Richard and Judy

Daytime television's most famous couple talk sex tips, bikinis and non-stop tweets with Deborah Ross

(Dan Burn-Forti)

The first thing I hear when I arrive at a private club in London to meet Richard and Judy is Richard saying excitedly: "It looks as if he is doing a poo!", to which Judy responds, as you would hope she would respond, this being Richard and Judy, by flicking her eyes heavenwards and saying: "Richard!", so I say it too. "Richard!" I say, if only out of the sense that unless all exasperated, middle-aged women stick together and flick their eyes heavenwards, the Richards of this world would run riot and then we'd all be in trouble.

They'd be jumping out from behind the aisles in the supermarket, broadcasting details of your hormonal ups and downs and offering conception advice along the lines of: "When we were trying to conceive, I would douse my balls in icy water before intercourse". So I say: "Richard!" and flicker my eyes heavenwards. If you're given the opportunity to do a Richard! you just run with it, surely? How many people have the opportunity in their lifetime? Still, why are we Richard!-ing?

Well, the photographer has set up for the picture with a chair formally positioned in the middle of a room, and has used his assistant for some test shots. It's the assistant's rather strained sitting posture which has inspired Richard's remark. I say: "Judy, is there no stopping him?". She says their son Jack is exactly the same, before drifting off to quietly inspect the room's paintings, while Richard jabbers away. She is a great drifter, and I do wonder if, these days, she wouldn't rather just be left alone. He, meanwhile, is a great jabberer, in person, and on Twitter, where he might tweet: "Right, it's late and I really do have to go to bed," rather as if we might otherwise not be able to tear ourselves away.

I love Richard and Judy. I love her pensiveness and common sense and sensational cleavage and startlingly blue eyes. I love his shiny-haired bounciness and the way he looks as if he might use Lynx or Brut, even though he probably doesn't. I don't know, frankly, if I could ever love his doused, icy balls, but you'd get used to them after a while, presumably? You'd gird yourself.

We do the photographs. They are chalk and cheese, physically, as in most other ways. Richard is all lean and loping while Judy is sturdier and softer and quite stately in her purple Principles frock. Richard, at 55, is eight years younger, and may look it, but she's always been the sexier one. It's counter-intuitive but true, I think. (A highly unscientific survey of my friends reveals more men would like to do her than women would like to do him, although it may just be the thought of all that girding.)

Anyway, when I later ask them what advice they would give themselves if they could travel back in time, to when they were just starting out, Richard says: "Do not take yourself seriously. If you take yourself seriously you will suffer terrible, terrible tortures. You will read reviews that will absolutely rubbish you, and it will hurt. Just be comfortable in your own skin, and allow people to hate you. It's a free world." And Judy? How about you? "I would have given a lot to have been given a very thick extra skin. I'm not as sanguine as Richard is about it. I don't read the TV critics much, but when I do..." "They're very misogynistic," interjects Richard, as he so often does. "Such misogynistic rubbish," she continues. "They are not on about me now, thank God, but they're on about every other woman on TV and it's disgusting."

She was once photographed on a beach in the south of France under the headline: "Blancmange in a bikini". "It was horrifying," she says. You should have worn a burkini, I say. She laughs. She is very warm, for all her drifting, and may be quite vulnerable, although I don't think she'd want you to see it. Richard is marvellous at being outraged on her behalf, and may well idolise her. He loves to talk her up. He says he knew Peter Mandelson was gay before it was known he was gay just by the way he looked at Judy when he appeared on This Morning. "We have a big gay following and gay men look at Judy in the same way they look at Judy Garland. There is a kind of worship. It was a commercial break and Mandelson was on next and he was waiting and I could see him looking at you, Judy, with utter worship in his eyes, and utter pleasure that he was about to enter your orbit, and I thought: 'Yes, he's gay'."

I don't know if Judy is entirely convinced by Richard's gay-divining abilities, but she smiles patiently all the same. We finish the pictures, then meander into the club's courtyard for what was intended to be a cup of tea but turns into a glass of wine, because Judy, being a lush, can't keep away for too long. I'm kidding! There have always been scandalous rumours about their marriage, most notably alcoholism on her part, but they say it's all rubbish.

