KEY POINTS:
Blimey, where to start with Julie Goodyear's life? Perhaps with that husband. "Which one, honey?" she says in that voice. It is throaty from years of fags, so instantly recognisable and inordinately thrilling, for any Coronation Street fan - from her farm in Lancashire where she is, of course, puffing away merrily.
Which husband? Yes, good point. She's had three, two useless and one who drugged and robbed her; four long-term relationships with women, one who dumped her when she was in the cancer ward; cervical cancer; a spell in jail; a 25- year career in Coronation Street as the busty, brassy Bet Lynch; a disastrous comeback.
On the cover of Just Julie, the autobiography she was finally persuaded to write, Goodyear is wearing a faux leopard-skin coat and earrings that could sink a cruise liner. Her hair is peroxide blonde, backcombed, beehived; her nails and lips are barmaid red.
This is not, actually, a picture of Julie Goodyear. It's a picture of Bet. On the inside cover is Julie, also blonde, but with a short, soft crop; her make-up barely there. She's smiling, but not the brassy Bet grin. Like Bet, she looks as though she's had a few knocks from life. It is a vulnerable face.
Hers is a book which lays those vulnerabilities on the page and reading it is like watching, with horrified fascination, several train crashes.
She starts the story of her life when she was already British telly's favourite barmaid and ought to have been rich and famous and revelling in it. Instead, here she is: in a psychiatric ward, not long after her wedding to that husband. "Oh, the second one."
That would be the one who went home with his mum after the ceremony. Goodyear staged the reception, alone, in her gold lame wedding gown . She reckons the performance she gave was one of her best. Afterwards, still in her gown and veil, she drove round to his mum's.
"Is Tony in?" said the bride. "Yes, he is," said the mum. "And I've only just managed to get him off to sleep," and slammed the door in her daughter-in-law's face.
That little scene is mad enough. She went home, went back to work on the Street, and at night went home to the bungalow she'd been sharing with Tony and drank brandy and soda. What followed was a storyline even we Corrie fans, used as we are to ludicrous plots, would have trouble swallowing.
The maddest bit is not that Goodyear found herself, or someone found her, she's not sure, screaming in the street, "grit in my mouth, blood on my hands and blood dripping from my bare feet."
Or that Goodyear was given two weeks of electro-convulsive therapy and, although she doesn't remember this, roamed the wards in a full-length evening dress and white fox stole.
No, where it all gets really bonkers is that the hospital ran tests which found drugs in her blood system. She denied then, and denies still, that she has ever taken drugs. Somebody from the hospital went to the bungalow and found traces of drugs in the soda siphon. "That siphon belonged to Tony, so I can only guess that it had been spiked by him. He was the only person who had a key to get in - but why?"
She was never told what the drugs were, and has never asked. That husband also made off with half of what was in her bank accounts and got half of the house, "which again was my fault because I put everything into joint names, everything".
She never, after a last meeting at the insistence of her psychiatrist, saw Tony again and she doesn't know the answers to any of the questions about him. But does she think he was just a conman? "I don't know what he was and because he's dead now that's just one of the things you don't get an answer to." Does it matter? "No. Not any more, not at all, no."
You just wouldn't believe this story if it had happened to anyone but Goodyear. Things do seem to happen to her. Her much-loved mum - "she has been on the other side for 20 years this month" - always said, and this runs as a refrain through the book, "whatever 'ave you done now? You must 'ave done summat wrong. You could cause trouble in an empty house."
I say I found this difficult to reconcile with the affectionate portrait of her mother. And wonder if it's why she says things like, "which again was my fault", when she's talking about some creep who humiliated her and ripped her off. But she says, "this is very typical in the North where I live. It's a very Northern approach."
All right, so why does she think she has attracted such lousy men? "Listen, you know Michele, maybe they find you. I think that kind of person is not going to be attracted to someone who would give as good as they get. I think maybe if you are a vulnerable, very gentle sort of person, you're more likely to attract ... shits is one word to describe them. Arsehole is another, there's quite a few words, Michele!"
