Ruby waxes lyrical about her 'split'

The last thing you expect Ruby Wax to be is quiet. The hyperactive motor mouth is rarely short of something to say, be it a quip or put-down, which makes it all the more remarkable that, for the past seven months, she has studiously avoided any major interview, has been rarely pictured in public and hasn't endured the customary round of publicity you'd expect of someone with two major BBC shows.

But her surprisingly reserved public image is quite deliberate; at least, it has been since the extraordinary revelations late last year that her 13-year marriage - one of the most unlikely, but strongest, in show-business - was about to collapse.

Her and husband Ed Bye, it was reported, were immersed in a series of blazing and tearful rows following rumours that the famously volatile Ruby, 48, was having an affair with a 32-year-old internet entrepreneur.

The allegations were all the more remarkable because they came just days after her last major interview in which she credited the unflappable Bye - her third husband - with keeping their relationship so strong. "He is selfless, he sacrifices a lot," she said. "Ed is normal, he can make me laugh and he's brought balance to my life.''

Now, though, Ruby is able to reveal for the first time just what happened in those dark days last October when she feared for her marriage and the future of her children, Max, 13, Madeleine, 11, and eight-year-old Marina.

After three hours of taping her eponymous daytime talk show, Ruby is in no mood to relax and her trademark rapid-fire delivery is peppered with venomous words for the woman she believes deliberately sought to destroy her marriage - the nanny from hell. "Don't believe any of those stories about our marriage break-up. Ed and I are very much together - it's just that we had a nanny who turned out to be insane. On day three, she told me she'd been abused by her stepfather. Ed called up the nanny agency to complain. And that's when the trouble started in earnest.

"I'd had years of great nannies. But, sometimes, people are jealous; I don't know why. Anyway, when I fired this girl, she was really inflamed. But she never went around saying we had rows at home because we hardly ever do.

"What she claimed was that I'd had an affair. However baseless the accusation, you can only imagine the tension it produced with Ed and me. She invented the whole thing. But that's all in the past now, and Ed and I are stronger for it."

For 13 years, Ruby has been married to producer/director Bye, whom she first met making Girls On Top with French and Saunders. The key word to keeping the marriage happy, says Ruby, is juggling. "Everything's all right as long as everything's all right."

As we speak, Madeleine has tonsillitis. "I told them to call me at the studio if her temperature went up and I'd head right home. My philosophy has never been that the show must go on. In the end, the family always comes first. I wouldn't take a day off work if I had a cold. But if anything's wrong with the kids - as I say, it's juggling. But in a pleasurable way. I'd be a really bored housewife."

Mr and Mrs Bye are seen as complementary individuals. "It's why our marriage works. Ed's straight. He's an English public schoolboy. And I'm not. It's the Yin and Yang. I can be a wilder mix and he can hold it together."

So, she's difficult to live with and her husband copes with it all by appearing to be permanently unruffled? "No, I don't think so. Oh, Ed can get ruffled, and I'm the one who keeps it all in order. I'm the one who makes sure the nanny's there, that the kids go to the dentist. I'm really organised. You can't do everything I do and be scatty." There have been blips along the way, though. Ruby spent some weeks in The Priory battling depression and then four further days on a return visit.

"That was the direct result of a chemical imbalance in my body after Marina was born. But that's all behind me now."

How did she respond to the therapy sessions in which she was involved? "Well, there's no trick to therapy; it doesn't offer any magic solution. I think of therapists as being a bit like landscape gardeners. Your garden's a mess. The therapists just prune back the weeds. You end up with a garden that might still be a little rough, but now you can see it all more clearly. At the core, it's know thyself."

And now, much to the surprise of many fans of her outrageous celebrity interviews, she's immersed in the world of daytime television, battling for the ratings as she was in the first series of her critically panned primetime quiz show, The Waiting Game. Neither vehicle could be described as event television - unlike the mercilessly funny documentaries that so exquisitely skewered the likes of Imelda Marcos, Fergie and Pamela Anderson. "Oh, I'm doing another six of those," says Ruby, "in the autumn." But why would anyone in their right mind agree to participate? "Because people like Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler and Roseanne became my friends, so they clearly had a good time. But with these other programmes, I am having a ball."

At 48 (although she's vague about her age), Ruby Wax is not a woman you could accuse of being tongue-tied. For every question thrown at her, there is an answer. In fairness, that includes answers to the more difficult ones, too. So, why this relentless output of work - isn't she stretching herself a little thin? "Because I have to earn a living." Her outgoings, she says, are considerable. An only child, her elderly parents are now both permanently hospitalised in Miami, with five nurses in attendance.

"The relationship has gone full circle. Now it's me who takes care of them." Before they became so frail, both had mellowed, says Ruby. "And I've mellowed, too." But, then, don't we all as we get older? "Not necessarily," she says, a distinctly dangerous glint entering her eye. "Look at Angus Deayton. I mean, what is all that about?" She shakes her head. "Still, ours is not to reason why."

Ruby has already said goodbye to her parents. "Psychologically speaking, anyway. Neither of them recognises me any more. This may sound harsh, but I've already done my grieving. They've gone. Their hearts go on beating, but they don't know me. Not that I could sanction anything that ended their lives. No, this is love care. And it's expensive."

When the chat show ends, Ruby will polish the final draft of her upcoming book, How Do You Want Me? which, in turn, will provide much of the source material for her one-woman West End show next February. She's pretty driven, then? "I'm turning it, sure. But I play hard, too." As she'd revealed to that day's studio audience, she'd recently been to see Madonna's new play.

"It was an atrocity," she'd told us, waving her arms willy-nilly round her head in a parody of the Material Girl's performance. "She can't act."

Life seems good. "I have plenty of stamina as long as I get lots of sleep. The kids are in school. I work during the day. Good times, yes."

Will she work less when her parents have gone? "Not if it's work like this. It's too much fun."