White approach - Marco Pierre White interview

Former Michelin-starred chef Marco Pierre White is back on TV with a culinary tour of Britain. Here he tells Alison Roberts why he condemns the free-range chicken 'snobs' and reveals that despite three marriages, he's never actually fallen in love

AT ONE point during my meeting with Marco Pierre White – the godfather of the modern celebrity chef, and the very first in Britain to win three Michelin stars – I have a horrible fear that he is going to cry. This is a surprise, of course. White is hardly a softie (legend has it he once made Gordon Ramsay, a former protégé, whimper in the corner of his kitchen), but it turns out he is quite full of surprises. We are talking about fighting and how his father taught him to scrap, but scrap fairly, in the school playground.

"The old man said to me, 'Marco, you will get into a lot of fights in your life but it doesn't matter if you get beat. Just make sure you hurt them more than they hurt you and only ever use your fists. If they go down, never put the boot in.'

So did he fight much? "When you're half-Italian and you live in working-class Leeds, it's not long after the Second World War and your Italian mother dies and people call you a coward …" And it's at this point that – despite the low lighting in Marco's, his restaurant at Chelsea's football ground – I watch as his eyes start to fill and his lip trembles. Blimey. White recomposes himself quickly, but for a moment he's a bag of emotions. "The old man was absolutely right," he concludes. "You have to learn how to fight."

At 47, he doesn't pick them quite so readily but he's still a stranger to diplomacy. When I ask him whether he supports Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver in their campaign for better standards of chicken-rearing, he sets to the subject with square jaw and fists raised.

"If you want my honest opinion, I think it's snobbery of the highest level," he asserts. "There are a lot of people in this world who earn £20,000 a year and have to feed and clothe their children, keep a roof over their head, take them on holiday – they cannot afford to buy expensive chicken." So the £1.99 bird sold by Tesco is acceptable? "People choose with their pockets. They might like to buy a free-range chicken but they can't afford it. I just think (Fearnley-Whittingstall and Oliver] should live in the real world. I was brought up on a council estate, I know what it's like to be poor. These people may not."

Imagine, if you possibly can, a world before celebrity chefs. And then imagine Marco's sudden appearance on the London restaurant scene in the late 1980s: he was a wild force of nature; gorgeous to look at; hot-tempered; brilliant at the stove; hugely egotistical. He changed dining for ever. "If I did one thing," he agrees, "I made cooking rock'n'roll, I made it sexy. I made young kids from rich backgrounds want to come into my world."

And now, of course, he is cooking on TV. White replaced Ramsay as the tutor of celebrity novice cooks on the always watchable Hell's Kitchen and recently began his culinary tour of Britain for ITV's four-part series, The Great British Feast. In this we see an eccentric, mildly irascible White discovering the best British produce and from it creating a series of dishes that are judged by experts and ordinary diners. The food is dead basic, but it's White's sly wit and rather childish sense of wonder that make the programmes compelling. In the first episode we saw him a little moist-eyed (again) as he contemplated a shed of forced rhubarb. And this is the second most surprising thing about White: the man once judged the most influential chef in Britain by the world's top gourmets, whose Escoffier-inspired food was eaten by the elite, the glamorous and the exceptionally rich, now proselytises on behalf of a very British, mundane fare. Salad cream. Knorr stock cubes. Chip butties. HP sauce. Tea served from caravans in lay-bys on the motorway. Ever the tousle-haired romantic (and he is still a handsome, bearish man), White has returned full circle to his childhood.

It has not been an easy journey. In 1968, when he was six (his elder brothers were 13 and 11, and his baby brother just 13 days old), his Italian mother died very suddenly of a brain haemorrhage. His father immediately stripped their Leeds council house of all traces of her; these events have affected his life ever since. "When you watch your dear mum die, it becomes a kind of pivot, an anchor in your life," he says. "I still ask myself what she expects of me, and she's still my guiding force, my mum. The only woman a boy truly loves is his mother … I had a lot of very confused emotions to unravel and I'm still on that path."

When we see White shooting rabbits and stalking deer in The Great British Feast, he is revisiting his childhood. If Fearnley-Whittingstall is experimenting with self-sustenance when he whips up a roadkill casserole, White and his family lived off the land because they had to.

White was ten when his father became seriously ill with lung cancer. "If you really want to know what motivated me as a young man," he says, "it was a fear of death. I wanted to be acknowledged, I wanted to be recognised, but I was scared. I knew in my mind that I could get those three stars (as he did, at London's Hyde Park Hotel] but I was terrified I would never live to realise it. My fear was I would die."

Yet he was the very opposite of cautious in life. He lived and worked like a demon through his twenties. Along the way he got married three times: to Alex McArthur, by whom he has a grown-up daughter; to former model Lisa Butcher (briefly); and to Spanish-born Mati Conejero, mother of his two sons, 14-year-old Luciano and 13-year-old Marco, and his daughter Mirabelle, seven. He and Mati are currently in the throes of an acrimonious divorce, about which he won't talk for the sake of the children.

"I don't believe I've ever truly been in love because I don't believe that I've known myself well enough in the past to allow someone to love me. It doesn't matter how wonderful a woman is, if I'm not ready as an individual to be loved, it's not going to happen. So I must take the blame in many ways (for the failed marriages] because I should never have entered into those relationships. But I still hold out hope for it. I'll always roll those dice. If there were two dice on the table right now and you could roll them for love, would I do it? Yes, every time."

In 1999, White "abdicated" (his word) from the restaurant scene. The king gave up his three stars, handed them back to Michelin and "exiled" himself to the country. There he began to "unravel all my confused emotions". He rediscovered his childhood passion for hunting, and taught his sons how to love both grouse and greasy spoons, just as his father had taught him. Most importantly, he started to find out who his mother was. The more he found out, the more he could see of her in himself. "I realised I was not a product of my father but actually much more of my mother …

"There is a type of person who is damaged as a child and forms a protective layer around themselves. The world they're born into doesn't penetrate – they just observe it but don't become part of it. And then, one day, that shell dissolves and they realise who they are and they become stronger people," he says, talking, a little perplexingly, about himself.

During his time away from the restaurant world, posh French food suddenly seemed irrelevant, decadent even. He began to appreciate once more the British food he'd always loved but associated with difficult, painful memories.

When I ask him how much he's worth, he replies: "No one knows and no one will ever know. I live my life under the radar. I don't go to parties, I don't go to charity dinners. I am only ever seen in my own establishments. I like to be totally cocooned and protected." Which either means he's got fingers in even more pies than we suspect, or that he's just not worth the £50 million he once was.

But White is good fun, still quite naughty and any restaurant world without him would definitely be duller. And, despite his current fetish for salad cream, a far less tasty sort of world.

• Marco Pierre White's Great British Feast is on STV at 9pm on Wednesdays. The accompanying book is published by Orion, £20.