It’s hard to know whether Jenny — or The Booby, as her husband calls her with practised disrespect — really believes this or whether she is immune to neglect after 34 years of living with the man now on live television and earning the label: World’s Worst Husband and Male Chauvinist Pig.

John McCririck, the Channel 4 racing pundit famous for his hats and nasty bling jewellery, is in the Celebrity Big Brother house and has lost no time in letting the nation know that he believes a woman’s place is in the kitchen, that he has no time for females with flat chests and that his own dear Booby “is not very bright and squawks a lot”. His housemates gasped when he spoke of the time he flew to America club class, making his wife sit humiliatingly behind him in “cattle” class. The Booby, meanwhile, is back at their pink doll-like mews house in Primrose Hill, London, stoically dealing with the media fallout from his outrageous remarks.

She answers the front door in a bit of a flap, apologising for the mess and the number of labradors and cats within. She doesn’t look much like a doormat, smiling from ear to ear and dressed in a sexy red suede tasselled skirt and boots. Neither is she all that mousey. But she does complain that all the fuss over John means that she hasn’t had time to get on with her housework. Ah, so is it true that he never lifts a finger in the house? That he has never once washed up?

The Booby shrugs her shoulders. “Well, yes but so what?” (This, I find, is her stock response to many of John’s crimes). “But he’s the one with the career, isn’t he? After a day’s work you’re pretty tired, you don’t feel like doing these things, do you? I just kind of back him up and drive him round and do the accounts.”

I say that this also counts as work and, anyway, a man of 64 should know how to switch on the oven. But it turns out that John doesn’t. Nor the kettle. “I was out riding once, it was quarter to nine in the morning and my mobile rang, and it’s John saying ‘I can’t get the kettle to work’. Do you know what he’d done? He’d switched it on at the plug but hadn’t pushed the button down.”

Then there was the time when she was out and he rang her bellowing that he wanted to heat up an Indian takeaway but couldn’t turn on the oven. The photographer and I sit open-mouthed. “Well, he never uses the cooker,” she says in an exasperated why-all-the-fuss voice. How does he feed himself then when you are not there? “Well, he can go out for dinner. Or he can usually find something cold in the fridge.”

When he helped Germaine Greer to wash up on Big Brother Jenny videotaped it because it was the first time she had ever seen him do it.

Mmm. This is a perplexing relationship. You can certainly see what McCririck gets out of it — a full-time housekeeper, nanny and adoring partner, but it’s difficult to see in all this one-way traffic what’s in it for her. Of course, there is always the possibility that this is all a charade, that behind closed doors McCririck drops the act and is a normal husband, and that The Booby is merely going along with it to enhance his eccentric media image. But then the sheer number of framed cartoons, press cuttings and photos of McCririck that cover the walls do point to a man with a gargantuan ego, a man who refuses to give his age in interviews.

And imagine Jenny’s average day. She rises early to take the dogs out and buys all the newspapers while McCririck stays in bed (if he is on morning TV or radio this can be as early as 4.30am). She usually takes him up his breakfast of almond croissant and banana with the papers and leaves him to read while she gets on with the housework and waits to drive him to where he needs to go (McCririck, naturally, cannot drive).

Is it true that she also runs his bath, which McCririck, in a throwback to his days at Harrow, calls his “tosh”? For the first time she is slightly indignant. “No, I do not run his bath,” she says. There is a pause and she adds: “Well, I suppose if he’s in a rush and desperate I do. But not every day, no.”

And such a devoted wife does not deserve a gift on her birthday? “John doesn’t think you should celebrate getting older. Look, his attitude is that if you want something, go and get it and I’ll pay for it.” Not very romantic though is it, Jenny? Surely she doesn’t continue buying him presents. “Not now, no. I’ve given up. If you sent him a Christmas card he’d chuck it back at you.”

She believed Germaine Greer would be the woman he clashed with most on Big Brother. But she believes they bonded in some small way over their love of animals and the environment (McCririck’s designated charity is Greatwood, which retrains retired racehorses). She leaps to use it as evidence of John’s caring side. “Did you see when Germaine had to do that (task) and was sick? He was sitting there with his arm around her, saying a woman her age shouldn’t have to do this and it’s not right.”

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