New Statesman: Diary: I saw Jonathan Ross's hair in curlers in the make-up room before his show. Sho

What's worse than being mugged on the streets of Brixton at knifepoint -- decomposing into an emotional wreck and crying on national television? Being mugged by Jonathan Ross's sharp tongue in the company of the chart-topping Sugar Babes and the brutal iron from EastEnders, that's what. Of course, I had (as JR was keen to point out) volunteered for both. A willing victim. But just because it was consensual didn't mean that I had to enjoy it! In both instances, I craved an ejector seat -- a lifeline from Chris Tarrant, any line, a joke, a humorous quip, anything to make light of the situations. None was to hand. The moment when I did have an ejector seat -- a genuine one -- I was upside down doing a loop-the-loop in a Hawk jet, being sick into a Nato-issue sick bag, which, rather disappointingly, given all the billions we spend on the military, looks just like any other sick bag.

It could have been worse! I could have appeared on Ulster Television's Gerry Kelly show and been upstaged by a flea circus and Matthew Wright. They were not appearing as a double act. One was doing somersaults and tumble turns and the other did a U-turn and apologised for years of celebrity muck-raking. What kind of mother did I have that I would volunteer for such humiliation? What kind of mother, indeed! That was the reason I travelled to Belfast and UTV, to find out what kind of mother David McBride (age 40) had and why she had left him in a tartan bag, aged two weeks, on the back seat of a car in Dunmurray in January 1962. His dark hair and green eyes denote, according to Northern Irish folklore, David a Catholic -- or rather his mother. In fact, he was brought up in a Protestant family but is convinced that his birth mother is a "Taig". A remarkable thing for one Irish foundling if it transpires to be the case. Not too remarkable, though, for the newly founded Police Force of Northern Ireland, which, I understand, has had a swathe of applications from Protestants calling themselves Catholics in order to jump the positive discrimination queue.

They were expecting a royal visit to RAP Leaming in Yorkshire and everything smelled of fresh paint -- well, nearly everything. I was leaving a trail from the runway to the mess toilet. What I hadn't left on the cockpit of the jet or in the sick bag was left on the neatly shorn grass. The morning flight, visiting the clouds for BBC Science, was without breakfast, but, taking advice from my former Red Arrows pilot, Squadron Leader Barry Cross, I had indulged in lunch before the afternoon sortie -- with predictable consequences. The G-forces and prawn sandwich/KitKat combo turned me from a Top Gun wannabe into a writhing, pathetic wimp. So much for being a hard man -- a theme that Jonathan Ross was happy to run with. He did have plenty of material to play with as the very serious Tom Sutcliffe, the Independent's hard man TV critic, noted when he asked in a scathing review of my "mugging" film: "Does MacIntyre have any idea what an absurd creation he is?" Well, if I don't, the floppy-haired Ross certainly does. I mention his barnet because I saw it in curlers in the make-up room before the show and all that was missing was Hilda Ogden's hairnet. Shockingly, he was fondled openly by four hairdressers.

"You're not very good at this -- in fact, you're crap," Ross insisted. Describing howl fainted while getting a Chelsea tattoo while undercover as a football hooligan -- he expanded on my Crying Game moment and called me Britain s worst driver since Maureen from Driving School. With Paxman-like ferocity, he exposed me as a big girl's blouse.

When the knife was drawn I wish I could have said, as Crocodile Dundee did, "Call that a knife? This is a knife", and pulled out a ceremonial sword. Instead, I tried to unsettle him by pointing out (dangerously) that I was once his researcher -- way back in 1994.

That was when I was taken seriously as a journalist and when readers of the Independent confessed to watching television. I was working for BBC Manchester and, with the onset of the National Lottery, had volunteered a heavyweight investigation into this new burden on the poor, this regressive tax and the evils of gambling. Having been sent up to the Controller of BBC1 for consideration -- it returned to me repackaged as How to Win the Lottery with Jonathan Ross.

And how I remembered Jonathan's own Crying Game incident when, somewhat the worse for wear after an evening on the set of El Gordo, the Spanish lottery game show, he found himself being seduced by a member of the same sex who thought his number had come up. But his luck was not in. Jonathan had resisted manfully, claiming: "If I was going to lose my homosexual cherry to anyone -- it certainly wasn't going to be to a badly dressed Spanish accountant."

For two days in Brixton, I walked around in various disguises which bore a distinct resemblance to that unlucky Spanish queen. On the third night -- the night I got mugged -- I was dressed as myself. It is clear that going undercover as a Spanish accountant is all the protection you need on the streets of Brixton -- or on the set of Friday Night with Jonathan Ross.