Meredith Etherington-Smith and Victoria Mather: Guess who's coming to dinner?

The Dinner Party Inspectors are the latest experts to offer us advice on how to live. Meredith and Victoria are fearfully plain-speaking on their Channel 4 programme, but what are they like when they're off-duty? Deborah Ross invites the stars of Dominatrix TV round for supper

Place: My house.

Event: Dinner party.

Main guests: Meredith Etherington-Smith, etiquette expert, and Victoria Mather, social commentator - otherwise rather dauntingly known as The Dinner Party Inspectors.

Subsidiary guests: Friends who agreed to come only if I stopped weeping and begging down the phone.

Table decorations: Nil.

Expectation of enjoyment: Nil.

Alcohol consumption: Excessive.

Revised estimate of alcohol consumption: Staggeringly excessive.

Quote of the evening: Meredith, on her husband "Pilch": "He's lovely, he's mine... he's not any old fuck, he's my fuck."

Another quote of the evening: Victoria, on learning that one of the other guests is a teacher. "Tell me, are you allowed to hit the little whippersnappers?"

Revised opinion of Inspectors: Total scream.

Actual enjoyment: Top night.

Recollections: Hazy, at best. Here goes, though...

6pm: Victoria and Meredith arrive. Early start, but I'd been told that they have to be away by 8.30pm. Victoria is the sort of SW-something woman who looks like she's never done her own hair, which, as it turns out, she hasn't. "I haven't washed my own hair for 27 years. I promised myself that when I grew up I would never wash my own hair. But there are so many things I don't do. I don't buy Chanel..."

"... neither do I," interrupts Meredith. "It doesn't fit!" Meredith looks like the sort of SW-something woman who could be very difficult and bossy in Dickins & Jones. Both, it turns out, are gorgeous if compulsive flatterers.

"What a lovely, cosy kitchen," marvels Meredith. (It is not.)

"What a beautiful garden," adds Victoria. (Ditto, plus Japanese knotweed, stinging nettles, dead things in pots...) "Go and look at the garden, Meredith, it's wonderful." (Oh, please don't, Meredith, please.)

"Stunning," Meredith exclaims, boomingly. "I love gardening. My philosophy is, 'If it thrives, leave it. If it dies, pull it out!'"

They have arrived with blissfully expensive pink champagne. (Do I agree with guests bringing blissfully expensive pink champagne? Yes, I believe I do.) "There are many people who think pink champagne vulgar," says Victoria, "but I think it's completely wonderful." "Pop," goes the champagne, "Fzz."

Victoria wishes she had brought her beloved Pekinese, Bubble. "I thought it was a bit hot and bothery and I wasn't sure if you'd really want her in your beautiful home. Some people are a bit funny about that sort of thing."

My ancient cat takes a leisurely stroll across the kitchen table. "What a beautiful cat," says Victoria. (She is not. She has part of an ear missing and is bad-tempered and smelly.) "I love cats and cats love me," announces Meredith. I ask how they feel about cats walking across the table we are about to eat from. "I don't have a problem with that," says Victoria. "I used to be [the city journalist] Christopher Fildes's cat-minder, and he's a great one for dinner parties where there are always cat paw-marks in the butter." Pop, fzz. Pop, fzz. I am a nervous hostess and am at it like billyoh.

6.30pm: My friend Andrew arrives. It's established that Andrew is a primary-school teacher.

Victoria: "Oh, brilliant."

Meredith: "What fun."

Victoria: "Are you allowed to hit the little whippersnappers?"

I am beginning to enjoy myself. Certainly, I've fallen for their fraitfully posh use of language. (At one point Victoria refers to something as "taking us for midships".) Pop, fzz. Andrew's wife Lisa arrives. Victoria is most enthusiastic about Lisa's T-shirt. "I love it!" "George at Asda, £3.99," says Lisa, who, I know now, cannot be trusted in sophisticated social situations.

"Oh, I love the high street," says Victoria. "Everything I am wearing today is from Marks & Spencer. I love my silk combats."

