Changing times for Jonathan Meades

If, in the coming months, you hear sniggering at the phrase "hot lunch", my advice is simply not to ask why. I'll just say that the lexicon of sexual euphemism has a disgusting new entry and a full description is contained in Jonathan Meades's hilarious and very black new novel, The Fowler Family Business. A hot lunch, I might add, has nothing to do with the author's expertise as a food writer and everything to do with his sewer-dark take on his own people, the, as he puts it, "filthy" English.

In the most innocent sense, I'm having a hot lunch with him at a Lebanese restaurant in Victoria. Noura's staff do not recognise the man who, in the newspaper cutting outside, names it his eighth best restaurant of 2000. But Meades is, these days, almost literally unrecognisable, a svelte and unhaggard 13 stone, rather than the 19-stone coronary risk he was towards the end of his 15 years as The Times's restaurant critic. He does not help the recognition factor either by dressing carelessly in a v-neck sweater and open-necked shirt rather than in the dark suit and sunglasses he adopts for his wacky but erudite television documentaries. The clear-speced 55-year-old before me, whose hand shakes when he raises his glass (of water) and who barely touches his grill, looks disturbingly unlike himself. As the title of his BBC2 documentary on surrealism put it last year, he has lost 100 pounds and does not know where to find it.

Telling me to disarm my tape recorder, he explains that the "hot lunch" was not a surrealistic invention. The sexual favour was named and freely volunteered to a friend at a wedding reception and was performed by one of Britain's not quite leading actresses. "He would not have had the imagination to make it up," he says, delighted that behind the opulence of a grand English wedding something so disgusting was going on.

I hesitate to compare such a genial dining companion to Hannibal Lecter, but it strikes me that their shared ability to focus simultaneously on civilisation's greatest achievements and the human psyche's most terrible degradations is, in both cases, a form of self-fascination. Meades, after all, is a cultural astronaut, who progressed from an acting course at Rada, through architectural and broadsheet journalism to the kind of rarefied artistic documentaries which, to his fury, are becoming extinct. ("Don't the BBC realise they are public service-broadcasters? No, they don't.") His restaurant reviews were classics of snob epicureanism. His appreciations of English architecture remain scholarly. If such an adjective can be applied to a food critic, Meades is a dyspeptic John Betjeman. A friend put it another way: "Jonathan's an intellectual knicker-flasher."

Yet his most famous public act of recent weeks was to get drunk at Marco Pierre White's 40th birthday party at the Mirabelle. He must have behaved really badly because he managed to cause more offence than even Bernard Manning, whom he heckled copiously. White later called Meades "drunk, rude and obnoxious".

"I didn't throw up, actually. That was made up. But I wouldn't mind had I done so. Journalist Gets Drunk at Party. Story?"

But the debauched, disreputable Meades is not entirely mythic? "No, it is a side of me, but only a very small side of me. Most of my life is one of bourgeois propriety." Leaving aside other instances of his rudeness - for example, putting the phone down on the over-solicitous new neighbour who asked him round for drinks (few of his stories redound entirely to his credit) - his fiction is certainly an offence against bourgeois propriety. He assails it with urban myths, bucolic horror stories and, in The Fowler Family Business, suburban sexual deceit. Since he was brought up in Salisbury to middle-aged parents, whom he has still not forgiven for sending him to a snobbish but Philistine boarding school, the easy conclusion would be that his life and art are an unending attack on the bourgeois, provincial, countyset values of the late John and Bunty Meades.

Instead, they turn out to have been major sources for his fiction. When I ask if his mother was shocked when his short-story collection Filthy English was published in 1984, he says she liked it because he'd included so many of her own anecdotes in it. The Sylvan Life, about child incest, was based on her experience teaching in the New Forest. "When she read it she said, 'Oh, you left out the story about the syphilis.'" His father, meanwhile, an army officer turned biscuit company rep, was responsible for some of the stories of military atrocity in Jonathan's largely unreadable 1993 novel Pompey - "some of the grosser stuff".

So his parents were complicit in forming his sensibility? "Absolutely complicit in it, yeah. And although my father was an outdoorsy countryman et cetera he had absolutely no illusions about the country. The townie's view of the pastoral idyll he considered a sad joke. He had no illusions about the probity of farmers. Basically, he thought that most people in the country were crims or aspired to be crims."

Meades claims he was not close to them but they were proud of him and hung a huge portrait of their only child over their fireplace when he left home. Later, father and son got on better and his sudden death from a heart attack at the age of 72 hit Meades hard. "It was a terrible shock, an insurmountable one for my mother." His mother lived on for 13 more " miserable" years. When she died he abandoned a novel he was writing about a mother-son relationship.

A macabre scene in Pompey is stolen from his father's funeral. Determined to become food for his beloved fish, Meades Snr wanted his ashes scattered into the stream at the bottom of his garden. Released from the urn, however, they did not sink but formed a whirlpool. "I watched my mother staring at this. It was very oily from whatever the flammable agent is so you get this sheen on the water, a sort of mother-of-pearl sludge. And, sure enough, when my mother died, exactly the same thing happened."

