Tim Hudson was an ex-public schoolboy who had played cricket for Surrey second XI - not very successfully: he only appeared once and scored 1 and 0 – but then settled in California and made his fortune as a disc jockey and property developer. He was also the voice of characters in the Disney cartoons The Jungle Book and The Aristocats, and the self-proclaimed inventor of flower power and friend and confidant of rock stars . . . or so he said. It was often hard to decide what was real and what was PR in his utterances, but he was certainly rich and could turn on the charm like a tap. He also had a certain hippie-meets-Great-Gatsby sort of style with his trademark panama hat, rainbow-striped blazer and ponytail.

I had first come across him in the States at the end of the 1981 season, but by the time we bumped into each other again in 1984 he had established himself back in England with a stately home, Birtles Hall, in the Cheshire countryside, which had its own cricket pitch named “the Birtles Bowl”. As part of our benefit seasons he set up a match between an Ian Botham XI and a Geoff Boycott XI. I didn’t hear from him again until the following spring.

I was soon lapping up buckets of Hudson’s trademark flannel about what a great English hero I was and how he was the man to turn my fame into a genuine fortune. He had big plans, and a vision of me as an Englishman archetype with heroic overtones. Winston Churchill, Cary Grant and Horatio Nelson were mentioned; even I thought that was overdoing it.

Hudson’s plans also embraced the way that cricket was played and promoted. The entire domestic cricket scene needed to be blown away. “Let’s have matches between teams captained by Eric Clapton and Elton John,” he said. “We could put them on telly and the crowds would come flocking in. I’d love to see cricket totally orchestrated: Pink Floyd playing and the game going on.”

I’m embarrassed even to write this today, let alone admit that I was sucked in by it all.

Step One in Hudson’s grand scheme was to use me to market a range of “unique and classic” casual clothing. The theme was “country-house cricket” and the predominant colours were the Rastafarian red, yellow, black and green. The fact I am colour-blind may have had something to do with it, but I actually thought the clothes were great. I liked a lot of the other trappings too: the Rolls-Royce, the wild parties at Birtles, and most of all the endless flattery. I was a world superstar, not just a great cricket star but a sex symbol who would take Hollywood by storm.

It all came to a head in 1986

Three days after we arrived, Hudson steered me into the offices of a Hollywood producer, Menachem Golan. Hollywood is built on bulls***, and Golan showed he was well capable of adding a few shovels-full with his statement that “Ian Botham has got the looks, the build and the accent to be the next James Bond. I know they’re looking around, because Roger Moore has hinted that he won’t be in the next 007 film and Ian would be a genuine candidate if he takes my advice and puts his name forward.”

When we sat down at the other side of his five-acre desk, Golan got straight down to business. “All I want you to do,” he said, “is put me ten cents on every seat.”

“Botham will give you ten cents,” Hudson said. “He’ll give you a million kids in Britain, a million in Australia and even more than that in India and Pakistan.”

“Well, I’ll tell you something,” Golan said, “he’s better looking than Tom Selleck” – talk about damning with faint praise. “So Ian, all you’ve got to do for now is stay here in LA and take some acting lessons for six months.”

“Er . . . excuse me?” I said. “I can’t do that. What about the tour to the West Indies?”

Golan stared at me. “The tour to the West Indies?”

“The England cricket tour. It starts in about three weeks.”

The new James Bond now had an instant decision to make. It was clear that it had to be either a licence to kill or a licence to play cricket. There could only be one decision: I had unfinished business with the Windies, so Mr Bond would have to wait . . . but if you’re still out there Menachem, I’m ready for my close-up now.

Botham’s tour hit a nadir in Barbados

Kath’s father, Gerry, had flown out to Barbados and he helped restore my sanity. He made me leave my room and get away from all the on and off-field pressures. I was back on a relatively even keel, but during the third Test I’d popped up into the stand to chat to two of England’s celebrity supporters, Mick Jagger and Eric Idle. Mick asked me to dinner that evening and told me to bring a few friends along. I asked Gerry and my roommate Les Taylor, and since Bob Willis was nearby with his brother and his wife and an acquaintance of theirs called Lindy Field, I added them to the party list.

