Watch Out

I am shown round by Amanda Ross, who runs Cactus with her husband, Simon. She engineered the move from ITV. 'I knew they were unhappy and I offered to look around - no obligation. If anybody found out, they could just say it was nothing to do with them, it was just Amanda Ross being stupid and entrepreneurial.'With Simon sceptical - 'You'll look really stupid' - she pitched Richard & Judy at Channel 4 and, to everybody's amazement, they went for it. Key editorial decisions were made at once. Their names were to be the show's title. They toyed with the idea of Judy & Richard, but fell back on Richard & Judy since that was what the nation had informally christened This Morning. They're so utterly familiar that any show they did would automatically become Richard & Judy. Cactus also stripped out the This Morning lifestyle stuff - fashion and cooking - to give a harder tabloid/ news edge and in deference to the shift from daytime to semi-peak time.'Anyway,' says Amanda, 'there's too much of that lifestyle stuff already.'

It all made perfect sense and, at once, it all went horribly wrong. The early shows were stuffed with an excess of material - one ran to 17 items - and the viewers turned over. The audience of the first show started at 2.1m and slumped to 1.2m in the course of the hour. The vultures circled. The press said the move had been a disaster. Richard and Judy couldn't hack it in the evenings, they were strictly daytime. Attempts by both of them to break into prime time in the past had repeatedly failed. Daytime owns them and they own daytime.

But this time it worked. They turned the network's 'shoulder peak' into their very own daytime. The show was slowed down, R & J were given room to breathe. The audiences climbed. They're now around 2.5m and they've done serious damage to BBC2's quiz show The Weakest Link. Then, when they broke for the summer last year, the unthinkable happened.

Cactus took Richard aside and made him have a haircut. They had always planned to do this. 'He needed updating,' explains Amanda. Richard's floppy quiff had remained unchanged for years. But the Rosses didn't want to move at once, it would have looked too much like a Channel 4 attempt to groove him up. But in the summer he got his new boy-band, shorter, spikier style. This was appropriate, of course, because he was now at least two decades younger than when his floppy style first appeared. Viewers phoned in to complain - not about the style, but about the fact that in the credit sequence he was still floppy.

Judy, meanwhile, has now adopted a downright bizarre helmet effect, at the base of which wispy flick-ups project almost at right angles. It looks completely daft in a mumsy kind of way.

Now Cactus is buzzing in Kennington. The studios shimmer with success. Silver S-Class Mercedes appear with the guests, and grinning young people constantly check on your wellbeing. In every office I enter, they stop working to say: 'Hi!' At the centre of all this are, of course, R & J. They arrive at 11.30am. They decline chauffeurs, preferring to drive themselves in from Hampstead in a modest S-Type Jaguar. I later explain to Richard that this is an unusually horrible car to own. But he bought the Jaguar marketing line. He thinks it looks like the old Mark II that Inspector Morse drives. It does not.

There's a meeting, then lunch, then R & J take away the scripts to 'Richard-and-Judyise them', as Amanda puts it. 'They have a very peculiar way of writing things and I don't think they want anyone else to do it.'

Richard's blurts are entirely unscripted. 'I'm always wondering what he's going to say,' says Amanda. 'That's why we all love him, isn't it?'

The show aims for a higher calibre of guests. If stars have appeared elsewhere - except Parkinson and, sometimes, Jonathan Ross - they're turned down. This puts pressure on the R & J brand to lure the big names. With Americans, who have never heard of them, it's a case of explaining why they are 'British icons'. But they've preserved the naughtiness of This Morning. Richard has said he thinks there should be more sex on TV and he's done his bit. This Morning pioneered the first 'back, crack and sac' depilation job on a man, as well as the first on-screen test of Viagra. The C4 show has delved into OAP sex, with two old actors in tracksuits demonstrating positions. 'The amount of complaints was phenomenal,' says Amanda, 'but it was a serious item and a lot of people rang to say thank you.'

The show runs five nights a week and they do 187 a year. Time off is fixed to fit in with school holidays - R & J's children Chloe and Jack are 15 and 17. Judy also has grown-up twins, Dan and Tom, from her first marriage. Richard and Judy stay on for an hour for drinks and canapes - the second best I have ever tasted - with the guests in the green room, getting back to Hampstead and the children around 7.30pm.

But the show is about to start and I am taken to the production gallery. Richard is there, dictating his script for a last-minute item they have decided to include - Clare Short's resignation speech. They are to use a five-minute interview with Jon Snow in the C4 newsroom, but R & J wisely cut this to three minutes. There are some nerves in the gallery about this piece, as Richard and Judy have been invited to Chequers for the weekend. These days they move in these circles. I am warned we are on 'open talkback', so if I shout anything in the gallery, they'll hear it through their earpieces.

I find myself struggling with the temptation to yell Richard a question about life on Znarg.In the gallery, the show, like all live TV, seems to emerge as a kind of smooth miracle from the chaos of desperate, split-second decision-making. For the second half I move down to the studio floor. In a commercial break, Richard waves to me. 'Bryan, it's been a couple of years, hasn't it?' It goes without saying that I've never met the man.