Born to be mild

Alan is on his way to Sheffield to promote his new book, Nobbut A Lad, a series of heartwarming tales based on his Fifties childhood in the West Yorkshire town of Ilkley. He grew up in a world where "do as you would be done by" was the order of the day; where you left your back door open come rain or shine and where he was taught to keep his head down and "blend in".

Alan considers himself lucky to have had such a childhood. His father, also called Alan, was a plumber, his mum, Bessie, "adored the doctor, tripe and vinegar and a drop of Bell's Scotch Whisky", and he had a younger sister, Kath.

"My father was, in that closet Yorkshire way, quite undemonstrative in terms of verbalising his feelings," he says. "But I was properly cared for. We didn't have much but we always had new shoes from Clarks because they fitted properly. The money was spent in the right places."

He inherited his parents' predilection for good manners and the idea that "if you've haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, don't say anything at all".

"I was brought up to be well behaved, which is so boring to say, but I think more than anything else to blend in - no showing off or getting ideas above your station. Don't come top of the class, but don't come bottom either," he says.

"I think I really couldn't imagine that that was it and that was what life was going to be like, that I would always be struggling to clamber some foot up, so it came as an enormous relief to discover when I left school that I seemed to be good at something."

Alan's school days weren't exactly the best times of his life. He failed his 11-plus and his lasting memories of school are of being told to shut up - his crime as he saw it, being too enthusiastic.

He recalls, in one heartbreaking scene, how he was happily making a wizard's hat one day, only for his teacher to pick up the unfinished hat, plonk it on his young head and - unaware to Alan - proceed to write the letter D for dunce on the hat in front of the laughing class. This cruel image has stayed with him ever since, along with a lack of self confidence which he describes as a "curse" that has plagued him for 50-odd years.

It is a subject he has talked about in many interviews recently and he sighs when it is brought up again, before laughing good naturedly.

"People are going to find it very... I shouldn't keep going on about it," he says. "It is a cross to bear and when you've grown up with it is almost impossible to shake off, or you shake it off for a bit, then suddenly it taps you on the shoulder again."

In what form would it tap him on the shoulder? In the form of bad reviews?

"Yes. I think there's always that. If you do something and something's done well and you just get into that state of mind of having a bit of confidence, then I'll read something, and I'll think 'I'm actually glad they've found me out, I've just been fooling other people all along'. You never think they might not have got it right."

Did he ever feel disappointed throughout his younger days because no one spotted the talent inside him?

"I did because I felt enthusiasm should have counted for something and it seemed so often that it didn't," he says. "Perhaps I was sensitive but I remember being crestfallen more than anything. Maybe if I'd been told I'd be wonderful I would now be impossible to deal with. I wouldn't wish to have been any different. I feel I've got a bit more comfortable with myself and I've always realised my good fortune.

"My childhood made me what I am and I've done all right later on."

"All right" is Alan being typically Yorkshire and understated - not showing off.

Alan's love of all things green came from visits to his Grandad Hardisty's allotment on the banks of the River Wharfe where he felt a sense of peace and solitude. He started growing things in his parents' back garden aged ten and after school became an apprentice gardener at his local nursery.

From his work on BBC's Pebble Mill, he has gone on to present Gardener's World, Songs of Praise, Titchmarsh's Travels, British Isles: A Natural History and, of course, Ground Force - the show which made him a world-wide star.

"I can remember being in America and we went out to Bloomingdales and this shop assistant said 'I lurrrrve your prograaaaame," he says, affecting an American accent. "I told myself at the time, either get used to it or call it off. I am in the public eye but I try not to let that affect what I do, I still go to the supermarket."

Alan is also the author of 40 gardening books and has shot off in a new direction too, writing best-selling romantic novels. He prefers to write in silence in the loft above the barn at the Hampshire home he shares with wife Alison. The couple have two grown up children, Polly and Camilla.

But he confesses he didn't always intend to write romantic fiction, it just turned out that way.

"I thought oh crumbs, I seem to be a romantic novelist," he says.

Alan has won countless awards over the years but perhaps he won't want to mention the Literary Review Bad Sex Award he received for one of his novels. I mention it anyway.

"Oh that," he says, laughing. "My daughter keeps saying 'they're not still going on about that are they?' It was eight years ago and it wasn't even me who won, it was Sebastian Faulks." He laughs again, halting what I suspect could have been a tirade of pent up frustration and burning injustice over the matter. But that appears to be Alan - as amiable as he seems on television - annoyingly so to some, a lovely, lovely man in the minds of others.

He says there are some things which irritate him; bad manners for one, intolerance another and people who are inconsiderate towards others.

He's just finished filming The Nature of Britain, due to be shown next autumn, and there are more novels to write.

Do any of his plans include presenting the Channel 4 show Countdown?

"I was asked," he says. "But the commitment was huge and with my other commitments I couldn't fit it in, so it wasn't for me at the moment."

But he's not ruling it out. Our interview at an end, I wish him well with his book tour, which will see him in Darlington today. It always bolsters his confidence when he sees a queue of people waiting to meet him and there's part of him, I'm sure, who can't quite believe they're all there to see him. He ends the interview as pleasantly as it began, happily signing off with the words: "Ok love. Thank you very much indeed."

* Alan Titchmarsh will be signing copies of his new book Nobbut A Lad: A Yorkshire Childhood (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99) at Waterstones, Darlington, (formerly Ottakar's) at 2pm today.