The left-hand side or the right-hand side? It was so hard to choose when there were three or four of us in the marriage. Now I'm happy with the centre. For some reason I am reminded of Carpaccio's St Ursula. Probably because I can't resist showing off my erudition.
I was born in Stockport in 1933. I never liked the name Joan and I always wished I had been called Diana. Or maybe that's my memory playing up. It's so hard to be sure. I want to write lovingly of my parents every bit as much as I want to name-drop Proust and Nabokov. But I find it hard with my mother because she was a miserable depressive who never got any help.
We went to Argentina, which is on the eastern seaboard of South America, just before the war. And then we came back. During the war I prayed for the Germans to win because the church commanded us to love our enemies. It may surprise you to learn that I was the school swot and I won a place at Cambridge.
How free I felt there and how wonderful to meet all sorts of other brilliant people with whom I would go on to work. I revelled in the new feminism of Simone de Beauvoir! So much so that I was married to Michael and bringing up two children in next to no time. Dizzy days.
I met a stranger at a party in north London and asked him his name. There was a long pause, pregnant with possibilities. "Ah," I said, breaking the silence. "You must be Harold Pinter." We immediately embarked on a long and passionate affair that was celebrated in Harold's remarkable play The Betrayal.
Michael discovered our affair but was happy for it to continue as he was having a few of his own. What times the 1960s were. I soon started working on the new Late Night Line Up in the first days of BBC2, and it was wonderful to work with so many of the most gifted people of my generation.
It was then that Frank Muir called me The Thinking Man's Crumpet. People often ask me if I minded, and the truth is that sometimes I did and sometimes I didn't. But I always thought it was better than being labelled The Thinking Man's Ear Trumpet.
Michael and I eventually divorced. It had become increasingly difficult to stop my affair with Harold becoming public knowledge, as one of us was acquiring an international reputation and the other was a playwright.
I was then dropped by the BBC, married Jack Emery, another depressive. I do seem to pick them. He had an affair and we split up and I did a lot more fascinating television shows, such as Heart of the Matter. Now I'm 70, which I'm told is the new 50. Rock'n'roll, girls and boys.
The digested read... digested
The Princess of Hearts of early BBC2
