I vividly recall the first time that I met Jonathan Miller. I introduced myself and the great doctor-turned-director replied: “The Times review of my Tosca production this morning was disgracefully impertinent - and I use the word in the 17th-century sense.”

I should have been miffed, but I giggled. Miller should have been miffed that I was giggling, but his need to have his wit and erudition publicly admired is too strong. So he giggled, too.

That was 20 years ago, yet little has changed. Now 74, and about to unveil his new staging of La Bohème at English National Opera, Miller has conceived some of the most celebrated opera productions of our time, and had every honour showered on him, from a knighthood down. Yet he still regularly denounces weaselly opera managements for their mendacity, stubborn opera singers for their “Jurassic Park” attitudes, and carping opera critics for their stupidity.

His caustic comments make wonderful copy, of course. Whether he is castigating the diva Angela Gheorghiu and her tenor husband Roberto Alagna, as “the Bonnie and Clyde of opera”, dismissing the theatrical talents of famous tenors (Plácido Domingo is “stiff and unyielding”), describing the dubious delights of collaborating with David Hockney (“a totally wretched experience”) or laying into the Covent Garden audience (“Harrods Food Hall gives up its dead”), he has a wonderful knack for making headlines and enemies simultaneously.

Such outspokenness was bound to get its comeuppance in a setting overloaded with overblown egos. It happened in New York in 1998, when Miller was frozen out of his job as artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera after a public spat. Directing The Marriage of Figaro, he objected when the Italian diva Cecilia Bartoli, singing Susanna, announced that she would substitute alternative Mozart arias for the usual ones. “If you don't sing Deh vieni in the fourth act of Figaro,” Miller thundered, “it's like coitus interruptus.”

Bartoli was incensed, and the Met's manager, Joseph Volpe, and all-powerful conductor James Levine sided with her. Later, in his memoirs, Volpe scathingly wrote that Miller “loves the sound of his own voice more than most opera singers love theirs” and called him “the world's expert on everything”. That was presumably meant sarcastically. But I wouldn't be surprised if the polymath Miller took it as a reasonable description of his abilities.

What will his new Bohème be like? We know that he is advancing Puccini's Montmartre by 100 years, to the 1930s. So his fans will be hoping for another brilliantly relocated classic like the mafioso Rigoletto or “grand hotel” Mikado that he gave ENO in the 1980s, or his yuppie-satirising Cosí fan tutte for Covent Garden. And his critics will doubtless be queueing up to deplore another triumph of cleverness over passion - a complaint that has been levelled at Miller's work for at least the past 40 years.

Me? I'm just hoping that I can write a review of the show that Dr Miller finds pertinent. In the 17th-century sense, of course.

La Bohème is at the London Coliseum,St Martin's Lane (www.eno.org), from February 2

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