Caught on film - when Banksy had dinner with Joan Collins

A new film records the unlikely meeting between Joan Collins and the mysterious artist Banksy.

Banksy is flavour of the moment. At the weekend, Bristol City Museum opened a show of 100 of the graffiti artist's works, causing a great stir in his home town. By the end of the day, London, too, will be gossiping about the night Banksy had dinner with Joan Collins.

A year ago, in full-length black sequined fishnet gloves, the star welcomed the street artist to dinner at her opulent Oxfordshire country seat on a glorious June evening. The night's extraordinary events are documented in a new film, Banksy's Coming to Dinner, which is being screened for the first time today.

You see the artist, his face pixellated and voice distorted to preserve his anonymity, being taxied from London to Collins's home with Tamara Beckwith, who sips nervously from a bottle of mineral water. When he arrives, Banksy presents Joan and her husband Percy with an artwork involving an aerosol can ("Perhaps we should get it signed," they whisper). Later, he leaves the dinner table when he loses patience with the other guests.

It's an unsettlingly comic film, like the reality TV show Come Dine With Me but instead of real people we have sort-of celebs circling each other uneasily. Guests include comedian Stephen K Amos, actor Ann Mitchell and an exuberant gay man (he turns out to be an agent called Paul de Freitas). Plus Joan's daughter Tara. She has to join the party when Amos's girlfriend is a no show ("Mummy will go mad!").

The film will create waves when it is shown to an invited audience at the ICA. Not least because the director is Ivan Massow, a former chairman of the ICA who left under a cloud in 2002 after describing the conceptual art promoted by the organisation as "self-indulgent craftless tat" and the "product of middle-class bloated egos who patronise real people with fake understanding" in an article in the New Statesman.

Massow was previously an insurance broker who made his fortune sorting out mortgages for gay men in the 1990s, and who for a while dispensed financial advice to viewers of Richard and Judy on Wednesday afternoons. A colourful character, he was also a foxhunting Tory who once escorted Lady Thatcher to a party conference. He crossed the floor of the Commons to the Labour benches shortly after, yet still rode from Somerset to London in support of hunting. He once toyed with the idea of running for Mayor of London.

In 1999 Massow became the chairman of the ICA ("He's a mass of contradictions and a risky choice, but the ICA should always live dangerously," said its director Philip Dodd at the time) and left in 2002. The screening of Banksy's Coming to Dinner, which Massow calls his first art project, marks his return to The Mall - the choice of venue is no coincidence.

His film is, Massow says, a spoof on reality TV, and a comment on the sensational/celebrity nature of the contemporary art world. Banksy, with his fame, the arguably inflated prices his works command and his enigmatic persona, is its perfect poster boy.

The pixellated star is not really Banksy but Massow didn't let the rest of the cast in on the secret. "I really thought it was Banksy," Joan Collins tells me from her villa in the South of France, though she understood the dinner party was a set-up. "Tamara wasn't sure, and we did wonder why he had come to dinner with me." In fact, the actor was Bryan Lawrence, who used to be in The Bill.

"Joan was the perfect match for this idea of art celebrity," says Massow. "She didn't mind biting the hand that feeds her."

In fact, Massow didn't set out to make a film about Banksy or the art world. His intention was to make a film with Joan, who will host the star-packed launch party tonight at the Mayfair Hotel.

"What we really wanted to do was a remake of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, with me in the Bette Davis part," Collins confesses. "But there were problems with the estate."

That idea didn't work out but it took Massow to LA, where the idea for making the Banksy film was born. He moved into the house on Malibu beach where Samantha stays in the Sex and the City film and began to hatch the plot. "I've done lots of things, I've even made shampoo. I wanted to work with Joan, so why not? I've known her for 20 years and we worked hard on this," says Massow who is now back in London living in a flat in Covent Garden. Over months, the project morphed into what Collins calls a "cod reality show".

Massow did actually ask Banksy to take part. "Did he think for one minute that Banksy, who has protected his identity for two decades, would reveal it in a film by a first-time director!" laughs one art world insider.

Nonetheless, Banksy's people seem suitably irritated. "We want nothing to do with that association. I don't really understand what it's all about," barked Banksy's PR, Jo Brooks, down the phone.

That Collins agreed to take part in a "cod reality show" indicates how persuasive Massow can be. She knows him through her son, the painter Sasha Newley. "My agents really didn't want me to do it," she says. "But then they never want you to do anything they haven't found for you, and I like challenges. It was totally unscripted at points, much less than a reality show, and I was just playing the role of grand lady of the manor."

Was it fun to do? "It was fabulous." Was there any tension around the dinner table? "Not until Tamara and Tara started talking about Ann being a lesbian."

Not everyone was as willing to contradict their agent as Collins. "Christopher Biggins said yes," says Massow. "But then his agent said no. He'd just come out of the jungle after I'm a Celebrity ... and there was something about jeopardising his situation with ITV."

Meanwhile, below stairs in the film, we find comedian Helen Lederer, another friend, playing an intransigent cook. "I've done the real Come Dine with Me, and that is really stressful: two cameras on you while you're cooking in real time - the recipes seemed to get longer and longer. For Banksy, we forgot we were being filmed, and started bitching about the others. It's all on tape somewhere."

Banksy's Coming to Dinner shares much with "real" reality TV, including the genre's insubstantial quality, its longueurs and a constant wonderment that you're watching it at all. You may find yourself praying, as I did, that the dinner won't include a dessert course.

It leaves you with little, except the memory of Collins' expertly lipsticked smile and the feeling that her and Percy really do get along rather well.

In the film Massow comments on the art scene he left behind ("conceptualism was going up its own arse and we needed real art - that is why I like Banksy") and we learn that Joan Collins is allergic to shellfish.

We also discover that Banksy's work is not to the actress's taste. "I'm into Impressionists and portraiture," says Collins. "Graffiti doesn't fit with the way I live." But just for a moment, when she held that spray-can sculpture and pondered its value, perhaps she could have been swayed.