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Diddy and the escort girl he paid for by cutting the ribbon on her new pet shop! A hilarious interview with legendary DJ David Hamilton... and the second wife who saved him from bachelordom worthy of a Carry On film
Well, this could be awkward. It was Mrs 'Diddy' David Hamilton — the legendary DJ's second wife — who suggested that I conduct this interview with her husband out on the patio, by the swimming pool.
She leaves us alone, as you would probably do too, if you knew your husband was going to be talking to a national newspaper about all the women he has loved and lost, and — ye gods! — paid for sex with.
Diddy and I have been chatting for an hour by the time Dreena trots out to join us, bringing more tea.
By this time, we have covered some (but not all!) chapters of the 85-year-old broadcaster's rather juicy personal life, laid bare in the astonishingly candid autobiography which sits on the table in front of us.
The conversation topics so far have included his abandonment of his first wife ('who did nothing wrong') for a TV co-presenter he found alluring in a fur coat; his relationship with a 'very beautiful judge's daughter'; his fears he might not have matched up (in romantic prowess) to a lion tamer; his myriad flings with housewives who offered him a bed (and more) for the night, and his horror at being caught 'in flagrante delicto' in a TV dressing room by This Is Your Life's Eamonn Andrews, 'who was quite puritanical, really'.
Broadcaster David 'Diddy' Hamilton with his second wife Dreena
David believes that the BBC has broken the core rule of 'never forgetting who your audience is'
The Hamiltons live in a glorious riverside cottage in Sussex, a most tranquil part of the world
I haven't even got round to asking him about that time with the American stewardess, or his liaisons with a series of Penthouse Pets.
We have, though, spoken at length about the time he found himself in a pickle with an escort girl because, as he keeps assuring me, he is not the sort of man who pays for sex.
Instead, he came to an 'arrangement'. He paid her in kind — by cutting the ribbon at the opening of her pet shop.
'Please say you didn't have sex in the pet shop,' I say, fearing for Diddy's national treasure status, and grappling with a mental image of him rolling around under the budgie cages and dog biscuits.
'Oh no, no, no, no. Not at all,' he clarifies. 'She came to mine.'
Anyway, by the time Mrs Diddy approaches with the tea tray, I wonder if we should shoo her away again.
'Oh, Dreena is very broad-minded,' he says, insisting that she's read the book and wasn't remotely bothered.
Nor will his loyal fans be reaching for the smelling salts. 'They lived through the Swinging Sixties,' he says.
What a blast it is to spend an afternoon chez Diddy. The nickname (he's 5ft 6in) was bestowed on him by Ken Dodd back in the day, who thought it was funny. David found it less funny, but accepted it 'on the basis that there were worse things to be called' and it stuck.
David had a fling with actress Trudi van Doorn in London after she invited him to see her in a West End show
David, one of the great voices of BBC Radio 1 and Radio 2, with his girlfriend Kathy McKinnon in the 1970s
The Diddys — sorry, Hamiltons — live in a glorious riverside cottage in Sussex, a most tranquil part of the world, but not between noon and 2pm on a weekday, perhaps.
I stand on the doorstep for a while, wondering who is playing Elton John at full-blast. It turns out David's daily radio show comes live from the attic room, which means his wife can't hear the doorbell.
The man whose history on the 'wireless' is almost the history of the medium itself (what DJ today can claim a training in Morse code?) emerges from broadcasting-to-the-nation with a pink face and a wide smile, still high on the thrill. He reckons that he's hosted about 13,000 radio shows in his 64-year career, and he's still going strong.
'I'm the oldest person in Britain to be still doing a national daily radio show,' he beams. In truth, he thought Covid would kill off his career, but no.
'I was due to go on Pointless Celebrities in the pandemic and then I got the call to say they couldn't get insurance for me. I remember walking up the lane with Dreena saying, 'This is it. It's over,' but she said, 'It's not over till the fat lady sings.' '
Two years later came an offer to join Boom Radio, the station that has scooped up some of those legendary DJs put out to pasture by the BBC. Now a million listeners a month tune in to Boom, which he says is causing the BBC to prick up their own ears.