My friends Stuart and Louise arrive. Louise's handbag is much admired. "That is the must-have handbag," Victoria declares ecstatically. Stuart, who could be quicker on the uptake, is perplexed. "I thought I was coming round to watch a TV programme..." We explain that The Dinner Party Inspectors is Channel 4's latest lifestyle show, in the style of What Not to Wear and How Clean is Your House?. It's a genre that's been given the rather worrying tag of Dominatrix TV. Each week Victoria and Meredith expertly cast their eyes over some hapless person's attempt at entertaining. The previous evening's episode had featured the gay cellist Jamie and his fat, sullen long-lost sister. "Such a furious pig," says Victoria. "And why was she wearing a marquee?" adds Meredith.

Victoria says that since the first programme was broadcast, "everyone has been phoning me to say I'll never be invited anywhere again". She then adds, with wonderful comic timing: "Oh, what a relief!"

Are they enjoying celebritydom? Rather, I would say. "We were on Richard and Judy's couch yesterday," Victoria says. "Do you know, Richard wears more make-up than Judy? They're terribly professional, though, and I loved having my name on the dressing-room door. It sent shivers down me."

7pm: I take my fish pie (Jamie Oliver, The Return of the Naked Chef, page 158) out the oven. Victoria: "Oh, fish pie! Yum. You are so kind."

Meredith: "My fave. And with frozen peas. Quite the best kind." Victoria: "You poor thing, have you been slaving all day?"

I put the salt, still its packet, on the table. "I love that salt," says Victoria.

Before she goes on to admire my Artexed ceiling and the oven door, which comes off its hinges, I ask Victoria and Meredith how long they have known each other.

Victoria: "Oh, years. Since Harpers, when Nicholas Coleridge was editor. Did you edit my psychotherapy piece there, Meredith?" Meredith: "I did, Victoria. It was a wonderful piece."

Victoria: "Nicholas and Meredith had to pull that out of me. It was like extracting teeth. It was still something you didn't talk about. My mother always called psychotherapists 'trick cyclists'..."

Meredith: "It was like the piece I did for the Telegraph about having cancer. I got cancer 12 years ago. It was a very positive piece, but I got a lot of hate mail about it. I'm a uni-boob. I've only got one boob. My favourite story is going for a mammogram when I'd had one boob off and they charged me for two. They were terribly embarrassed when I pointed it out. I wrote this piece and I got sacks of hate mail saying how could I talk about it?"

Victoria: "I was expecting people to slap me round the chops, but up to about 12 years afterwards people came up to me and said, 'I read your piece and as a result I went to a therapist and it helped me so much.'" We are utterly captivated by now. Honestly, can you ever hear enough about the wildly dysfunctional upper classes? Victoria: "My father was a theatre director, my mother was Cecil Beaton's model. She gave up after she was made to go into a goat pen wearing nothing but a fur coat. Honestly, Up With This I Can Not Put! Mother was wonderfully eccentric but financially incontinent, bouncing in and out of bankruptcy. Life was pretty tough. My father got Parkinson's unbelievably early, during the war, so there wasn't very much money about..."

Meredith: "My father was kind of a wonderful person, but a gambler. He had had such a really dangerous war, so that after the war it wasn't enough, and he took up gambling, big time. They just about managed by dint of hocking my mother's engagement ring to crack me through school. I've earned my own living since I was 17."

"I left home at 16."

"You're so competitive, Victoria."

"No one ever leaves home any more. Parents are going demented because they are never getting their lives back."

"I used to work in a pub as the bustiest barmaid in town. People would stuff notes down my cleavage. Gangsters would come in and I would lean seductively over the bar."

"I remember when I was coming out, when I was a debutante, if you didn't have a house in London you rented a house for the season, and I remember coming home to the house Mummy had rented in Seymour Walk and the locks had been changed because she hadn't paid the rent. Bailiffs..."

"Ah, bailiffs... we had a wonderful bailiff called Mr Violet. Charming. He was always in the kitchen having a cup of tea."

I ask Victoria what she learnt about through therapy. "I learnt," she says, "that it was all right not to love my father. I used to feel so desperately guilty about it. He was so ill. But when you are little the one thing you really, really loathe is incapacity. He'd teeter and dribble, which I couldn't bear. It says some awful things about me... when he died I felt desperately relieved, but guilty. It stayed around like a bad smell."

