It is a bit of a mystery why, when it comes to professional competitiveness, chefs are so much more volatile than any other branch of the TV leisure industry. Take gardening; no spats to report on that front. You don't get Alan Titchmarsh, trowel raised in combat, engaged in bouts of public squabbling with Monty Don over the best way to mulch roses. And DIY; all quiet there, too. The Carols Smillie and Vorderman have yet to exchanged cross words over differences in the application of paint finishes (although who wouldn't love to see it? Sample tiff; 'Frankly, Carol, your sponging technique stinks, those cushions are so over and that rag-rolled breakfast-bar looks shite'). Even that most bullish of all televisual lad-fests, the car show, finds the like of Jeremy Clarkson and Tiff Needell rubbing along together nicely, quite able to refrain from exchanging profanities over how best to gauge clutch control and brake horsepower.

But chefs? Perhaps it's something to do with the emasculating effect of all that delicate dill-chopping and coulis drizzzling - the closest men get to doing needlepoint - that prompts the need to purge pent-up reserves of machismo in public. Whatever, they can't stand each other, and the man who is routinely to be found on the frontline of culinary warfare is Antony Worrall Thompson, chef, restaurateur, TV presenter and general troublemaker-at-large.

If there's a whiff of a scrap, Wozza is right there with an arresting quote, whether it's dismissing Delia's scrambled eggs as lousy, exposing fast food outlets as pedlars of pre-cooked omelettes, or, recently, denouncing his local town, Henley, as too stuffy - 'it's like being in Herne Bay sometimes' - to ever see him realising his grand vision of doing for Henley, 'what Rick Stein has done for Padstow'.

The fact that he got a rise out of Delia - the woman who, until recently, wouldn't criticise a bent banana, let alone another living being - is a measure of just how irritating he can be. Last year, she was moved to abandon her wipeclean image and kick up a stink, big time. 'He is dreadful, just repulsive,' she said of Worrall Thompson. 'Food and Drink is the most disgusting programme on television. I will never ever know, as long as I live, how the BBC or the general public can tolerate it.' Gordon Ramsay is another adversary. He has no time for Worrall Thompson's style of cooking. His considered view is that Wozza 'can't cook to save his life'. Food critics, too, are decidedly lukewarm. A.A. Gill accused him of selling out, trading his cooking talent 'for afternoon couch potato fame, fun'n'funky trousers and the sort of tan you can only get from Madhur Jaffrey's spice rack', and Michael Winner had this to say about a night out at one of his restaurants. 'One of the worst dinners I ever had in my life was in a basement called Downstairs at 190. The chef was Antony Worrall Thompson, and my host was a well-known movie-star. Everything went wrong, from very slow food delivery to courses that were so heavy that if Worrall Thompson had been the chef on the Titanic it would have sunk long before hitting the iceberg.'

Is he hurt? Not a bit of it. It's all meat and drink to Worrall Thompson, a shameless publicity seeker and a man who, like a Jewish matriarch with a pan of chicken soup, doesn't mind having a feud or two simmering away on the back burner, should any hungry journalist happen to require sustenance. 'I have the occasional spat with Gordon - it keeps things going,' he says, with a wicked, whiskery grin. 'I lived off Delia for a year!' he adds, as if referring to a stockpile of cooking apples. 'I take it on the chin. I take on all comers. I'm a bit of a Jack Russell.'

But while Winner barks and Ramsay bites, Worrall Thompson is more of a take-the-ball-and-run-with-it kind of mutt. His payback is delivered in the form of the kind of pranks that got him a reputation as an incorrigible troublemaker while at public school at King's, Canterbury. 'I never behaved myself then and I still don't,' he says with some pride. Then, he would habitually hurl blackboard rubbers at teachers and once pushed the sports master's car into the swimming pool. These days, he demonstrates his disapproval by pasting Michael Winner's face to the toilet seats in his restaurant and putting up 'Not Wanted' posters of him by the door. He is currently plotting revenge on the Michelin Guide. In the absence of any interest from the men who dish out the coveted stars (he attributes this snub to a very un-Michelin penchant for lurid cocktails, in-house pianists and waitresses in tight catsuits that were evident in previous restaurant ventures), he will, instead, he says, award himself three Michelin tyres and hang them on a pole outside.