'And what do they want to do now? They want to launch their own boomer station to oppose us, because we have made it work. Terrible isn't it? It's so… s****y.'
We shall return to his forthright views on the BBC, but the extraordinary thing is that he is still broadcasting daily while fighting cancer.
Back in 2022, David was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer called polycythaemia vera, which is held at bay by chemotherapy. That healthy complexion is actually the result of his cancer, which causes the body to overproduce red blood cells.
'It's one of the better cancers to have. They picked it up because my blood was too thick,' he explains, then adds, with a chuckle, 'I was too red-blooded.'
David with his wife Dreena and her daughter Charlotte
What does a red-blooded man like Diddy do when he hears the word 'cancer'? 'He sits down and writes a book.'
If there is one takeaway from the memoir it is this: Radio 1 and even Radio 2 DJs in the Seventies and Eighties (and he famously broadcast simultaneously on both stations) were getting a lot of sex.
Like the stars whose records they played, they had groupies galore.
'Yes, we became like the pop stars, and women did throw themselves at us — and I caught them. I was like a kid in a candy store.'
How many women? 'Ah, my friend Tony Blackburn once said he'd been with 500 women but I think he regretted that. I honestly didn't keep count, and even if I had, I wouldn't say. A gentleman never tells.'
To be fair, the book isn't full of braggadocio. His honesty about his failings as a husband and father are sometimes touching. And this is a man who, reflecting from the last chapter of his life, knows full well that he was very lucky to find (another) good woman.
'There is a point you get to when it feels like a very empty existence,' he says of the endless sex. 'You start to wonder, 'What if I get ill? Who would come and visit me in hospital. Who would care?.'
David Hamilton was a wartime baby. Born David Pilditch in 1938, (he took his mother's maiden name when told radio audiences would struggle with Pilditch), he spent his formative years on this very land, evacuated to the farm on this site.
Listening to the radio was his 'window to the world'. In 2005 he discovered, quite by chance, that the farm was owned by a member of the pop group Marmalade — and he bought it. 'Life has come full circle,' he says.
His was a lonely childhood, and he was clearly scarred by his parents' split. His mother took up with another man, and regretted it later 'because my father was a good man'. How history repeats itself. 'The irony is I did the same to my children,' he agrees.
David now thinks of Dreena's children as his own
By the mid-Seventies David - smooth of voice, and of reputation - was a household name
There was an early loss of innocence in childhood. At 13, he was molested by an older man at a football match. 'No one even knew the word paedophile then.'
He started his broadcast career in Forces Radio during National Service with the RAF, but his early career was in local TV.
One of his first interviewees was Cliff Richard. 'He was 18; I was 20.'
In 1962 he married a pretty make-up artist called Sheila. She was pregnant with their daughter Jane, and would go on to have David Jnr. 'I loved her very much,' he reflects. 'Although you may wonder from the book whether I fell in love a lot.'
When their children were still tiny, however, he walked out, into the arms of his TV co-presenter Roz Early. 'The first time I saw her I thought 'Wow. This is the woman of my dreams,' ' he admits. 'I don't feel good about it.'
After four years, it was all over. 'Roz wanted to have children and I didn't, and you can't deny a young woman that,' he says. But he discovered later that she had never really got over a previous love, a circus lion tamer. 'Maybe life was more exciting and thrilling with him than it was with me. I'm sure it was, actually.'
By the mid-Seventies David — smooth of voice, and of reputation — was a household name. One magazine called him the 'housewives' superstar'. Another voted him the second Biggest TV Turn-on. Tom Selleck was No 1.
His love life was tabloid fodder — the red tops particularly agog at his relationship with that judge's daughter ('who once danced on a table naked'). Funnily enough, she found him lacking in the drugs part of the 'sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll' lifestyle.
'Once, she said 'You are very square, you know', because I didn't even really drink that much but she used to smoke dope, so I did have one of her funny cigarettes. It didn't do much for me. I quite fancied a Mars Bar after. Or a lie down.'
He tried it again, with a researcher while working in New York. It was she with whom he was caught by Eamonn Andrews in a dressing room.
