Frankly, that’s a thought my Sunday morning could have done without. There’s a comforting, almost 1950s, feel about Andrew Marr’s face. It’s a television face only in the sense that he’s got satellite dishes attached to the side of it. Admirable Andrew Marr has taken over from David Frost in that political Sunday morning slot.

“What’s the feeling in your bowels?” Andrew asked John Major. I have thoroughly enjoyed myself and I had such a craic with people for 30 years,” he insists.. He hopes they have learned the lesson that the time for reality television may be drawing to a close because “in the main the public is bored shitless by it”.He says he “can’t be doing with reality television” and loathed “from the bottom of my soul the first series of Big Brother and haven’t watched any more”. He does, however, make an exception for Ant and Dec and I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here.”ITV should get back at what they are best at, which is making great television programmes. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is a well-made programme,” he says, tongue in cheek.Tarrant is obviously not short of the odd million or so and has been carefully investing his money in property over the years, but he has never gone down the Chris Evans route of owning and then selling the company to become mega rich.He was under pressure when he was 35 or 40 to set up his own company, but he says that he wanted neither the risk nor the aggravation.”Wage slaves like me and Wogan and Aspel and co have sort of done all right and you do let the companies take the strain,” he says.Is there anything in his career he regrets, apart perhaps from the row when an old picture of him in the back of a taxi with Sophie Rhys-Jones was sold to The Sun just before her wedding?”No I bloody well don’t It is a case of what you see is what you get I’ve had a bloody good run.

The Tarrants, the Evanses and probably soon the Wogans and the Steve Wrights will shuffle off from the microphone and the fear is all the companies will think about is record rotation and focus groups.”There is a danger that we will get away from personality-led radio because it’s too expensive. I could not tell you a single record that Kenny played but I remember his jingles, his nonsense, his madness.”Tarrant also has a message for the bosses of commercial television. The test of great radio is sitting in a traffic jam somewhere in London in the middle of the afternoon and remembering something that Kenny Everett said 20 years ago or something I said. That’s the job actually, isn’t it,” he concludes.He believes there is a sort of hiatus in commercial radio at the moment. He would not claim to be an all-round entertainer doing the “song and dance stuff” like Bruce Forsyth. He specialises in telling larger-than-life anecdotes and essentially being himself.The cheeky chappie of Capital Radio combined with the English honours graduate of Birmingham University?”Half a brain cell,” he laughs in response.In 2001 he won a Sony radio award for his “unique relationship with his listeners” “Yes.