Editor-At-Large: One week filming with Paul Daniels is enough to make anyone commit murder

The last few days have left me numb with exhaustion, white with fatigue and tight-lipped from making the supreme effort not to raise both hands and strangle a small doggedly irritating man. I've spent three days with Paul Daniels, filming a new television programme called Crime Team for Channel 4.

The premise is that two participants are given clues and have to solve a murder – in this case one that took place in the 1680s. I must have been distracted when I agreed to participate, for I was convinced my co-sleuth was the charming comedian Sean Hughes. Two days before shooting started, the name Paul Daniels moved to centre-frame.

I have seen enough of Mr Daniels to last me a lifetime. We've visited stately homes, shot with antique guns, travelled in a rubber dinghy down the Thames and interviewed countless historians and experts. The concept of teamwork swiftly vanished, and I sent Paul to Coventry in order to retain my sanity. He sang three bars of the same Frank Sinatra song 50 times in 72 hours. He called endless waitresses "You sexy beast", from Pizza Express to four-star hotels. The highlight of the entire enterprise was reaching the centre of the world's longest maze before Paul did, but even then I could hear his relentless stream-of-consciousness through several yards of topiary.

All I have to show for the week's work is a modest appearance fee, a certificate signed by a maze-keeper, and the inner joy of knowing that even when severely provoked, I am incapable of murder.

I had forgotten what prolonged filming is all about. Packets of Maltesers, chicken pie in cafés where health standards haven't been addressed for decades, and cameramen with weak bladders. At one stage three of them spent 20 minutes looking for a toilet in Greenwich while I bobbed up and down in the dinghy. Paul claimed he couldn't work the automatic loo – I cursed that the ruddy thing hadn't flushed him away for good.

Then, there's the weather. Whenever I film outside we enter a cycle of torrential rain, fine rain, wind and rain, and wet mist. Last week was no exception. If there was a gap in the rain, no one would be ready to start filming until it had started to pour again. The director, Rob, wrote a schedule that even Kubrick would have found challenging. His directions to the crew began to resemble the frantic arm-waving of an epileptic enduring a fit. Passers-by took one look at this motly line-up and crossed to the other side of the street. Children were led out of earshot.

This attempt to participate in a "serious" history programme has been a humbling experience. In future I will no longer sneer at Simon Schama and David Starkey on TV. I take my hat off to Peter Ackroyd and his recent brilliant series about Charles Dickens, bound to win all the awards this year. I'd not realised how hard it is to look intelligent and crack a 17th century code, talk coherently about Charles 11, the Restoration, Catholics and spies while walking through a field. It's even harder when next to you is a small cheeky chappie determined to unleash a bad pun, who is neither post-modern nor ironic. On his part, he found me charmless and clearly considered me a quasi-man, because he relentlessly chatted up everything female.

Into this atmosphere of fear and loathing you must factor a short but startling appearance by Alexander Thynn, 7th Marquess of Bath, keeper of Longleat and sexual athlete who has conquered approximately 74 wifelets. Clad in a beret set at a jaunty angle, a patchwork waistcoat, velvet trousers and sporting a better head of hair than either Rod Stewart or Robert Plant, he is selectively deaf and comprehensively eccentric. Paul seemed somewhat miffed that the Marquess and I were already acquainted, but it gave me no advantage as I couldn't understand more than half of what the good Lord said. We had met in 1968 in St Tropez when Alexander drove me to dinner in his sports car, sticking to the British side of the road at a cruising speed of about 90mph. On arrival I got out and fell off my platform soles with fear. Over the subsequent years I have admired him as a completely unsnobby, driven person. Rainy Longleat was full of happy caravanners, the banks of the lake were jammed with fishermen and the Postman Pat village was throbbing. Ken the caretaker whispered to me that his Lordship had been photographed recently, cavorting with two naked busty females in the Kama Sutra suite for the pages of Sunday Sport. This is a man who will do almost anything (including flogging 400 items at Christie's to raise around £15m) in order to keep the show on the road.

I finished filming by realising that officials at the Department of Transport have drawn inspiration from the Restoration period, with its spies, plots, codes, false rumours and lies. And Alastair Campbell surely models himself on that 16th-century doyen of the secret service, Lord Walsingham.

Garden gnomes

Meanwhile, gardening, one of the nation's three major obsessions (the others being football and the Queen's suprising upturn in popularity) continues to boom. Anyone unhappy in their current job who'd like to make at least £20 an hour should simply watch a few Alan Titchmarsh tapes, tune in to Gardeners' Question Time, and then add the magic catchphrase "landscape gardener" to their notepaper. Near my home in Upper Nidderdale, North Yorkshire, people consider laying net traps to catch the two rarest species in the valley – certainly not golden plovers, badgers or hawks. Got plans for a new bathroom? How about putting it off till 2004? Want a gazebo or new rockery? Don't make me laugh. We locals will resort to virtually anything to snare a gardener or a plumber.

Already a head-teacher, a qualified architect, a master butcher and an engineer have given up their former professions to morph into landscape gardeners. After six months and dozens of pleading phone calls, I trapped one. My simple request – a new lawn and a couple of raised herbaceous flower-beds. Three thousand pounds later I have a quasi-Japanese rock garden, a lawn shaped like a free-form blob, some willow screens and a rose arch. And guess what? These princes of the pruning shears don't do anything as menial as "maintenance". That's going to take another round of begging. Perhaps Alexander Thynn could release one from maze duty if I drum up wifelet number 75.

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Am I the only person who finds Ken Livingstone's impending fatherhood nauseating? Why do I not find it surprising that, having split with his partner of many years, he has an affair with a thirtysomething young journalist, who now is a member of his "team". I thought Ken stood for equal opportunity for all. But when it comes to sex some people are more equal than others. If my friend (and fellow 50-plus person) Lulu, left, is photographed with a man young enough to be her son she's branded a shameless careerist. Of course, Ken couldn't be accused of improving his image, could he?

jsp@independent.co.uk