Gordon Ramsay's name for him is 'the squashed Bee Gee' and, while not entirely flattering, it is wickedly accurate. The impression is further emphasised by his squashed nose, broken seven times in sporting accidents and sundry scuffles. He claims currently to be on a low-carbohydrate kick in preparation, later this year, for the publication of his first diet book - 'I've got to lose weight, otherwise I'd be the only fat man in history ever to sell a diet book' - but his old friend Peter String fellow is sceptical. 'He's never going to be Geri Halliwell, is he? I can't see him doing all those yoga exercises can you?'

Not conventionally sexy, then ('he's not exactly the Tom Cruise of the business', offers Stringfellow) he nevertheless enjoys the attentions of a keen following of randy housewives. They send him saucy aprons, and rubber gloves - some of them fur-trimmed. Sex, he stresses, shyly, is hardly the motivation. 'They like me because I'm a cuddly bear, because I'm down to earth.'

In the atmosphere of anti-foodie, down-with-snobbery, any-fool-can-whip-up-a-soufflé-for-12 atmosphere that today's TV chefs like to promote, this kind of benign approachability counts for a lot. Worrall Thompson is the kind of guy who doesn't prat around peeling his garlic or washing his herbs, and he uses the now familiar lexicon of the studiedly-casual, red-blooded TV chef. He doesn't blend or sauté, he 'blitzes' and 'fries off'. He doesn't place things carefully in the oven, he 'whacks' them in. There's a wholesome earthiness about him that goes down as well in his restaurants - 'I'm not trying to cook the best food in the world. People don't want a temple of gastronomy anymore, they want somewhere to go and relax' - as it does with viewers.

'He's a mediaeval character,' says Stringfellow. 'A Henry VIII figure. He looks like he should be holding a leg of lamb in his hand, ripping the meat off with his teeth, then throwing the bone over his shoulder when he's finished.' Peter Bazalgette, head of Bazal productions, who spawned Food and Drink, wraps up his appeal thus. 'His bright , carrot-coloured hair; that's an enormous strength. And he also operates what I call le chef mange ici principle - a chef who cooks on TV shouldn't be a stick insect. Finally, he is a classically trained chef who has run his own restaurants but who is also very unstuffy.'

And outspoken with it. It is a very fortunate pressure group indeed that manages to recruit the verbally incontinent Worrall Thompson as its mouthpiece. Besides numerous books, a column for the Daily Express, and various other contributions to foodie websites, he currently has plenty to say on behalf of the Campaign for Real Food, founded four years ago and of which he is president. That's not real food as opposed to the lurid plastic variety available at all good branches of the Early Learning Centre, but Real Food as in the mud-caked, organic, foodstuff.

But while you and I might know what he's on about, he finds he's making slow progress with the ordinary folks who are under the assumption that they are already eating real food (even the most impoverished British citizen can obtain food that is fresh, healthy and nutritious). Pubs, for instance, don't get it at all. 'The breweries hate chefs,' says Worrall Thompson. 'They want to deal with someone who can operate a microwave and use a pair of scissors.' He despairs of the current state of ready meals. 'The Indian meals are the only passable ones. All the others are crap. I tried a shepherd's pie once. Thirteen per cent meat! I wouldn't give it to my dog.'

As it is, Trev the retriever's diet includes carrots and spinach from Worrall Thompson's organic mini-farm, which supplies his West London restaurant, Wiz. Central to the Campaign for Real Food is the idea of the farmer's market, selling fresh, locally grown produce. At weekends, he and his wife Jay run a stall in Henley town square selling their own organic chutneys and eggs. Here, well-heeled locals pitch up to indulge in the rare privileges of buying filthy carrots. Indeed, the social profile of your average farmers' market is such that you might as well be shopping at a slightly more rustic version of Fortnum and Mason's foodhall.

It might be said that in a progressive, well-fed Western country, isn't the very idea of a campaign for real food a little crass; one of those wholly superfluous non-campaigns, like a pressure group fighting for countrywide availability of Prada loafers, or a drive to obtain state-funded Nicky Clarke haircuts for all?

A renowned chef who wishes to remain anonymous says, 'not everyone can afford organic food, and you can't condemn them for being ignorant. If anyone's being ignorant, it's people like Antony Worrall Thompson. Not all mothers have got the time to drive 30 minutes out of their way to buy fresh produce. Not everyone earns £1 million a year. Get a life! Live in the real world! He's being romantic about it.'