Ms Field gave me, Bob’s brother and his wife a lift in her car while Les Taylor and Gerry drove behind us. Ms Field was a good-looking woman, an ex-Miss Barbados, but beyond a few bland pleasantries on the drive there I hardly spoke to her and spent the evening chatting with Mick about cricket. I went back to our hotel with Gerry and Les and forgot all about Ms Field.

I soon had plenty of other things to occupy my mind. A couple of days before the fourth Test in Trinidad, the Daily Star ran a story headlined “Botham drug shock”, the result of an “off the record” chat between Tim Hudson and two English reporters in a bar in Santa Monica, California. The choice quotes about me included “I’m aware he smokes dope. Doesn’t everybody?”

I was still in the process of suing The Mail on Sunday for libel over their “sex and drugs” allegations about me in New Zealand in 1983–84. A few words out of place by my manager could lose me the case and leave me with a costs bill of a million quid and change. When I finally tracked him down in Miami, the phone conversation was brief. “If you do not at once put out a release through your lawyer threatening to sue the Daily Star,” I said, “I will have no alternative but to sue you or sack you. Maybe both.” In the end I settled for the latter.

Just when I felt that I had got back on track, there was another hammer blow. Straight after Mick Jagger’s dinner party, Lindy Field had flown from Barbados to London with one aim in mind: to hawk around the London tabloid editors a story about a supposed night of cocaine snorting and wild sex with me. Kath was already due to fly out to Antigua before the final Test. By the time she arrived, the News of the World’s scoop was out. I could see why the paper’s editors must have been salivating. It had the lot: sex, drugs, an adulterous celebrity and a beauty queen: “I laid out coke . . . beauty queen’s night of passion with Botham . . . Test ace in sex and drugs scandal”.

One of the purported “facts” used to back up the story was that so torrid was the shagathon that Ms Field and I had allegedly embarked on in my hotel room, we had broken the bed. The paper’s reporters had even interviewed a hotel maintenance man who was quoted as saying, “I didn’t fix the bed myself, but all the guys were talking about it.” Had they bothered to ask me or my roommate, Les Taylor, they would have discovered that it was actually Les who had broken it, when slumping down to get some sleep.

Kath came straight to the point. “Well, is it true?”

“Of course not. Gerry was with me all night. Ask him if you don’t believe me. She’s just made up a plausible-sounding story to make herself a few thousand quid.”

As far as I was concerned it was now ancient history, time to move on. But though she said nothing else at the time, Kath was mired in a depression. One morning, while I was at a team meeting, she went off alone. When I got back there was no message and no sign of her and I became frantic. Finally she walked back into our room, shocked to see the state I’d got myself into. I snarled at her for going out without telling me or leaving a note, she snapped back that I was being ridiculous, but eventually we calmed down and I suggested that we should go down to the bar. A few of the boys were there, we had a few drinks and then we decided to go back to our room and watch a movie. Bob Willis set off to buy pizzas first.

While he was out, one of our friends told me some interesting news about Ms Field: it turned out that she had a very expensive cocaine habit to support, suggesting a strong motive for Ms Field to want to concoct a lucrative story for the press. I was delighted and I told Kath at once, thinking she’d be pleased too. Instead, she burst into tears. “I never want to hear another bloody word about that woman,” she said. “Can’t you understand that?”

Evidently not, because my next contribution was, “What the hell’s the matter with you? Cheer up for God’s sake.” Kath stormed out of the bar with tears streaming down her face and greeted me with a stony silence when I got back to the room.

Bob brought the pizzas shortly afterwards but, frustrated by Kath’s reproachful silence, I grabbed mine and sent it flying, then went round the room overturning the ice bucket, including the bottle of wine it was cooling, smashing the bedside lamp and throwing a few other things that came to hand against the walls. Then I stormed out.

I wound up throwing down rums in a beach bar, where Bob Willis found me a couple of hours later. I got back to the room blind drunk, and having delivered my pompous, drunken verdict – “That’s it. Our marriage is over. We have been trapped by the headlines” – I fell unconscious on the bed.

When I came round the next morning, the first thing I heard was Kath with a fit of the giggles. Opening a bleary eye, I saw that a piece of pizza was dangling from the curtain rail with strings of melted cheese reaching almost to the floor. I started to laugh too. In that moment, I realised that if we could go through a night like the one we’d had and still wake up laughing, there might be a chance for us yet.