The Scandalous Adventures Of Lord Byron C4

"IF you had a time machine," pondered Rupert Everett from his bath, "where would you go? Or if you could be a star which one would you be? These are the idle questions we sometimes ask ourselves." He missed out "what's happened to the tomato sauce?"

Everett, the first presenter to strip off every five minutes since the heyday of Judith Chalmers, was tracing the route of the scandal-laden first European tour of esteemed poet Lord Byron, a man who "captures all the glamour of the human condition from the gutter to the gods". Not for nothing has he been described as the Britney Spears of his generation.

In his travels to the continent, Byron got up to so many duvet-based shenanigans the only wonder was he didn't return cross-eyed. Described by Everett as "the first modern sex symbol", pre-dating Tommy Steele by several decades, he was "Britain's first international celebrity with a vanity and sexual appetite of a rock star". Regularly did he appear on the front of Ye News Of Ye Worlde.

Byron landed first in the louche southern city of Lisbon, famed for its bars and bordellos. There he "greedily experimented" with actresses, servant girls, and prostitutes, before moving on to the tapas.

Everett thought it only circumspect to catch up with a modern-day high-class Portuguese call-girl.

"What are Englishmen like compared to Germans?" he asked her. "The English are very careful," she somewhat mysteriously replied. I can only think the Germans recklessly throw their lederhosen off the balcony.

Byron, said Everett, hitching up his underpants, was a mass of contradictions, "nose in the gutter and head in the stars", illustrated by his romp through Spain and Malta where he had countless flings with floozies yet was dead set on romantically collecting locks of their hair, not all of it from the plughole.

He then headed to the "wildest country in the western world, a blank space on the map that few Englishmen had ever visited". Just as I was thinking he was off to Belgium, it transpired Everett meant Albania. Again, here Byron got up to stuff that should never be mentioned in a postcard to an ageing aunt. Indeed, the entire journey was way too scandalous for diary form and thus the Lord semi-fictionalised it in the poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage that on his return to Blighty would make him famous.

"Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," said Everett, wrapped in a fluffy towel, "was a timebomb. It would have a bigger impact with English readers than any other poem." Only There Was An Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe comes near.

"All society envied him," said Everett, "all the girls were after him.

"The women were just like moths to a light."

I was like that when I was younger. The moths loved me.