"Move on," advises Meredith.

"Yes, one must move on," accepts Victoria. Meredith puts a hand on Victoria's. Victoria admires Meredith's pink nail-varnish. "So much less frightening than the black, dear." Meredith: "Well, it is summer."

8.15pm: I'm still sober enough to remember that Meredith and Victoria must go soon. I serve strawberries in balsamic vinegar with mascarpone (page 256, and yes, it is my only cookbook.) I am waiting for "I love strawberries in balsamic vinegar", but everyone has lost interest in the food by now.

Stuart and Meredith (who is the editor-in-chief of Art Review as well as the author of a Salvador Dali biography) are well into a discussion about art. Meredith says that if she had all the money in the world, "I'd buy a vast Jenny Saville."

Victoria says the only two things she's ever wanted in life are an Aga and diamond earrings. She's just bought the Aga with the proceeds of her latest Social Stereotypes book, and is well on her way to the earrings. "A carat each, from Ritz Fine Jewellery, and I'm paying them off week by week until I get them." On the HP, then? "Yes, on the drip. And when I finally get them, I'll feel I have achieved something. I'm hoping Johnny [Raymond, her husband, who does something in the City] won't notice."

9.30pm: Victoria and Meredith still here. Pop, fzz. Pop, fzz. We're discussing Victoria's pash on Hugh Jackman ("I've got into X-Men and am totally in love with him); the awful party they scrutinised in Essex ("The host did beef Wellington, but everyone said they didn't like rare meat so he had to remove it from the pastry and grill it"); and Victoria's commemorative plans for Bubble. "I've discovered there's a service by the Royal Mail so you can have your own stamps made. I'm going to have them made with Bubble on them. Such a good idea, don't you think? She deserves a stamp."

10.30pm: Pop, fzz, pop, fzz. I ask Victoria if Johnny can cook. "Yes, but I don't allow it. It's a male thing. He uses 46 pans. He once went on a course at Leith's and all he learnt was how to cut an onion. Who the fuck cares? Just cut the onion."

Meredith: "My husband has his signature dishes. His scrambled eggs are heavenly. And he's learnt - wait for this - how to make mayonnaise." I do not know much about Meredith's husband other than that he's called "Pilch", they live in a house "you can always just tip up at" and she's rather keen on him: "Not just any old fuck. My fuck."

She suggests we vote for celebrities we'd sleep with out of pity. Actually, being Meredith, she puts it rather more plainly than that; she says: "Let's vote for our top five mercy fucks!" Andrew Lloyd Webber is a popular choice, as are Robin Cook, Jeremy Beadle, John Redwood and Tom Cruise. Mick Jagger could not be included because Victoria said: "I would sleep with him happily!" The menfolk, who are rubbish about this sort of thing, can only come up with Posh.

11pm: The Dinner Party Inspectors go. I don't remember much of this beyond Meredith trying to order a cab and bellowing: "No, I am not a man. I just have a very deep voice!" My friends are well stuck in.

Midnight-3am: Anyone's guess, more or less, although I think the whisky came out.

8am, next morning: Discover that, miraculously, I had not only cleaned up before going to bed but had also made my son's packed lunch. Have no memory of doing either.

3.30pm: I pick up my son from school. "Mummy," he asks, "how come all you gave me for lunch was a sandwich with nothing in the middle?" "Darling," I say, "I love you very much, but do you have to speak so loudly?

'The Dinner Party Inspectors' is on Channel 4 at 8.30pm tonight

And the Dinner Party Inspectors' verdict...

Meredith

I can't remember having enjoyed a dinner party as much; every one of the guests had something interesting to say. And I just love the fact that Deborah had clearly spent about 24 hours stoning olives. What was so nice was that it was all about elbows on the table. And regardless of what people say, there are no rules about things like that; if you are having a good time, it doesn't matter.

Victoria

I am totally mortified; I had so much champagne that I totally blanked on the address and haven't sent Deborah a thank-you letter. I loved her dinner party. The atmosphere was so relaxed (absolutely key) that it didn't matter that the dinner table wasn't laid and that we fell over the box of empties at the front door! Deborah's dinner was much more like a salon. And as for that heavenly fish pie...