Yes, there is that. Worrall Thompson is wont to get misty-eyed about all sorts of things; old fashioned shepherd's pie, buttered crumpets, a time when more mothers cooked proper hearty food for their families, the days when smokers were not treated like pondlife by most of society ('Smoking Permitted Throughout', read a defiant sign in the window of his West London restaurant, Wiz). Like one of his overfilled steak sandwiches, his love life is stuffed with meat and endlessly juicy.

After smashing his face, and consequently, his confidence, in a rugby scrum at the age of 16, he married, at 22, to the first girl who looked at him. That relationship foundered and, soon after, he married an Australian, with whom he had two sons, Blake and Sam. It was not long before she went back to Australia with the kids'. There followed a series of brief affairs, one with a beautiful American-Japanese woman who broke his heart. 'She said she wanted to end it and I said "Right, I'm going to commit suicide".' There were dramatic scenes at LA airport. 'I managed to escape through a door I shouldn't have, ran down the runway and was arrested. I wanted to be crushed by a plane. I managed to get out to where the planes were taxiing before I was caught. I was in floods of tears. Really distraught. Without her, I just didn't feel I had anything to live for. Luckily, I got a sympathetic cop.'

Worrall Thompson admits that cooking and relationships make disastrous bed partners. 'Chefs are a really quite disgusting species,' he says. 'You work horribly anti-social hours then come in reeking. It's still a very primitive industry, in a way.'

These days, he limits the reek factor to just two days a week, a level of disgustingness easily tolerated by his third wife, Jay, with whom he has two children, Toby-Jack, six, and Billie-Lara, three. How does being the Real Food tsar square with having two children of chicken nugget-dependency age? He and Jay used to feed them dried apricots, passing them off as sweets, before the kids wised up. He is appalled by fast food, but he knows that they sometimes have it. He knows because he has cracked the secret code, devised by Jay, the children and their nanny to protect Worrall Thompson from the inevitable. 'They have a finger sign - a tiny wiggle of the little finger - that they make to each other; it means they've been to McDonald's.'

He and Jay met when she was head waitress at Stringfellow's. At first, says Stringfellow, he didn't fancy Wozza's chances. (Neither would you, if you could see the tall, willowy blond alongside the little fat Wozza.) 'I said; no way, mate. You're not going to get anywhere with her. I've been trying to get inside her knickers of ages.' But where one libidinous old dog failed, another found success. There was a protracted flirtation period, during which she concluded that he must be gay (Wozza played hard to get and remained resistant to the charm that had previously impressed customers of Stringfellows like Jean Claude Van Damme and Kevin Costner) before he came to his senses. Her friends - lithe youngsters from the London club scene - were dubious when she said she was going to marry him. 'What, that fat bastard?' Stringfellow marvels at the female capacity to overlook a man's aesthetic shortcomings. 'I am always amazed,' he says. 'Men go for physical perfection, but, luckily for me and Antony, women got for other things that will remain a mystery to me and him.'

Friends say that he has mellowed considerably since marrying Jay. In younger days he was, he says, 'an aggressive little fellow', and it's not hard to see why. He endured the kind of childhood that makes Oliver Twist look emotionally pampered. He was sent away to boarding nursery in Brighton when he was three - paid for by his grandmother - and was, he says, bullied senseless by a tyrannical school governess who punished his tendency to sleepwalk by shutting him in a coal hole. His mother and father, both actors, were inattentive parents. His father left when he was small, 'so from a very early age I found myself almost being married to my mother. I vetted her boyfriends. She'd turn on the tears and I'd say "for God's sake, mother. You're not on the stage now".' She wasn't what you'd call a devoted mum.

'My mother was not really a good mum in the classic way. The three weekends a term at boarding school she was allowed to come down, she might arrive at 1pm if I was lucky. All the other parents arrived at 8am. Sports day she'd arrive just after I'd run my race. I was always independent because she was never there, never around. I was always loose on the streets or with a neighbour across the road in the holidays. I was hardly ever looked after'.

It was when one in a long line of au pairs made him a raw bacon sandwich (she thought it was ham) that he knew he'd have to fend for himself in the kitchen. By four, he was making his own scrambled eggs. At school, his flair for cooking was developed further. 'I was in demand as a fag because I cooked really well.' Toasted sandwiches, steak and chips and a wicked way with stew was the sort of expertise that could earn him £5 a week. 'I also had an aunt who had a pub just outside Canterbury. I wen there to help out in the kitchen after choir on Sundays, and when I returned to school they'd avoid me like the plague because I stank of garlic.'

