Dame Joan Bakewell is most famous for three things: a broadcasting career that goes back to Late Night Line-Up in the 1960s, an affair with Harold Pinter and her role as champion of older people (unbelievably she’s 78).

These topics and others will come up tomorrow when she’ll be on stage at the Playhouse chatting to Mark Damazer — former controller of Radio 4, now Master of St Peter’s College — and taking questions from the audience.

Occasionally Bakewell does ‘A Conversation with…’ events, but this one’s different: proceeds go to Shared Experience — the Playhouse resident touring company of which she is chairman of the board. Last year, of course, Shared Experience lost its Arts Council grant.

“We simply couldn’t imagine it could happen,” Dame Joan told me, “we were completely shocked, especially since our record is unblotted in terms of critical acclaim.

“We called a meeting with the Arts Council and I’m glad to say they said our artistic integrity was unchallenged — we remained in the top bracket of producing outstanding work. But what they didn’t like was the business plan we were then running”.

All this happened as Shared Experience was hoping to collaborate with the Playhouse – indeed the party held to celebrate the joint venture was held the evening before the Arts Council bombshell. The company remains in continuous consultation with the Council and receives project-by-project funding.

And tomorrow’s event will indeed be a form of shared experience as Bakewell talks of her life and times.

She hit the national consciousness — in all sorts of ways — when recruited for Line-Up in 1965, but I had to confess that I didn’t know what she’d done in the gap since going down from Cambridge: “Not much, is the answer! I did what people did in those days: got married and had children — I had my family complete by the age of 30 and was ready for a heavier workload. I’d briefly been a radio studio manager at the BBC after university — a technical job and I wasn’t very good at it. From the late ‘50s, I began to do bits of freelance radio broadcasting, at three guineas a time; and doing it here and there, nobody notices you and you can make your mistakes and learn from them.”

The growing medium was TV, and in the canteens of Broadcasting House, says Joan, she pricked her ears, rang round and got auditions (she did an afternoon programme with David Jacobs). BBC2 arrived in 1964, and so did the programme later called Line-Up. It was live and Joan presented at least three nights a week, along with others such as Michael Dean, Denis Tuohy and Tony Bilbow. It made her.

“Conceived as a promotion of television itself, it evolved into a programme that could be critical of the BBC and then ITV; it built us an audience, but also enemies within the BBC — we were considered a maverick, guerrilla enterprise, sniping around the corridors. People like Dennis Potter, Ken Loach, Jonathan Miller and George Melly were always on!”

I pointedly refuse (she laughs) to use the phrase by which Frank Muir described her, but suggested she must have known of the impact she had on viewers: “I did get letters proposing all sorts of extraordinary activities, but I was too busy balancing the family and the job! The press was always talking about my clothes and that sort of thing”.

I interrupted, reminding her that she had posed for some rather dreamy photos. “Yes, there was that going on, and I quite liked that ‘cos I was young and fancy-free — not literally, you understand!” (I don’t mention Pinter.) Five decades on, Joan Bakewell broadcasts regularly, on music and matters of faith, attending the Lords three days a week. The route from maverick guerrilla to Damehood makes a great link, and the tale will be told at the Playhouse. Just after tea. Ah, crumpets!

Joan Bakewell appears at the Playhouse tomorrow (February 3) at 5pm.