfield, but he didn't want to talk about that, or his sister - "because she's very private. Jackie is retired now, and she lives with my mother. She's in a wheelchair, she's a lovely person, but she has a terrific struggle. And that has had a big impact on my view of life. I just think all this violence, these hooligans - they're idiots, because they've got their health."

He became a vegetarian aged five, and food-wise he stays stuck at the same age: his favourite meal is chips and baked beans, which is what Debbie ordered for him when she threw him a surprise birthday party at the Chesterfield Hotel in Mayfair in January for his 60th.

"I know people think I'm unadventurous," he says. "I won't even go to a Chinese restaurant."

I ask who had come to his birthday party, as he had no friends. "Noel Edmonds turned up," Blackburn answers obligingly. But didn't they fall out when Edmonds took over his breakfast slot at Radio One? "Well, we did at one stage," Blackburn admits, his face darkening. "But it wasn't his fault he got my job."

With his new sought-after status the wheel has turned full circle to the Sixties, to days when Blackburn, Edmonds and Dave Lee Travis (the hairy cornflake) were such superstars they caused riots in supermarkets.

Back then Blackburn used to large it around town with his E-Type Jag and bunny-girl girlfriend. That was when he slept with hundreds of women "I was single," he says in his defence. "It's the most natural thing in the world."

One thing that hasn't changed is his workaholism. He does three radio shows, seven days a week, the new breakfast show, the soul show he does every weekday for Jazz FM, and the Saturday show for the Real Radio Group.

This does mean he sees a bit less of his wife and daughter. "And a lot of people say, 'When do you see each other?' But we do see each other a lot." He pauses. "I mean, this week, I haven't. But tomorrow I see them again. And when I start my breakfast show we'll see each other more."

I ask how long they've been married. "Eleven years. And our daughter has the same sense of humour as me. She played a daisy in her school play, and I said to her, 'Be careful I don't get out the lawnmower.' She laughed. She got the joke, which I thought was good, because she's only six."

The family live in a five-bedroom house in Hertfordshire, down a country lane. I ask what drew him to Debbie after 17 years on his own. "We just click," he says. "She's never played games. I trust her 100 per cent and that's something I never got from anybody else."