Judy has had health issues. A knee operation. An eye operation. A hysterectomy. This is why she has sometimes looked a bit tired in public. When an allegation about alcohol was made recently in print, Richard got a barrister onto it "because it's deeply unfair. Judy just doesn't have these issues". I have a glass of red. Richard has rosé. Judy has Cava, two bottles, then a whisky chaser (Kidding! Kidding!).

We're here, ostensibly, to talk about the Richard and Judy Book Club which first launched on Channel 4 in 2004, and which they now run in tandem with WH Smith. The club, despite not having a TV presence any more, has proved a dizzying success, selling two million copies of the selected titles – Richard and Judy pick eight each season – since last autumn. It is most satisfying, particularly as the literary world sneered when the club was mooted. The first winner of their Book of the Year was Monica Ali's Brick Lane but, Richard says, she refused to pick up her award. "Incredible snobbishness," he adds, "incredible." I ask them what their own favourite books of recent years are. Judy says hers is Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife, "which is f***ing fantastic". Richard says his is Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, "which has footnotes! Footnotes!".

They are both now working on novels of their own. Judy's is a ghost story set in Cornwall while Richard's is a family drama set around the Second World War. Richard says Judy's is "really good" while Judy says Richard's is "really good", which is, I suppose, really good. Richard jabbers on – he can be unstoppable – about his: "After Fathers and Sons [his well-received book on his own family history, among other things] everyone said I should write a novel, but I couldn't think of a plot. A publisher even offered me a plot, but I refused. Then, one morning, I woke up, went downstairs to make tea and I'd given birth to all these people – a whole family! – in my head. Amazing!" We've lost Judy at this point, as she is somewhere else entirely – staring into the distance with those startlingly blue eyes.

Richard is still busy making programmes, standing in for Chris Evans on Radio 2, tweeting like a mad thing – "I haven't fallen off a cliff! I've been in the Algarve!" – whereas Judy has almost fully retreated. I'm not saying Richard drags her around like some reluctant, sad, circus bear, but if the wider world went away I'm guessing she wouldn't mind too much.

She has said she will never do television again. And nothing could induce her? "No," she says, "but it isn't because of all the misogynistic crap." Why, then? Boredom? "Yes," she says, "I was getting bored by the end, especially by the last show we did." Alas, they just sort of petered out on a digital channel called Watch which nobody did (watch, that is). And how did it feel, I ask Judy, going into work every day to make a programme that had almost no viewers? She says: "I couldn't have cared less".

They started, of course, in 1988 with This Morning. I say the key to This Morning's success was their married relationship, and the fact that they sat on that sofa doing what married people do. They bickered and teased and flirted and sulked and rowed and laughed and gave away bedtime secrets and tried Viagra. I think Richard was rather disappointed with Viagra. "It's not an aphrodisiac. It just makes things last a little longer," he says. But the best bits, of course, were always the glares Judy gave Richard when he was being silly, or those jabs to the ribs ... priceless. "I knew it was good TV," admits Richard, "even though I had to bear the bruises."

In 2001, they moved to Channel 4, making a success of the 5pm slot before deciding to pack it in altogether in 2008. "But then a month before we were due to finish, UKTV came along with a huge cheque and said: 'We're launching a brand new channel and it will be a zero audience to start with but we think you are the guys to build it up', and we just couldn't resist ..."

The cheque? "... the challenge." However, just before they went on air, the channel went from free to paid-for and no one could find it. They called it a day after six months, and did not find it at all humiliating. "It was quite funny in the end," says Judy, "our figures were dropping so relentlessly, Richard said more people were following him on Twitter than were actually watching." "Our audience had fallen to hospital radio levels," confirms Richard cheerfully.

We finish by sitting in the sun, sipping our wine, talking about this and that. We talk about Piers Morgan and wonder if there is anything out there that could ever embarrass him. (No, we decide.) I ask what they like to watch on TV. "I'm hooked," says Judy, "on Medium with Patricia Arquette. I love her to bits." "Judy," says Richard excitedly, "is practically having a lesbian affair with Patricia Arquette!" "Richard!" says Judy. "Richard!" I say. The best thing about Richard and Judy is that there is no "real" Richard and Judy. They are as seen on TV, and I miss them, and want them back, although I'm guessing Judy is not for turning. Maybe all that girding has simply taken it out of her. It would me.

For more on Richard and Judy's Summer Book Club, visit richardandjudy.co.uk. The podcast is available now on iTunes

Photographs by Dan Burn-Forti