The only time I've dreamed about someone off TV, it was Simon Cowell. I'll spare you the details but I've always wondered what it was about him that made such an instant hit with my subconscious. So when I recently spotted him at Michael Winner's book launch, I couldn't resist weaving over to introduce myself and say "Hi, I've always wanted to interview you!" Unfortunately in my excitement, I spilled my champagne all over someone who was standing beside him, whom I completely ignored, persisting in telling Simon Cowell that interviewing him was my dearest wish in life - except that it came out as 'my dearest swish" because I was not entirely sober. He stared at me with that strange glittering half-smile we know so well from X Factor and said, "Fine." Fine? It was the last answer I was expecting so I just stood there gawping. "Do you want to take a number?" Cowell prompted, and I said "Oh yes, good idea!" and produced my diary and wrote down the number he dictated and then in very large capitals beside it wrote the name "SIMON CALLOW." Cowell glittered some more. "So nice to meet you, Linda," he said.
Well that's blown it, I thought the next day, but anyway I rang the number and got his PR man who - again to my amazement - said, "Fine." You do know that we don't pay for interviews? I said sternly. "That's all right - Simon and I are very rich men. Give me your number and we'll get back to you." And blow me, they did. Admittedly there were three or four changes of date, and I was told I could only have an hour, and if we wanted to take Cowell's photograph we would have to provide a make-up artist (we decided not to bother), but essentially he was as good as his word.
So I went to see him at Sony-BMG, where he works in a dull office in southwest London. He greeted me in a friendly enough way and chatted about Michael Winner - he knows him from Sandy Lane, Barbados, where they always spend Christmas and New Year. Cowell is flying out there as soon as X Factor finishes. "Michael is someone I never thought I'd be friends with but having met him, he's hysterical and charming and actually a very nice person, though he doesn't like to show it, but he's incredibly good-natured - I adore him." Did he hear Winner on the radio the other day saying he was short of money? "No. But tell him if he is, I'll buy his house - that'll sort him out."
Cowell could afford to buy Winner's house because he is now supposedly the richest man in television, worth US$200 million. He is paid US$30 million a series for American Idol in the US (making him the second-highest-paid American presenter after Oprah Winfrey) and US$40 million over three years for X Factor in the UK. He also produces other shows like America's Got Talent and Britain's Got Talent and has the right to sign any acts he fancies from all of these shows. Thus he effectively gets a free talent-spotting service for his record label, and he recently hit the jackpot with Leona Lewis, an X Factor winner whose first album went straight in at number one. So he is absolutely coining it - and he only started his television career six years ago, when he was 42. Before that he was a record-company executive, well known in the industry and well paid but a nonentity to the general public. He says he only agreed to appear on the box as a way of protecting his investment. He realized that the record industry was in decline: "I just felt instinctively that by using television as a vehicle we would have a better chance of selling records. But it was the record side of it which was the primary reason for getting involved, not wanting to get my ugly mug on TV."
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