I’ve done some pretty bizarre, dangerous and disgusting things for this magazine. I’ve spent a day walking round London dressed as Mr Darcy. I’ve eaten the ark. I’ve been to Leeds. But last week was a new low. For no better reason than a cheap headline, I fired a high-velocity bullet into Bambi’s face. This is the first time something actually had to die for a piece.

I’ve known Marco Pierre White for 20 years. He is one of the few people I can remember the exact moment of meeting. I walked in to his first restaurant, Harvey’s, on Wandsworth Common. I was wearing a tail coat and sponge-bag trousers. He was wearing a butcher’s apron and the look of a serial killer. I was on my way to a wedding, he was on his way to greatness.

Only one of us would make it.

I was expecting two quick nouvelle-cuisine courses. Four hours later, I had lost count of the plates. Marco sat opposite me, scribbling orders onto a pad, tearing them off, screwing them up, handing them to a poor, abused waiter, like Hitler in his bunker. He would stick his fingers into his food, into my food, through his hair. He would wave them round the restaurant. He was mesmerising. I was mesmerised and have been pretty much ever since. This was before I met the Blonde. She had met Marco with the late photographer Bob Carlos Clarke, who had photographed Marco feeding her warm oysters and tagliatelle up against a wall with his fingers. “It was,” she says, “the rudest thing a man has ever done to me with a butcher’s apron on.”

Marco and I have spent quite a lot of sodden afternoons mucking about in the undergrowth killing stuff. He took up shooting all of a sudden, apropos of nothing, and did it the way he takes up everything — tailoring, Bugatti bronzes, Giacometti furniture, boil in the bag — with complete commitment and the utter concentration of a hungry heron in an ornamental pond. He doesn’t do things by halves; he doesn’t even do them by wholes. He does them by multiples. I remember when he became enamoured of the aristocracy and picked up dozens of titles. The dining room at Mirabelle looked like a series of living royal flushes, and he would regard them from the bar with a collector’s fond pride, as if they were cuckoo clocks, which, indeed, a great many of them were. And then there was the month when the Oak Room was full of hatboxes. The obsessional intensity, the single-minded commitment was astonishing and hugely attractive, if occasionally ridiculous.

So he took up shooting. He didn’t just want to be proficient and bag a couple of pheasants; he wanted to extinguish the species. Plenty of weekends, we filled the Land Rover with corpses and drove them back to the restaurant, where an army of plongeurs would be lined up to pluck and gut. We would have a late supper, still dressed in tweed, and he would do the maths: how much each bird had cost as sport, and how much he could sell them for as catering. Then, all of a sudden, from one season to the next, he lost interest in shooting and took up stalking. It’s not really my thing, shooting roe deer in Dorset. I prefer red in Scotland. But for this interview, we decided to have a day in the hedgerows, looking for a buck.

Marco picked me up with Mr Ishi. Mr Ishi has been his driver and Baldrick for a good many years. He is also possibly the most terrifyingly bad driver still with insurance and out of traction. Marco won’t drive; Mr Ishi can’t drive. They are inseparable. I kept my head down in the back. Marco sat in the front and ate half a kilo of peanut butter with his fingers and smoked a pack of fags with the other hand. Beside him, Mr Ishi stared at the motorway as if it were a science-fiction movie.

Marco is the best chef I have ever come across. It’s invidious to make these judgments, but in a critic’s life they’re inevitable. He wasn’t necessarily the most technically adept, and he didn’t have the keenest palate or the most inventive mind, but he did have all those things in the top 10%, plus that obsessive enthusiasm. He had the thing you see in brilliant sportsmen: he was mental enough to not just want, but need, to be the best. And then he reached 38 and the obsession left him, like hats and pheasants and aristocrats. The need to cook seven days a week evaporated. He handed back the Michelin stars, hung up the butcher’s apron and walked away. Elvis had left the kitchen.

He’s still in catering, of course. He has restaurants and the Yew Tree Inn, where we stop for an early supper of steak and snails (a dish, incidentally, I invented), and steak and kidney pie and rillettes and half a dozen other things that come unbidden from the kitchen. It’s all good, bordering on extremely good. Brilliant for a rural pub, and Marco still talks about it with pride and interest, but it’s like watching Stirling Moss play Scalextric.

Now, he is obsessed with stalking roebucks with big heads. There is a complex and trainspotterish maths formula to measuring dead deers’ horns, and Marco has more gold medals than anybody. He has bagged the European record and can enthuse about it for hours. So off we go to walk the margins of wheat and barley fields still in the green. Meandering among hedgerows and copses in the long-shadow evening with a gun is still one of the most blissful ways of doing next to nothing. Stoats and hares dodge through the rides, an early owl silently saunters past, clasping a late, late vole. Pigeons clatter out of the corn to roost. The last of the skylarks proclaims his kingdom in the final hurrah of sunlight. The does are the first to come out to feed; we see roe and fallow and a couple of piggy muntjac.

We’re supposed to be talking about his new television series where Marco cooks an English feast, and travels the country. “What do you think of it?” he says. Well, I’ve had enough of films about people driving around England like Elgar on Bovril, the elegiac land of hype and rhubarb. But the cooking bits are good: you get a glimpse of the immense craft and appetite. “They wanted me to do it because they discovered most people think I’m foreign — Marco Pierre.” He was born in Yorkshire to an Italian mother and English father. What’s great about the series is that Marco has taken to television like hats. The heat and strength of his obsessions, the unswerving self-belief that is a discipline rather than a vanity, all come across, when so much of television is presented by bland, broad, good-natured people-pleasers. Marco is unlike anything else: frightening and compelling, with just the merest twist of high kitsch camp.

We find a young cull buck standing in a hedgerow. He’s two years old, with an expression of winsome, dark loveliness. “Shoot him,” said Marco. No, you shoot him. “No, you shoot him.” I’ve just eaten. This is supposed to be your story. It’s better if you do it. “No, you’re my guest. Just get on with it.” The deer looked at us from left to right with youthful incomprehension. It’s like Ray Mears directed by Quentin Tarantino. So I kill him and gut him, and sling the cadaver into the back of the Land Rover. But because Marco’s going on a bit, I forget to puncture the diaphragm and six pints of gelatinous gore empty into the back. Mr Ishi has to hose it out. He drives me back to London in silence, occasionally muttering: “The blood. The blood.”

Marco’s Great British Feast is on Wednesday at 9pm on ITV1. Marco Pierre White’s Great British Feast is published by Orion Books at £20

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