So then, were you there for Channel 4 on Monday night, post-prandially slouched in the deep-dented sofa, nice fatty hunk of pork belly peptically marinating in your own, one fist wrapped around a jug of punning stout, the other deep in the popcorn bucket, watching Whatever Happened to the Slimmers of the Year? Sure you were. You wanted to hear that diets don’t work. You wanted to see those big, cheery broads lumbering about in the contentment of capitulation. You wanted to hear that outsize matters. You wanted to be told that fatting was the new slimming. You wanted to discover that plump was in.

Me, I didn’t need to. I already knew all that. I had just come home from a nine-course lunch at Weightlovers magazine to celebrate its award to the Whopper of the Year. I was there to interview her, for the world’s greatest newspaper.

Here we go . . .

IT ALL began one evening last March when Willesden security operative Darren Charnley, 34, came back from a hard day in the atrium and hung his cap on his wife.

“I was just stood there by the door, and it all went, like, black,” is how gorgeous, huge Samantha, 30, remembers it now, with a girlish giggle that sets her chins going like a boxful of ping-pong balls. As Whopper of 2002, with all that that entails, she can afford to laugh now, but it was no laughing matter then, she can tell you. “I was less than eight stone. I’d try on a size 28 frock from somewhere chic like Huge Her Modes, but who was I kidding, Alan, it would just hang on me. I looked like one of them hot hair balloons after the wossname’s gone out, I do not mind saying! I would just sit in the changing cubicle and sob, watching through the curtains while enormous customers primped about in their fashionable new clothes and brought the plaster off the walls.”

But then she pulled herself together.

“But then I pulled myself together. It is no good sitting here on your bum, or where your bum would be if you had one, I said to myself, you have got to do sunnink about your weight, Samantha Charnley, or your husband will not have no more relations with you.”

So she started buying Weightlovers magazine every week and following its diet rules assiduously, snacking between her four meals a day before rolling into bed. Sleep helped. “I would wake up in the middle of the night with this craving for unsweetened lemon juice and Ryvita, and I knew I had to beat it, so I would get up and go downstairs and make myself half a dozen rounds of chip butties and a nice warm pint of lard. It wasn’t all willpower, mind, my neighbour Kirsty was a great help, she was always there for me, all I had to do was phone and before I knew it she would be shovelling bread pudding into me after I was too tired to lift my own trowel. I owe a lot to her, and my husband Darren has been a real diamond, letting me fill myself with beans and bottled Bass, whatever the gastric consequences, despite only one lounge and the patio door jammed.”

But, finally, courage and perseverance have paid off. On Monday, at the Weightlovers office, Samantha received the coveted Gold Porker for getting up to a shapely 34st 9lb. She will also grace next month’s cover, once her photograph has been digitally enhanced to an even more fashionable 5cwt. “It is not just the celebrity and the chance of my own series,” she confided happily, “it is also dead economic. I can wear the duvet I sleep in, Darren has swopped the Smart for a Foden 3-tonner plus £500, the bath needs just two cupfuls of hot, and it’s goodbye to pricey designer bikinis now that I’ve bought a lovely Gulf-surplus ex-SAS tent in what they call Autumn Beach. It has a window in the back where Darren can climb in if he wants to.”

“And does he?” I inquired.

“Do I ever!” averred the clearly rapturous hubbie, suddenly appearing from behind her, to popping flashguns. “Our personal relations have perked up no end, I trust I do not have to draw pictures, we are both men of the world. Also I can now take her out and about, I never used to let her come to QPR on account of my friends taking the wossname, eg what’s the stick for, etcetera, but now they are more than happy to stand behind her when the wind gets up from the Shepherd’s Bush end, she is just one of the lads, also no end of a boon after the match when it comes to shoving our way through a busy Rat & Cockle.”

In addition to the handsome statuette, Samantha Charnley also wins a glorious all-in slap-up eating holiday for two in Bavaria, the strengthened floor of her dreams from the Willesden Joist Company, Bernard Manning’s workout video and a freezerful of suet worth almost £12.