Richard Madeley is trying to convince me that, despite outward appearances, he’s actually very careful about what he says. “My mind moves quite quickly but I always have a filter,” he claims.

I suspect it’s a subject the presenter gets asked about a lot. Let’s not forget, this is a man whose outbursts are so infamous there are entire websites that remind us he really did tell a woman who lost out on a lottery win of £928,000 “Maybe it’s for the best”; asked a transsexual if she missed having a penis and once complained: “I haven’t seen a sex scene on television recently that has remotely turned me on. And I’ve been there till 4am waiting for it”.

One of the reasons ITV show This Morning became such compulsive viewing in the 13 years he presented it was to see what he would say next – and how longsuffering wife and co-host Judy Finnigan would react.

But he claims their on-air double act was just that.

“The idea Judy was mortified by what I’d said is b******s,”

he scoffs. “Her eye-rolling was just good television.

We used to play things up – of course we did.”

Anyway, that was then. The couple left This Morning in 2001 to move to Channel 4 where they presented a similar show called Richard & Judy (as many had taken to calling This Morning during their tenure) for seven years before moving to another show on UKTV’s digital channel Watch. The latter attracted such low viewing figures neither was sorry to call it a day in 2009.

Well, Finnigan wasn’t sorry. In truth, Madeley did wonder how he would fare, whether he would get withdrawal symptoms from TV. But he’s now started a new chapter as a fledgling novelist and says he couldn’t be happier.

After his well-received autobiographical work Fathers & Sons in 2009, Someday I’ll Find You is his first work of fiction, the World War Two-set tale of Diana Arnold, whose ill-fated marriage to “a sexy, handsome fighter pilot – every girl’s dream partner”

leads to events that will haunt her ten years later.

The plot came to him in a dream apparently. “I came down to cook Sunday lunch one day and I suddenly realised a whole family had moved into my head while I’d slept in the night,” he says incredulously, as well one might. “There they were, sitting round the table having Sunday lunch arguing about Hitler!”

He says it sounds as if he’d gone mad and I don’t disagree.

“But there they were and I eavesdropped on them: the beautiful young girl, the brother training to be a fighter pilot, the father a lawyer and the mother a painter – although not as good as she thinks she is. They had names and everything!”

The book is written from Diana’s perspective and – assuming she didn’t dictate it to him from the dinner table – I wonder if he found it hard to get into the female psyche?

He tells me a lot of people have commented that it reads like “a woman’s book” (which wasn’t exactly what I meant).

“I didn’t write it as that but I realised that yes, if you were to categorise it, it would be more women’s fiction than men’s. If you’ve done 13 years on This Morning you can’t fail to get in touch with your feminine side. But you know, I’m married and I have a daughter so I think I know a bit about these things.”

Finnigan’s first novel, Eloise, came out last year and has gone on to become a bestseller. That surely puts the pressure on him?

“I feel totally pressured! But we’re not in competition at all. I’m so proud of her and what she’s achieved but of course it raises the bar for me and in that regard I have to leave it in the hands of God.”

He pauses for a moment before adding: “And readers.”

He admits he will be disappointed if it flops.

“But there’s still a sense of achievement whatever happens.

To open a book with your name on it is like having a baby, because it’s all you. It’s not even as if you reported on something. This was all in your head and now it’s on paper.”

It’s just the kind of inanity that has frequently seen Madeley compared to Steve Coogan’s comic creation Alan Partridge. But his enthusiasm is rather endearing, just as it is when he rhapsodises about his wife. The couple, who were both married to other people when they first met in 1982, have been together for nearly 30 years and have been through their share of ups and downs.

“But you make a commitment,”

pronounces Madeley, “to be there in the downtimes as well as in the euphoria.

I think we’ve been very lucky – lucky to have met the right person at the right time, lucky to have changed together. So many great marriages change in different directions and people can’t help it, they suddenly realise they’re miles apart. By pure good luck our vines have grown in the same direction and stayed entwined.”

He doesn’t give a hoot what anyone else thinks anyway.

He’s 57 and he’s had “a really nice” career on telly that continues to serve him well.

“I’ve interviewed some amazing people and, in hindsight, our show [This Morning] was seen as quite groundbreaking.

I don’t have anything to prove now. I do things I want to do and I’m happy I’m still out there to be shot at.” Shot at? Is that how he sees it?

“Oh yeah, of course. There’s always someone on TV you absolutely hate – you’ve never met them but you have an irrational dislike of them. I feel like that about people so I have no doubt other people feel that way about me and they’re perfectly entitled to.”

I wonder if he is quite so blithe about his daughter Chloe, a 25-year-old model and “fitness enthusiast” with a fondness for appearing half-dressed in tabloid newspapers. Is he anxious to protect her against the inevitable slings and arrows of a media career?

“I don’t worry about her in the slightest. She knows exactly what she’s doing. She’s developing a career in health and fitness and that’s why she does these photoshoots – to demonstrate the results.

She has an old head on young shoulders and she’s grown up seeing the way Judy and I handle these things.

If I had a pound for every negative feature about me! But people don’t throw rotten fruit at you in the street because of something nasty someone wrote about you in the press; it doesn’t affect your career. We never cared and neither does Chloe.”

He does however admit to a few hopes and dreams for his new granddaughter Ivy, the daughter of Tom, Judy’s son from her first marriage.

“I’d like to pass on the gift of happiness and enjoying life” he says. “We’re only here the one time and it’s very important to enjoy it.” For once, Richard Madeley might have said something sensible.

*Richard Madeley will be in conversation about Someday I’ll Find You with Judy Finnigan at the Ropetackle Arts Centre, Shoreham on Thursday (July 4). For tickets, visit www.rope tacklecentre.

co.uk.

*Some Day I’ll Find You is out on July 4 (Simon & Schuster, £7.99).