That experience, and the kind of insouciance that found him dying his Dover sole bright green, was, he says, 'what got me going'. His first successful venture as a chef-restaurateur was Menage à Trois in Chelsea, which was famous in the Eighties for capturing the mood of the moment by serving only starters and puddings, and was a big favourite with Princess Diana. In the late Eighties, he moved on to restaurants like dell'Ugo, serving an early form of fusion cooking. There followed Bistro 190, Woz and his current venture, Wiz, which serves simple, rustic, family-style meals in relaxed,easy-going surroundings. 'He's always had a very astute finger on the pulse of what people want to eat,' says Matthew Fort, food critic of the Guardian. 'He has great sensitivity to popular tastes.'

And yet, despite his proven skill as a chef, detractors say he and his ilk bring the art of cooking into disrepute, gurning away on telly when they should be banged up in their restaurant kitchens, cooking for their clientele. 'But the managing director of Rolls-Royce doesn't screw every bloody nut into every car!' splutters Worrall Thompson defensively. Matthew Fort backs him up. 'The idea that you divide the world into serious cooks who do TV and serious cooks who don't is ridiculous. Gordon Ramsay categorises himself as a serious cook, but is his effing and blinding any better than Antony's? Frankly, it's all entertainment.'

And Worrall Thompson is better at it than most. He swore he wouldn't follow his parents into acting - 'they were always broke' - but there is definitely an element of showmanship in the way his professed shyness turns to flamboyance the minute the camera begins to roll. 'We're proper chefs at heart but what's wrong with getting the message across that food should be relaxing and fun?' he says, defending the role of the celebrity chef. 'It shouldn't be up-your-bottom stuff. The Roux, Le Blanc, Mosiman - they were gods, but we've brought cooking to the living room.'

But at what cost to his reputation as a chef? Marco Pierre White, who, 15 years ago, laid the foundations for the loud-mouth that became the celebrity chef, is glad that he never appeared regularly on screen. 'I've increased my value by not doing television. You prolong your shelf life and preserve an element of mystery.' But Wozza, let's face it, is not the mysterious type. If White remains the enigmatic, hardcore, rock'n'roll element of celebrity chefdom, Worrall Thompson is H from Steps. He is big, he is loud, he is out there. And that's the way he likes it. In an almost ceaseless stream of media attention, he has found the kind of acceptance he craves. 'He's a very insecure individual, to be honest,' says Fort. 'He's desperate to create a place for himself in the world, particularly after his rather shaky past. It's a matter of reassurance to him.'

But what happens when his appeal wanes, when a character with more interesting facial hair comes along to nudge him aside? Worrall Thompson is bullish about the future; he plans, in any case, to scale down his work commitments when Jay is 40 (four years time) when he will concentrate on his farm, and his writing. But, being Wozza, always with half an eye on a marketing opportunity, he has a couple of money-spinners on the back burner. 'I'd like to do an organic supermarket range, and I've got a secret barbecue sauce recipe that's good enough to be branded.'

And there's always a career in politics. A keen member of the Tory party, he watched Boris Johnson pounding the pavements of Henley during the run-up to the election and recognised in him a kindred spirit. 'I'm a big supporter of his. He's a great character, and that's what the Conservative party needs - personalities.' But is it ready for Wozza? And could he take the vicious backbiting, the cut and thrust? For all his claims to resilience in the face of criticism, he is not as thick-skinned as he professes to be.

'Chefs love to be applauded and recognised,' says Fort, 'and they don't just want to be rich and successful, they want to be loved as well.'

By all accounts, Worrall Thompson is easy to love. He has many friends, considerable warmth and has a way of winning round even his most virulent critics. Take Delia, for instance. She was invited to Worrall Thompson's fiftieth birthday party this year, but couldn't attend. By way of a tribute, she sent him a photograph of herself wearing a T-Shirt bearing the legend 'I love you really Antony'. Coming from the woman he once dismissed as 'the coldest woman on the television', I'd say that definitely constituted a thaw.

• Campaign for Real Food: 3 The Castle House, Long Street, Sherborne, Dorset DT9 3BU. Tel: 01935 389497, Fax: 01935 389498 email: briony@positivepr.co.uk. Membership costs £25 per year.