My favourite clergyman.

Is the Rev. Richard Coles, co-host of Radio 4’s Saturday Live and contestant in the new series of Strictly. No stranger to stardom, he was once one half of The Communards, and this was biggest-selling single of 1986. A few years ago, I used him as a voiceover because he sounds very similar to Stephen Fry. I just rang the vicarage at St. Paul’s in Knightsbridge and he answered the phone. He was kind, intelligent, worldly and gay – the last person you’d expect to have any truck with organised religion. But a couple of years later, when I was invited to the launch of his autobiography, he revealed how fame, drug abuse and the AIDS-related deaths of so many of his friends left him utterly lost and broken. Proving once again that lost souls at their most vulnerable will always fall prey to religion.