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The, as it were, winners will each get one hour on the plinth — it runs round the clock for 100 days, hence the 2,400 figure. They can do what they like, and they can carry stuff up there, provided they don’t need help doing that.

The mind, obviously, boggles. In the exhibitionist culture both created and reflected by reality TV, will some Jade Goody wannabe go for something sensational? Given that, in summer, at least a third of the people will be appearing at night, the chances of some of them going for outright sleazy are high. A spokesman for the project says nakedness is okay, but anything illegal — meaning obscene — will result in the plinth-dweller being removed by the staff, though probably not in time to prevent the tabloids from getting their shots or taking screen grabs from the video link from Sky, which is filming the whole thing. Gormley is unconcerned, but others will be, notably the mayor’s office and Sky TV.

Is this magnet for exhibitionists sculpture? The only physical addition to the plinth itself will be a net projecting outwards at a slight upward angle.

“That’s obviously important as a safety device, but it’s also important in terms of talking about the vulnerability and exposure of the person at the top — this idea that you are alone in a very public place, really exposed and, therefore, in danger, not simply from the fact that you are eight metres above the ground, but also, perhaps, from what others might do to you. It feels like a basketball net or a trampoline, but it’s also a fence.”

Times Archive, 1968: Churchill Memorial

A standing figure of Sir Winston would certainly possess sufficient bulk to occupy an oblong plinth

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The net aside, is he doing sculpture here?

“It’s the making of a piece of sculpture in time. It’s asking fairly fundamental questions about who can make art and how it can be made, who can participate in it, and important questions about representation. What I’m hoping is that this will tell us something we don’t already know about what people think and feel about being alive now.”

It’s going to be a big moment for 2,400 people, but also for Gormley, a strange man who needs careful attention. Married with three children, all of whom seem to be heading in the direction of art, he is 58, and his very short hair is dyed very black. He’s wearing pale jeans, a grey, long-sleeved T-shirt, big boots and wire glasses. He has the air of an eastern European intellectual and a manner that seems absent-minded but isn’t really. Though his conversation is rambling and full of those doubled adverbs — “terribly, terribly” and “totally, totally” occur a lot — it rambles around a clear centre, the work in all its monumental and very non-rambling simplicity.

Of all the successful British art that has emerged in the past 20 years, his is probably the most popular and generally accepted. He is — and he will hate this, but it’s true — a very establishment figure. He was established primarily by the Angel of the North, the gigantic, industrial figure that looms over the A1 at Gateshead and memorialises both the miners who once worked deep beneath its feet and the whole manufacturing culture that has vanished, but, as he wryly observes, we now desperately need to get back.

“It was to do with a very strong loss of hope in the north and a complete breakdown — post the miners’ strike, post the shipyards shutting down — and a sense of loss of Britain’s long tradition of making things.”

The Angel proved so popular that it spawned imitations, not all of which he approves of. “It’s a terrible thing to have a precedent like that,” he admits. And he has said elsewhere: “A lot of public art is gunge, an excuse which says, ‘We’re terribly sorry to have built this senseless glass and steel tower, but here is this 200ft bronze cat.’ ” He is, however, all for Mark Wallinger’s giant horse, to be erected at Ebbsfleet, Kent. “He brilliantly manages to combine the Englishness of the chalk-horse tradition with the ‘now’ of the race meeting’s obsession with betting. It is something that is both ancient and modern.”

The Angel — as well as all Gormley’s subsequent work, but especially One & Other — is, before it is anything else, a critique of modernism. “It’s a very odd thing to me, the failure of modernism. When Mondrian talks about art that is open for everyone, he’s talking in a sense about the very same thing I’m interested in, a place of open participation for everyone. But that failed because it became institutionalised itself, in a way that made it a specialist realm of human endeavour. I’m not interested in the idea of artist as hero. I’m saying that art is an open space of reference and reflection, where, hopefully, human freedom can be expressed. With One & Other, I’m saying, ‘I need an hour of your life to make this real.’ ”

The dry, abstract scholasticism of some late modernism seemed to mark the return of art to the galleries from which it had briefly aspired to escape. Gormley’s big, public art was a rejection of all that. Furthermore, everybody could see what his Angel and his man-figures were meant to be — people. But he squirms when I use the phrase “aggressively figurative” to describe his style. He is is very concerned to stress that his figures are not representations of people, or even symbols of people; they are, rather, shadows of where people have been.

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