We had the studio beautifully set up, cyclorama in smooth backdrop, fully lit for a formal half-hour interview with him … when Charles Haughey was led into a studio and found one of the matching black leather thrones occupied by me, he seemed to assume that this was as planned.

I did a kitchen-sink interview: everything got thrown, including Col Gadafy’s carpet [a gift] and Terry Keane. (It should be remembered that this was at least 50 years ago, when the Keane love affair was widely rumoured, but not known for sure, even to Seán, the son who later succeeded Haughey in his constituency.)

At the end of the interview, Haughey [Fianna Fáil leader and repeatedly taoiseach] was good and mad. After I thanked him, the cameras continued to record because that was how I had briefed the camera operators, and so they captured him leaning across, grasping me by the knee and telling me I was a rude bitch. It was said half-furiously, half-appreciatively.

The tape was rewound, a pot of weak tea brought, and assessment begun. Haughey was initially defensive, resentfully – and wrongly – predicting what criticisms I would make. Once he copped on that assessment wasn’t the same as criticism, he became fascinated by it, curious about what distinguished the written from the spoken word and intrigued by the need to be singular and specific, rather than general and conceptual.

We probably got only seven minutes into the recording, because even when you interview somebody for 40 minutes, as I had in this case, everything you need is to be found in the first minutes. The reason we would play a recording from start to finish is because the density of concentration on the first min