Where does he want his ashes put? "I want to be stuffed. A taxidermist friend of mine is going to make a cast of me."

I honestly cannot tell if he is joking, but I believe him when he says that he has been preoccupied by death from early childhood, a preoccupation that perhaps accounts for the genuine enthusiasm he displays for the undertaker who oversaw his parents' ceremonies, "a vast man with fantastic clothes, triple-breasted waistcoats and a version of an Ulster raincoat he designed himself".

This is the only praise in the entire interview he offers someone or something outside London. Otherwise, he cites the "despicable" GP who "shoved" his mother into a home without his consent, family hotels that make Fawlty Towers look like "social realism" and many tales of poaching and bestiality. He must have a venal (or venereal) story for every country town in England. Take Highworth, Wiltshire, identified by Betjeman as one of the most perfect small towns in Britain. Meades claims knowledge of a thug from there who goes sheep-shooting by night in the Cotswolds, piles the carcasses into a removal van and flogs them to halal butchers in Birmingham.

He thinks Britain is a joke nation outside the capital, doesn't he? "Yes, I do. There's a degree of incompetence about so much stuff in Britain. It's incompetent and proscriptive as well, a nasty combination. There's a much greater gulf between London and the British provinces than there is between Paris and the French provinces. Their provincial cities aspire to look like Paris. They're much more urbanistic, the French. The British are basically suburban."

Which brings us to Henry Fowler, funeral director and anti-hero of the new novel, whose quiet life in Norwood, south London, Meades utterly destroys. I quite like Henry but Meades very clearly does not. Indeed, he admits he set him up to "whack" him. "I think of myself as Joe Pesci here."

Henry is whacked for his complacency? "He is very, very complacent, the smuggest man who ever lived, with lots of very provincial prejudices. You could hold those prejudices if you were living there. You couldn't if you were living in Maida Vale or somewhere. Or you would be much less frank about them."

By the end, Henry has lost all selfrespect. None too faintly, one hears his creator cheer as Henry's moral compass clatters into the gutter.

"I think it's a horrible trait, moralism. I think it's really loathsome."

Which was why I was surprised that Meades reacted with such righteous fury to Bernard Manning's racist jokes. "I probably was being a bit pious but it wasn't a moral offence. It was a kind of aesthetic offence. It was just so incredibly unfunny."

Does he think less of White for inviting Manning? "Marco's northern. I like Marco very much but he is northern and the North is a foreign country."

It strikes me that perhaps Meades felt he should have been doing the cabaret rather than Manning. I ask if he's yet resolved in his own mind if his act is intellectual or vaudevillian. He says he thinks he has failed at both.

So he is not pleased with the Jonathan Meades he has constructed? "I dare not be pleased with it. There lies the path of Henry Fowler, of complacency and unquestioning acceptance of the status quo of one's little life."

The status quo of his own domestic life has been repeatedly upset. Alarming his mother by not marrying the girlfriend he had in his twenties, he wed first Sally Brown, who ran the British Theatre Association. They have twin daughters now at university. Divorced, he married Frances Bentley, managing editor of Vogue. Their two girls are aged 15 and nine. He now lives with Colette Forder, a colleague from The Times. He does not, as he once observed, belong to the generation "whose ideal, expectation and actuality was a job for life and a wife for life".

Is he difficult to live with? "Probably. I don't know. Yeah, I should think so. I think most people are unless they're vegetables."

But Meades shows even less appetite to discuss his divorces than he does for his lunch - or hot lunches, I must add, for the record's sake.

"Even if I thought it was a bad idea to get complacent about whatever I've done," he interrupts himself, "I don't think I've the capability to do it, not with the paranoia I suffer and always have done."

I suppose he spent 15 years fearing someone wanted his restaurant critic gig? "Someone always wants that job. It's extraordinary, the bare-faced petitioning."

The cheese, he says, would have killed him if he hadn't finally given up.

But surely no happy person eats as addictively as Meades did? "No, any shrink will tell you that it probably was occasioned initially by some kind of unhappiness and then becomes a habit, so the actual reason, the cause, may have evaporated but you're still left with the effect. I think that may have been the case."

To take things chronologically, he began eating professionally as his first marriage unwound, lost weight once it was over and gained it in spades during his second attempt at matrimony. Perhaps he has Colette to thank for his present trim, although he says it is he who does the cooking at their home by Tower Bridge.

I realise, when my mobile rings, that we have been talking for four hours. I also realise that I am only a little nearer to separating the performer from the person. A few nights later I watch an excellent but excessive programme he made on Queen Victoria's architectural legacy on BBC Knowledge. An audience of several will have seen him continue his war on suburbia but will remember most vividly Meades dressing up as a March Hare and claiming the bustle promoted anal penetration. Jacob Bronowski, I ask myself, or Bernard Manning? Does he even want to be taken seriously?

"They are loud, rhetorical, unreticently clever, self-proclaiming, illmannered, hallucinatory, grotesque. It must be said they are, thus, untypically British." Thus Meades on Victorian buildings. Thus me on Meades.

The Fowler Family Business (Fourth Estate, £10).