'I wonder, would you mind awfully telling Fay Weldon to go easy on the sherry?' Photograph: Getty
One of my biggest TV disappointments in recent years has been BBC Four's Dinner With Portillo. The premise was sound enough: Michael Portillo, the former Conservative party politician, invites a bunch of opinionated folk to his home to scoff, quaff and shoot the breeze.
Over the course of five series, Portillo proved to be a convivial enough host. I desperately wanted to like it, but the series consistently failed to engage me.
Partly because of its self-imposed constraints - each dinner party being strictly limited to one topic of conversation such as the legalisation of drugs and Putin's Russia, thereby removing all hope of the kind of free-form discourse that is surely the main purpose of a dinner party.
Partly because many of the guests (Bianca Jagger, Vanessa Feltz, George Galloway) were the kind of people I'd flee the country to avoid rather than sit knee-to-knee with at a vaguely formal table.
Yet watching it reminded me of my obsessional /a> (even though I do anything to avoid them in reality).
I often think about them last thing at night, when much-needed sleep is thwarted by my daft, over-taxed mind. Others count sheep or attempt complicated breathing exercises to weigh their eyelids down. I lie there, often deep into the darkly worried night, and fantasise about the guests who would make my dream dinner party.
This isn't nearly as easy as it sounds. In fact, it's not unlike solving a Rubik's Cube. Just when you think you've got it licked, you realise that one piece of the puzzle is blatantly misaligned.
After fifteen years of practice, I think I've finally cracked it. Here's the list of invitees, moving clockwise:
Brian Eno Narrowly gets the vote over Stephen Fry. Though equally smart, pop's most sagacious being is almost certainly the superior flirt and would surely be at his come-hither, eyelash-fluttering, egghead best sat alongside the delectable...
Sally Phillips Her from I'm Alan Partridge and Smack The Pony. Possessor of the sexiest laugh in showbiz and quite possibly the funniest woman on the telly since Kathy Burke. A kindly Christian woman, she'd surely warm quickly to...
Andre Royo In HBO's The Wire, Royo plays the almost saint-like Bubbles, TV's most sympathetic character in many a year. Provided he could be persuaded to attend in character and leave Bubbles' crack pipe at home, Royo would be guaranteed to bring some much-needed pathos to the table and might just hit it off a treat with...
Robert Downey Jr Easily Hollywood's most charismatic man, the world's most handsome, and no stranger to the crazy-pipe in times now passed, Downey's ability to riff jazzily on any subject under the sun makes him a dinner party must. Let us imagine him passing the gravy-boat to...
Fay Weldon She coined the advertising slogan, "Vodka gets you drunker quicker", spent three decades brilliantly advising women how best to behave badly, and thinks pornography is a damn good thing. How could she not get on like a house on fire with...
Lil' Kim One of the best-selling female rappers of all time and easily the most uninhibited. So wildly uninhibited that the house might literally end up on fire halfway through the main course. Best seat her alongside a guaranteed civilising influence. Someone like...
Byron Rogers Journalist, biographer, the funniest man ever to come out of Wales (not saying much, I concede, speaking as a Welshman) and one who's eye for flagrantly eccentric human behaviour is forever unerring. Who better to chum it up with than...
Eric Cantona Footballing artiste, alleged film actor and a man whose gift for talking complete bollocks borders on genius. If anyone can understand what the dickens he's on about with all the seagulls/trawler/sardines parley, it's Professor Brian Eno. Thereby squaring the dinner party circle.
Or have I? You tell me ...
