How In the Psychiatrist’s Chair got inside the minds of stars

This week’s audio highlights are stacked with celebrity revelations from the recent past. First up is Anthony Hopkins: “Booze is very attractive, and it’s terrific stuff if you can handle it … millions upon millions of normal people can actually do it. I can’t.”

Or Bob Monkhouse: “I know I was an accident.” Or Esther Rantzen: “You’re looking at a 10-stone brunette underneath this eight-and-a-half stone blonde.” 

Their dogged interviewer was the late psychiatrist Anthony Clare, who from 1982 to 2001 unspooled the minds of many stars. Archive on 4: In the Psychiatrist’s Chair digs into the legacy of his Radio 4 series, with the help of another fantastic inquisitor: former Desert Island Discs presenter Kirsty Young.

After a gentle start, new and archive interviews are brilliantly interwoven with her commentary. There’s a great moment when Clare asks Spike Milligan if he could have done his best comedy without his struggles with severe mental illness. A long pause follows and Milligan admits that he could not. 

Young relishes every moment – “the parrying, the probing, the tenacity!” – but this isn’t just fan worship. She explores Clare’s difficulties interviewing guests such as Ann Widdecombe, a woman of strong faith, and Uri Geller, who bent a spoon in front of the host (who struggles to know how to respond). Young talks to psychiatrist Carine Minne about Clare’s 1991 encounter with Jimmy Savile, during which he tried and failed to get Savile to discuss his feelings. Savile said he didn’t have any. “I would dare speculate that feelings, for [Savile], if he had any, were located in everyone else,” Minne says.

Tales From the Celebrity Trenches is of another mood entirely. “The money I used to piss away,” says Simon Cowell in the opening moments of episode one. “You once paid three million quid on burlesque vaginas,” adds presenter Jamie East, seconds later, before interviewing the man who “built the modern celebrity factory, only to find himself as one of the most enduring products”.

Cowell is, of course, doing this to plug something – a new boy band, December 10 – but East, former boss of gossip website Holy Moly, entertainingly peels back the shiny curtain to reveal the madness behind it. Smash Hits-worthy moments include a discussion of the X Factor dressing room that Cowell says gave him norovirus, and East’s remark after asking his subject if he’s a billionaire (“you’ve done all right – your underfloor heating’s been on all day”).

Cowell also reveals he still worries about money (“because I know what it’s like when you’ve got absolutely nothing”), admits to taking Xanax because he’s nervous at parties, and discusses the death of One Direction’s Liam Payne (“It was so bad. I was in pieces … which is why I literally just disappeared to think it through”). He also later says he felt “sick” when he first watched The Traitors. East suggests it’s because Cowell wishes he’d come up with the idea – and he’s right.

Meanwhile, Bananarama’s Siobhan Fahey is quoting Hunter S Thompson’s assessment of the music business in the first episode of Hit That Perfect Beat: The London Records Story. “[It’s] a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” She giggles. “That’s good, isn’t it?”

Against a pulsing pop soundtrack, we’re whirled through the label’s thrilling 1980s, led by perky former Smash Hits journalist and artist Siân Pattenden. Enjoy Bananarama, Bronski Beat and Fine Young Cannibals emerging from DIY beginnings as distinctive pop personalities, and future DJ Pete Tong serendipitously signing Run-DMC and Salt-N-Pepa. But Dannii Minogue has the episode’s best line, on what great music is like: “It’s rub-your-ass-against-the-speaker good.”

Photograph by Homer Sykes / Alamy