She took up skin-diving for the programme Your Kind of Sport - and has been an enthusiast ever since - and learnt to fish for A New Angle on Noele Gordon, describing the sport as "just like Russian roulette - you never know what's coming up next!"

 

For Lunch Box, she became the try-anything-once girl.  She rode an elephant, dressed up as a circus clown, entered a cage of lions and went down a mine.

 

A few breathless minutes with three untrained lions she describes as "tremondously exciting, something quite primeval about the strength and agility of those beasts".  But the mine was something else.  "That was terrifying," she said.

 

"It was a very deep new pit at Cannock Chase and we finished up the last hundred yards or so to the face crawling on our hands and knees.  The fantastic thing is that men spend their lives doing that.  For men expected to do that, £100 a week would be nothing.  I came out very strongly on the side of the miners."

 

Noele Gordon is a warm and generous woman, talkative, opinionated, emotional and concerned for others.  She has a sardonic sense of humour and a hearty laugh.  She treads a fine line between the lady and the tomboy.

 

"I always watch my behaviour wherever I am.  This is the difference between my generation of actors and the young generation.  I still do not think I should be seen out in trousers, though, obviously, there have to be exceptions to this.

 

"I never have my picture taken smoking because, although I smoke like a furnace, I don't think it's right that any child who watces me should be able to turn round and say 'Well, Meg Richardson does it.'

 

"If I should want to smoke myself to death, drink myself to death and live with forty mean at a time, that would be my own business and I'd keep it my own business.  I wouldn't make a public thing of it and say to young people, 'I smoke, I drink, I live in sin.'

 

"This, I think, is wrong and immoral, and it's something I resent about many modern actors and actresses.  They are trying to impress their views on how to live on other people."

 

I watched Noele on location at the Shropshire Farm Institute at Baschurch - the "model" for the Crossroads motel - where despite unavoidable delays in intense cold she remained calm, patient and helpful.  Having given up most of her lunch-hour to a picture session she then found time to give an improptu stand-up interview to the local newspaper.