I got a call from Marco. “Look, Ainsley Harriott dropped out, and I told them there’s nobody I’d rather be photographed with than you. Will you do it?”

I’ve noticed that very, very important and powerful people who are used to having every raise of their eyebrow and curl of their lips read, deciphered and acted on often start telephone conversations in the middle, as if they were just coming back from a commercial break, assuming you’ve been privy to the train of happenstance that has led to the phone being picked up. I’m not really like Ainsley Harriott, I offered. Nobody would consider us strangely alike. I would lay a considerable wager that nobody has ever gone to Ainsley and said, “You remind me of that restaurant critic whatsisname.” “Good,” he interrupted. “I’ll pick you up tomorrow at 9.30.”

Great. Do I need equipment? Insurance? A note from my mum, I ask the dead receiver. I have an abiding love for Marco; I’ve known him a long time. I’d say yes to pretty much anything he asked, with the obvious caveat that it didn’t involve writing a cheque or putting an apple on my head and standing very, very still.

Next morning, he arrived bearing a bronze bust of a roe deer’s head on a plinth. “This is my gift for the new twins,” he said generously. It was an impressive head, with horns like a matched pair of lesbian ramblers’ dildos. It’s the biggest head ever shot in Britain. Obviously, it was dispatched by him. That’s so thoughtful, I replied. They haven’t got one of these. “We’d better get going. I’ll explain in the car. They’ll give you the costume when we get there.” Brilliant.

We ended up on the roof of an advertising agency with a lot of creatives and clients and work experiences and mood boards and trays of Tesco croissants and unripe fruit. I discovered I was taking part in an advertising shoot on behalf of the catering industry’s benevolent society, which looks after chefs and waiters and plongeurs when they fall on hard cheeses. It’s a gritty campaign with photos of Heston Blumenthal as a tramp, Raymond Blanc as a blind man and Antony Worrall Thompson as a dosser. Marco and Tom Parker Bowles and I are alkies.

So, I got dressed up in a vomitous suit by Detritus and Garbage and a stinking, slimy shirt and dead man’s shoes. My face was distressed and my ankles blackened, and snot was rubbed into my hair. I was told to sit on a bench with a quarter of a bottle of cooking brandy and try to look like a drunk.

It all came home. That’s very good, said the photographer. You’re very believable, said the client. Really, really hard-core, said the creatives. Have you done this before, asked an assistant. Back off, weird old pervy person, said the work experience. None of them knew – why should they? – that I actually am an alcoholic, albeit a dormant one. I really didn’t need to do the method thing to be drunk on a bench, and it was very odd how quickly the feel, the atmosphere, of it came back to Daddy. The sticky, hunched, folded-up slump of it rolled over me like fog. I haven’t had a drink for more than 20 years, but the torpor, the boredom, the sentimental despair, the vicious self-pity and the acidic malevolence were all there, just under the surface. Not to mention the diarrhoea. The brandy bottle leaked onto my shirt. I had a moment’s intense reverie, a flashback that was a prescient warning, and I admit, I gave myself a bit of a fright. I always thought that somehow my life after drink was a gift I didn’t really deserve, and that one morning I’d wake up to find an angel with a clipboard at the head of the bed, saying there’d been a terrible mistake, and that I could have the years I’d already spent but, sadly, I’d have to go back. And this would be me, on the bench.

They kitted Marco out, and together we looked like Flanagan and Allen, which I mentioned to the work experience, who gave me evils and said, “Whatever.”

While Tom was having his shoot done, Marco and I went to lunch at Haché Burger Connoisseurs. Get them. It’s a new restaurant on the bit of the Fulham Road known by public-school boys as “the Beach”, a collection of short-order restaurants and bars selling fruity cocktails and short-order variations on mince.

We walked in, still dressed as tramps, and took a table for two. The waitress looked at us with the wary curiosity of a dog regarding a frog.

“You’re not real, are you?” she said. “I mean, you’re not real dressed up like that.” Marco has the ability to fill any room that he’s in. He gave off an expansive air of accomplishment from under his dreadfully greasy hat. “You see, I used to do some acting,” she said. “I can tell.” She looked round for the hidden camera and went back to the kitchen. I could see her animated conversation with the manager: “There’s some bloke over there made up to look like Marco Pierre White. But he’s not fooling me. And I think the other one’s supposed to be Ainsley Harriott.”

The room is universal fast-food cheerful design. That is, just enough flair to lure you in, but not enough comfort to make you want to stay any longer than it takes you to swallow. Plain tables, cheap, uncomfortable chairs, flat lights, mirrors on the wall and, the one design extravagance, plastic Japanese cherry-blossom fairy lights stuck to the mirrors, which from a distance looked like magnified medical photographs of sickle-cell anaemia or nonspecific urethritis.

Haché is the bacillus of a chain waiting to become contagious. It may have come from abroad, opportunistically, with global warming. The name implies that these are French hamburgers. Gastronomically, it’s impossible to get French and hamburger into your mouth in the same sentence. If there’s one place in the whole world you could be pretty sure of not getting a decent burger, it’s France. But there we are.

The burgers come as either regular meat or girlie chicken. There is a limited number of steak, lamb and vegetarian options, but altogether this is a sparse list. Burger menus are usually exhausting bores with every conceivable variety of option. They are the Ikea of food: flat-pack, build-it-yourself and guaranteed to fall apart in your hands.

We both had bacon cheeseburgers, and they weren’t at all bad. Manageable as sandwiches; adequately made. The chips were, as Marco said, fine for frozen. I hate to call anyone a liar, but if the vanilla-pod ice cream had ever seen a vanilla pod, I’d be astonished. Best, though, were the prices. Burgers ranged from just over £6 to just over £8. If not great value, then definitely value.

Sitting in a restaurant with Marco is an education. He dissects the finances and the economics of every facet, doing quick calculations on napkins, working out what it’s taking, what it needs to take, where its weaknesses are, how much debt it can sustain, how long before it makes a profit. All the stuff that never crosses your or my mind, when we’re ordering rare or medium, but never leaves the mind of a restaurateur. He said he liked it there. “If I were going to the cinema and wanted to take the kids for something to eat, I’d happily bring them here.” The bill came, but neither of us had our wallet. Marco picked up his phone, and his driver sauntered in, handed the waitress a credit card and said, “I’m paying for the tramps.”

329-331 Fulham Road, SW10; 020 7823 3515 Daily, midday-10.30pm

5 stars: Marco Pierre White; 4 stars: Marco Pierre Right; 3 stars: Marco Pierre All Right; 2 stars: Marco Pierre Trite; 1 star: Marco Pierre Wrong

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