When I tell my girlfriend that I am interviewing Arlene Phillips, her response is brutal: “She’ll eat you alive.” The Strictly Come Dancing judge has been dubbed the “queen of mean” by no less an authority than Simon Cowell. In her early days, the choreographer behind Hot Gossip, Starlight Express and videos for Freddie Mercury and Aretha Franklin would regularly reduce her charges, including a young Sarah Brightman, to tears.

Most recently, of course, Phillips has been a vocal critic of John Sergeant’s gloriously inept passage through Strictly. She is perhaps partly responsible for him bowing out early but, as she says, her life is too busy for regrets. She also has an eye for the younger gentlemen, having drooled over Mark Ramprakash and Gethin Jones. I imagine a cross between Dorian, the lascivious neighbour from Birds of a Feather, and the scary dance teacher with the stick in Fame.

We meet at a studio in southeast London, where Phillips is rehearsing a live show of Britannia High, which competes on her crowded slate with productions of Flashdance and We Will Rock You. She briskly leads me to the café and offers me lunch. But, as we tuck into our goat’s cheese salads, there are no requests for me to extend my arms or tuck my bottom in.

Swathed in a floaty black dress, trousers and scarf, she looks a decade younger than her 65 years. The lack of lines is thanks in part to Botox and fillers, although she insists that she won’t go there again. “I cannot stand pain!” She must have dealt with a fair bit if it dancing. “Yeah, but not that kind of acute, piercing-the-skin pain.” Now she prefers a non-surgical treatment from Spain, which, she casually mentions, is also used by Madonna. For somebody who insists that she is immune to celebrity, she can drop names with the best of them, claiming at one point to have introduced Brightman to her future husband Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Then there is Cowell, whom she has known since the Eighties. “He was really slim then, really good-looking. He would lean out of the window of his office, eyeing up the girls.” She smiles when she talks about Strictly’s rivalry with The X Factor. “Last year we went head to head; this year we’re at different times, which takes the fun out of it.” What does she think about Cowell calling her the queen of mean? “He thinks I’ve softened actually. He knew me in the Sarah Brightman days.”

This series of Strictly has been the most headline-grabbing, she agrees, chiefly because of Sergeant’s exit. For the record, she was not the author of the “dancing pig” comment mistakenly attributed to her, although she came up with plenty of others. “I fear our standard is being abandoned and it’s becoming about who can be the most entertaining,” she told one tabloid. “It has to stop!”

Such preciousness can backfire: one poll found that 60 per cent of those who voted for Sergeant did so to annoy the judges. “They might well have done that, but I’m sure they did that with Fiona Phillips and Kate Garraway too.” So what’s more important: the entertainment or the competition? “It has to be the competition. If it’s seen just as entertainment, will the contestants change what they’re doing? You always hope that the personality of the celebrity as well as their improvement in dance will be what makes the winner. Jill Halfpenny wasn’t overly entertaining, it’s what she became that was riveting. The same with Mark Ramprakash, who exploded on the dancefloor. He was animalistic.”

Doesn’t her predilection for taut males undermine her claims to it being all about the dancing? “I don’t think so. Mark’s salsa was legendary. And a lot of attractive men haven’t done so well. I actually thought Quentin Willson was extremely attractive but he went out in week one.”

That Phillips has a saucy side can be of little doubt to anyone who has watched the routines she devised for Hot Gossip. The dance troupe were mainstays of The Kenny Everett Show, encapsulating a trashy decadence peculiar to the late Seventies.

“Kenny loved everything we did, as wild as we were,” she remembers. “We actually recorded a number that was never aired because Thames TV thought we’d gone too far. It was set on a train, and there were pointe shoes and whips involved. 6.15 in the evening we went out! Strictly time!”

Phillips had moved to London in the early Seventies from Manchester, where she was born in 1943, one of three children of a Jewish family. Her father was a barber, her mother a housewife, and both loved classical music. There wasn’t much money around, but when there was, they would take her to the ballet. Being Jewish, she says, taught her the centrality of family, although she is not religious.

When she was 15, her mother had leukaemia and died three months later. Her father then became ill with thrombosis, and Arlene, the elder of his two daughters, took the lead. “It was a very tough time,” she says. “And the only thing I wanted to do was dance.”

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