“Because the world finally makes sense to her,” says Cherry, a former has-been who, with this success, might be said to be in some kind of heaven himself (although we meet merely in a London hotel almost as fashionable as he is). “That, I would imagine, would give anyone a bit of peace and joy.”

Once the final episode of the first series is shown tomorrow night, he promises, Desperate Housewives will make a bit more sense to us all. The tangled story of Mary Alice’s suicide — the body in the toy chest, their nosy neighbour’s murder, all that — finally resolves itself. “I didn’t,” he explains, “want viewers to kind of feel, ‘ Oh they’re just yanking our chain here’.”

The show’s whydunnit plotting does not, however, even begin to explain the phenomenon of a programme so popular that even Laura Bush has now pronounced herself a desperate housewife. Dark yet brightly lit, witty yet rarely belly-laugh funny, original yet full of obvious thefts from predecessors such as Twin Peaks and Six Feet Under, the show initially left even its writers unsure of its tone. Cherry would ask of a newly written scene: “Where’s the wicked?”

The wicked certainly helps. So does, particularly for its large male audience, the casting of four sexy actresses — sexier, incidentally, than Cherry had originally planned, and, in three out of the four cases, older than the network had intended (Desperate Housewives may be “lookist” but it is not ageist). But no, if there is a secret to the success of Desperate Housewives, it is located for all to see in its title.

On meeting him, you at first wonder what insight Cherry, a 43-year-old gay Republican, could possibly have into the desperation of a street of latter-day Hedda Gablers. But it takes only a few minutes to realise that Cherry is a spectator who sees more of the game than the players.

“Straight men just fascinate me,” he says. “It’s like you marry women but you really don’t like them. They have something you want and you put up with all this crap. And what’s great is that I always get the best parts of women. I get their sense of humour.

“Because I don’t have an agenda when I sit and talk to women, they expose a different side to me.”

His first and most important research tool, however, remains his parents, the late Truman Cherry, a prosperous oil executive, and Martha, a housewife who gave up a career as a fashion designer to have Marc and his brother and sister.

“At some point they became two people who really had in common only their children. That was the bad part of their marriage. The good part was that so much love was poured into us kids. I mean, I just adored my parents: I was treated magnificently.

“My problems kind of occurred with the outside world. I was a very shy and smart child who got beaten up regularly at school. I had my share of childhood angst, but it didn’t come from the family.”

That’s interesting, I say, because I had read that the spark for the programme came from the trial of Andrea Yates, the Texan mother convicted of methodically drowning her five children in a bathtub. As they watched a news report on the case together, Martha had reportedly blurted out to Marc: “I’ve been there.”

“But that’s why it hit me so hard!” he says. “I thought that she was always happy. I thought she was living her dream. To find out that she had had moments of desperation herself was so astonishing that it hit me on the most primal level.”

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