I’m having an argument with Kate Adie about whether or not journalism is a dangerous occupation when she says: “When you came out to meet me today, you didn’t do a risk assessment. You didn’t wonder if you’d come back alive.”

“Well, Kate, actually I did.” She laughs. It’s a sudden machinegun burst. How can I tell Kate Adie – once the nation’s frontline sweetheart, the Vera Lynn of war reporting, that she has a fearsome reputation? “Stern”, “impatient”, “cantankerous” and “imperious” are just some of the adjectives that attach themselves to her name.

That’s not the woman I meet. This one is wearing a pretty pink sweater with pearl earrings and has blazing blue eyes. At 62 she’s sexy in a busty, silver-haired, Helen Mirrenish kind of way.

Ever since she first came to the public’s attention in 1980, when we saw her crouched behind a car door reporting on the Iranian embassy siege, we’ve thought of Adie as the epitome of the cool and courageous foreign correspondent. She’s the first one to puncture this image: “Yes, it has risks like any other job, but it’s not inherently dangerous. You can choose to avoid danger if you want.”

This from a woman who has been shot three times, had a knife held to her throat and had a gun thrust in her face. She’s watched a grenade launcher swivel to point straight at her. But she doesn’t consider herself brave. For Adie, danger was like dog excrement on the pavement of her professional life – you step over it, not in it: “I’ve never been one of these people who got a thrill from danger.”

However, she admits there have been moments when she’s had to stick her neck out. There was the time, in 1989 at Tiananmen Square, when she had to climb a wall, knee a policeman in the groin and take a nick from a bullet in order to deliver video footage of the massacre to her colleagues. That was “just one of those things that had to be done”.

What goes through the head of a nice middle-class woman, who grew up in Sunderland and went to a posh girls’ school, when a drunken Croatian psychopath with bad breath is holding a gun to her throat and thinks it might be fun to pull the trigger? “Instead of thinking, ‘How do I get out of this?’, I just thought: ‘Why?’ ” She pauses and adds with a sad purr: “‘I haven’t done anything to you. I don’t deserve this.’”

War correspondents are often portrayed as psychologically damaged men who’ve looked into the heart of darkness and found sanctuary in booze. How does a woman who has walked through the human abattoir of history, from geno-cide in Rwanda to slaughter in Sierra Leone, cope with the psychological shrapnel? Drink? No. Therapy? Certainly not.

Kate is old-school: “Over the years it’s become more fashionable to talk about emotional effects, whereas I come from a generation whose parents went through six years of war and they didn’t go around talking about how they coped.”

Does she think Britain needs to bring back the stiff upper lip? She doesn’t deny that “people who have suffered real trauma need some kind of therapeutic help”, but adds: “I think you’d be surprised how people can cope. I’ve seen people experience the most hellish things and what gets them on the right road again is love and friendship and care and concern. People get a lot of comfort from the woman who brings in a cup of tea.”

The theme of her latest book – about people who do dangerous jobs – is courage. Why is it that courageous Kate hasn’t so far taken a stand on what many of her profession regard as the death of serious television reportage? Jeremy Paxman has done it and so has Anna Ford, blasting broadcasting for its ageism and sexism and cutting of news output. You’d think Kate would have come to the aid of the BBC newscaster Moira Stuart when she got the elbow for being too old. Is Kate a BBC loyalist, or a BBC lackey whose silence has been bought with a job presenting Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent?

“I never comment on these matters. I have other things to worry about,” she says. But she has spoken out, at least in the past. In her 2002 autobiography, The Kindness of Strangers, she characterised the BBC under the management of John Birt as a “mad fungus which stuck its greasy stalks into every crevice and expanded to block light and logic”.

“Well, that was John Birt and he’s gone now. The management at the BBC went completely bananas.”

And now? She maintains that when it comes to the subject of broadcasting, she’s a silent observer who stands above the fray: “Those issues are best left to people who work in newsrooms.”

We talk about the rise of emotional reportage – the tendency of broadcasters to put themselves in the story and share their feelings with viewers. “I’m an old-fashioned reporter,” she admits. “I want the viewer to be informed about what is going on and let them have their own reactions. If a journalist is in a war scene and walks by a series of corpses and says, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this’, well, there’ll be some viewers who have seen such a thing, so you haven’t reported as well as you could.”

Hers is the voice of a different age of broadcasting, when reporters like her in flak jackets were out on the front line gathering the facts. “In these days of 24-hour news, you tend to get reporters standing by the satellite dishes instead of discovering the story,” she concedes, and her disdain is clear.

She tells me about the time she passed a small demo outside Euston station and spotted a reporter broadcasting from above on a flat roof. “I spent about 45 minutes talking to the police and the demonstrators and nothing much was going on. It was a bit of stand-off.”

Kate then climbed up to see the young presenter and discovered that the girl had been too busy churning out reports for various BBC outlets to go and interview anyone. Kate says: “I later heard her speaking to camera about the ‘threat of violence’ – she was trying to make predictions and I thought: no, that’s not news.”

She stopped doing frontline reporting for the BBC in 2003 when she was 57 and people assume that she must be bitter about being sidelined by the glamour girls who have come in her wake. It’s a role that she refuses to play: “People want me to be unhappy, but I’m not. I’ve nearly been killed three times, so when I wake up in the morning, I’m not filled with worry; I’m glad to be alive.” The private Kate is very different from the cool professional we saw on our screens: “I’m very emotional.” She has a large group of friends – who include ex-boyfriends – and doesn’t feel that she missed out on marriage (“It just hasn’t occurred”) and says that, yes, of course, she’s had times of being madly in love.

I ask her what sort of person does a degree in Scandinavian studies at university in the 1960s, as she did. Laughing, she says: “Someone who spent too much time playing tennis, having boyfriends and going to parties and who didn’t see their A-levels coming.”

In fact, the young Kate had quite a wild time at university: “I went to demonstrations. I hit people with placards.” And did she smoke cannabis? “No, never. We were all so busy drinking so hard, there was no time for pot.” It was at university that she encountered Alun Armstrong, the actor, “and there was this man who was turning up at parties and singing and we would say ‘Shut up, Bryan’ – it was Bryan Ferry”.

The name of the rock star resurfaces later in our conversation, when I ask if she has any regrets. She pauses, gives a big laugh and says: “I suppose, that I never got to nail Bryan Ferry when I had the chance.”

Into Danger: Risking Your Life for Work by Kate Adie is published on September 4 by Hodder& Stoughton, priced £20. Copies can be ordered for £18 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

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