"It's a bestseller over there now."* JAMIE OLIVER is back in the nation's good books, with his campaign to improve the calorie-ridden junk that passes for school dinners.Not everyone is singing his praises, though. The TV producer Pat Llewellyn - who "discovered" Oliver when he was working at the River Caf? is said to be irked by the chef's endorsement of Sainsbury's.The reason, I'm told, is that Llewellyn invented the "Naked Chef" concept on which the supermarket's adverts are modelled."Although Pat doesn't want any money, she does feel a bit peeved," says a chum. "Back in the late 60s and early 70s they weren't doing anything that half of the underground elite weren't doing with their kids on the East Coast."The family moved around, from New York to Europe, where the young Robert experienced the joys of a traditional English prep school for a year ("I spent most of time standing in the corner," he says), eventually winding up in Santa Monica. Downey first entered rehab when he was 23, but kept his act together, producing a series of performances that won praise, even if the highest garlands eluded him. Many thought he should have won the Oscar when he was nominated for the 1992 film Chaplin. It was only in 1996 that it all began to fall apart, after he was stopped for speeding and the police found drugs and a gun in his car.Some experts suggested that rather than having a drugs problem Downey was suffering from bi-polar disorder, and that instead of prison and rehab, he should have been receiving treatment for depression When I raise this, he laughs. "Yeah, it's something that somebody said, but it's absolute bullshit.
Left to my own devices, when I'm not strung out on narcotics, I'm absolutely normal in practically every way."Downey has always been open about his years of snorting cocaine and smoking heroin. So open that a thought strikes me: is he someone who had a genuine addiction problem, or did he just like to party very hard? He looks shocked when I ask him "Oh, it wasn't liking to party very hard," he says Then he reconsiders "Well, I can't say I didn't like to party very hard But the party was over 20 years ago. When I was 15 'til 19, those 1,200 days, yeah, I liked to get down I was a kid and it was fine. But from then on it was pure escapism."It was, he says, a struggle with drugs: "Nothing was working - rehab and all that. So I think that on some level I realised that the best way to lose this was to start getting arrested. Now, if you'd said to me: 'Guess what today is? It's the day you're going to jail.
And you just thought you were driving home to snort more coke, didn't you?' Well, I would have said that I didn't want to do that But it worked. It took a long time, but it worked."Does he think he's been unlucky in that his every fall has been under the lens of the media? "It evens out. I got some breaks that I wouldn't have got, and I took some hits that I wouldn't have taken I chose to explore this drug abuse darkness. And I chose to be in the public eye." Downey explains all this without self pity. He's warm, occasionally sardonic (his 11-year-old son Indio, from his marriage to the model and singer Deborah Falconer, told him that all his songs sounded the same.