'He said: 'That man will never appear on This Is Your Life.' And I never did until Michael Aspel took over.'
Born David Pilditch in 1938, he had a lonely childhood that was scarred by his parents' split
David Hamilton's autobiography, Long And Winding Road, published by Austin Macauley, is out now
It's all hilarious to recount, but he concedes he came close to losing his family. At one point, Sheila and the children went on holiday to Malta, and decided to live there. 'That was a very difficult time. I visited and they were speaking broken English.
'I came home very upset.' And despite outward appearances — in those days he drove an Aston Martin, then a Rolls-Royce — he was working all the hours to fund two homes, and perhaps keep his ego afloat too.
Have your children forgiven you? 'Oh yes. That was a long time ago now.'
Yikes to them reading about the pet shop 'deal' though. In the book he calls the hostess Melanie, 'although that's not her real name'. He slept with her four times, then opened her shop, 'and a nice crowd turned up'.
'It does sound like a film itself this, doesn't it?' he says, perhaps thinking that he was Richard Gere in Pretty Woman. Alas he wasn't. 'I knew she would be with another man the next day, and I thought, 'I'd better nip this in the bud now'. Obviously, I haven't seen her since.'
Oh, for Melanie to now recognise herself and call into his show, requesting some Pet Shop Boys. Does he wonder how her life panned out?
'I like to think she'd have a chuckle about it. She's probably married now with several kids. People choose their path in life, don't they? I would think if the pet shop had been successful, she would have given the other job up.'
Had David continued on this path himself he could have self-destructed, but in 1981, friends set him up on a blind date with aerobics teacher Dreena. She came with three children, considerable baggage for a man who did not want a second family. 'But by then I had grown up,' he says.
'There was quite a brouhaha when we got together,' Dreena admits. 'My friends did say, 'You can't marry him. He is a womaniser', but we've been together for 40 years now, married for 30. And there are no regrets there.'
Hilariously, those who warned Dreena off the relationship on account of David's diddiness, never mind his ladies' man tendencies, were also given short shrift. Dreena says that some thought that the height difference (she is 5ft 8in to his 5ft 6in) made them an odd couple.
'In fact, we were once at a showbiz event — where I was wearing heels with my ballgown, so the difference would have been considerable — and in the queue for the ladies this woman said, 'Oh, he is soooo much smaller than you. How awful for you.' I leaned over and I said, 'Inches have never been a problem for us'.'
He can't say it was easy. 'At times it felt like World War III. But now I think of Dreena's children as my own. In fact, I probably did see more of them than I did my own children.' Now they have nine grandchildren between them.
Dreena runs to fetch photos of her daughter Charlotte's recent wedding as evidence that Diddy has come good. 'David gave her away. She asked him to. She adores him.'
Family aside, I suspect that the job was always David's true love. He admits now that when he was shifted from Radio 1 to Radio 2, he was devastated.
'Nobody has a right to be there for ever, but I was only 38, and the man who told me was years older. His choice of music was South Pacific and The Sound Of Music. If I'd been rude, I should have said to him, 'If anybody's going, it should be you.' '
He has watched with dismay the recent changes at Radio 2, with old timers like Ken Bruce being let go, and the resulting loss of its audience. He believes that the BBC has broken the core rule of 'never forgetting who your audience is'.
'I'm disappointed with the BBC because I was very proud to work for them for many years. For a station like Radio 2 to just turn its back on such a big audience like that… The mistake they are making is that younger people don't listen to the radio the way my generation does. They go to Spotify. It's an audience Radio 2 are not going to get.'
He's furious that only now — when boomers like him have had to go elsewhere for work — that the BBC is suddenly remembering its loyal listeners. Not that he'd be tempted back.
'I've worked for awful management. I'm working for nice people now, and I treasure that. You see, radio is not like a football team, an army going to war. Radio is soft and friendly and cuddly. You are cuddling people with your voice and your music.'
How long can Diddy Hamilton go on broadcasting? He doesn't want to 'do a Biden' and hang on longer than he should. 'But I will trust Dreena on that. When she tells me it is time, it will be time.'
David Hamilton's autobiography, Long And Winding Road, published by Austin Macauley, is out now.