She says she's not very highly sexed and thank goodness for that because imagine the trouble she'd have got in if she was.
"Oh, God, yeah. If I'd have been a nympho! My God!"
She never thought about having a sexual relationship with a woman until her shrink asked whether she had. When she said, "Good God, no", he said he was surprised. She says it would probably never have occurred to her but, "you know, I'd had so many disappointments with men, I thought, 'Hey, this is it. We're on to something here'."
But not on to anything too much. She also has that Northern trait whereby if you don't expect much, you're not disappointed when you don't get much. "That's pretty good, isn't it? When you get anything that's one hell of a bonus." Except when you're Goodyear and things just happen. What happened when she finally got her gold Rolls-Royce is a fairly typical story.
"Isn't that the pits? To work all the way up to a Rolls-Royce, to look the dogs bollocks. And I knew this guy was looking at me and I turned and smiled and lowered the window and the f***ing thing just fell out! You couldn't make it up! He pissed himself laughing and drove on."
You couldn't, I tell her, make any of her life up and hardly anyone could tell it so well, in that bleakly funny, deadpan Northern way.
"You tell me your favourite funny story," I say, "then I'll tell you mine." "Oh, so many. I mean, how could anyone have cancer and the commode breaks your first time out of bed and you've got splinters in your arse and that can't be possible. Not with a nun on either side!"
My favourite involves a woman called No Name, Goodyear's first girlfriend and a device called "the Pifco". Goodyear hadn't a clue what women did in bed but "had gleaned from some of the less savoury jokes I'd overheard ... that it was possible to buy aids or gadgets".
On the day No Name was coming round "for drinks and a sandwich" Goodyear popped out to the electrical department of a big Manchester store. "You know what I want," she said to the young male shop assistant. "A Pifco ... The thing that moves, women use it." She demanded it be wrapped in brown paper, and took it home and shoved it in the bedroom cupboard.
At some stage of the evening No Name got on Goodyear's bed and called her in. This was the moment, Goodyear decided, to present the Pifco. Which she did, to an obviously perplexed No Name. "But Julie," she said finally, "I haven't got arthritis." "I know you haven't, but your mother has," Goodyear said. A Pifco is a massage machine for ... arthritis.
And that, says Goodyear, was one of her best unscripted lines. "I was really proud of that! And I couldn't wait to get her out of that bedroom."
I say I bet No Name couldn't wait to get out of the bedroom. By now I am snorting with laughter. "Go on, go on," she says, "only I could get a pisstaker all the way from New Zealand laughing about my pathetic attempts at life."
Perhaps, I suggest, she gets the journalists she deserves. "Oh, thanks a bunch. Welcome back mum!"
A rollicking read, then, but a sad life, in many ways. "Hey, I'm still here aren't I?"
After reading her book, I quite desperately wanted to know that, at 65, she was happy now. She has been for 11 years, with Scott, who came to deliver some cement one day. He is 25 years younger and the tabloids persist in calling him her toyboy. They have what she calls an "unusual relationship" which makes me laugh because when have her relationships been usual?
He has asked her to marry him every day of those 11 years and she might give in, just to shut him up. "It isn't a love story, I don't want people to get carried away! Because my life was never going to be once upon a time and they lived happily ever after. That's the case of so many women, I think we're fooled right from the word go with fairy tales."
I thought she might be a stroppy and demanding diva because that's the way she's been painted, and, anyway, why shouldn't she be? "You know, there's a fine line between perfection and stroppy and demanding. I like things right because the end result is going to show. But, nah, I couldn't be arsed."
So she wasn't a bit diva-ish and I absolutely adored her. Of course I did. She called me sweetheart and honey and she says she'd come and whisk me away if only they'd reinvent smoking flights. She puts away 40 fags "on a quiet day" and can only just survive the two and a half hours to Spain to go to her holiday home.
But she's heard of a German entrepreneur planning to set up a smoking airline.
"I promise you, honestly, if he does, I shall come and get you. And I'll leave the Pifco at home!"
