I first met Harold in 1963 and still have a very clear picture of him then. He was puckish, totally sure of himself and extremely “actorly”. He was handsome, black-suited, very smart and intensely good company. I found him completely unpolitical but interested in dissecting the catchphrase, the cliché, sparring over what many might have thought mundane.

Young as he was, he had by then enjoyed extraordinary critical success in the theatre and had already had a play shown on commercial television that netted an audience of 19m.

The word Pinteresque had entered the language and he had become what he was to remain – a one-off mixture out of Samuel Beckett, T S Eliot and Franz Kafka, and already wholly his own mysterious and magisterial man.

In the 1960s and 1970s, as so many fine dramatic new voices clamoured for space on stage and screen, Pinter was always there, dark-clad, often smoking a Black Sobranie, mad on cricket and wine, accreting stories about himself that were woven in delight and admiration.

He met Antonia Fraser at the height of the 1970s. I remember winding up in the same pub as them after their joint appearance at an ICA event had caused excitement on the level of Burton and Taylor’s first public outing in Rome. For weeks, for months, this dazzlingly unexpected liaison captivated the press. They were two principals holding court over territory that stretched from Jewish Hackney to titled Ireland, from the caravans of theatre and film to historians and politicians and writers all over the world.

The first time I interviewed him formally was in 1978 for the first season of the South Bank Show. He was spectacularly difficult – or so I thought at the time. I tried to discuss The Homecoming. Was there an element of sex in the way she . . ?

“You could say that,” he replied. To my two or three questions of well-meant analysis he returned a dead-bat monosyllable. Yes. No.

What I did not realise until later in the interview was that he truly had no idea what went on before or outside his play.

He said he got ideas for plays out of the blue. He’d been lying on a sofa one afternoon and the first lines of No Man’s Land had come into his head: “I rushed to my desk and wrote them down and it went on from there.”

Nevertheless I kept in the earlier parts of the interview because it seemed Pinteresque. There were pauses, repetitions, menace and embarrassment and the impression of skidding out of control on the surface while underneath there were the rumblings that would break up the ice.

A few years ago I interviewed him for the same programme and he was a different man. He tried and succeeded in being open to every question.

He said that the previous day he’d been in the National Gallery when suddenly a poem had occurred to him. He’d written it down immediately and could I read it now, he asked, during the interview? It was, it is, a wonderful poem about going for a walk with his English teacher on Hackney Marshes.

That glee about his own work could easily slip into something else. You are always likely to be questioned about whether you had read his latest poems or seen his latest productions. If not there was, at the least, a very long pause.

He could be a difficult man in conversation with no holds barred even in the most sacred of restaurants or other public spaces. The unpolitical man I’d known in the 1960s became ferociously political as he grew older. It was hand-to-hand stuff.

Nevertheless, you always felt it came from a pure and anguished moral source.

And he was such fun. Even in the toe-to-toe slug-outs you were exhilarated by the force of the man.

With the almost unbelievable devotion of Antonia, his wife, he determined to live out his life when ill as fully as he had lived his life before the cancer. That meant piling in.

Theatres, parties and, of course, restaurants. He and Antonia were not so much punctual as prepunctual. I tried to beat them once or twice but never won. So you’d go into a place for dinner and there they would be at the table, glasses charged, a smile of expectation. Game on.

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