Smash hit

Alli has never been one to undervalue himself, either. Chorion is putting his £70,000 starter salary up to £120,000 this year. Not bad for a two-day-a-week non-executive.

In fact, says Nick James, Chorion’s chief executive, it sends out important signals. “If you’re going to be a growth company, you can’t afford to have someone who isn’t a hard-driving chairman.”

Alli is clearly entranced by Chorion’s prospects. Ask him about licensing and he leaps to a whiteboard above one sofa and starts squiggling. “It’s a complicated model, so let me just draw this up,” he says. ‘Content’ is in the middle, television, video, newspapers, publishing, licensing and more radiate out. He contrasts that with the Disney model — “they bought all this.”

Figures are flying out. He wants to expand Chorion fast. By April it should clinch its long-heralded deal to buy the Mr Men (speculated price £28m, but he’s not saying). Then it will develop a new area, science fiction perhaps, or romance. Suddenly I feel as if I’m listening to a lecture from a very trendy academic.

And that’s what captivates many about Alli: how he can leap from indiscreet charm to financial acuity, or from his media luvvie lifestyle — he’s virtually a fixture at The Ivy restaurant — to passionate conviction about the political issues he champions (gay rights, racial equality and children).

Then crack a joke about the po-faced targets listed in Chorion’s last interim report — “increase Noddy penetration in the UK” — and he just creases up. “Don’t even go there,” he laughs. He is such a dab hand at schmoozing that you don’t even notice his intent.

Back in his Planet 24 days, employees sometimes found that hard to square with the rigorous contracts they had to sign and his obsession with profit.

Alli sighs when I bring it up. “Some people think television is a lifestyle, not a business. They’re surprised if you ask them to get in on time.”

In truth, Alli’s background was very different from those around him. His family trace their roots back to India via Trinidad and Guyana. Brought up in Norwood, the second of three brothers, he left school at 16, after his parents split up, because he felt his mum needed him to earn a wage.

A chance visit to a jobcentre got him a position as a clerk at Planned Savings magazine. Within seven years he was its publisher.

By then he was living with Parsons, who later lured him in to run the business side of his production start-up. They have been together for 22 years. With experience of that kind, Alli admits he was always likely to be tough on those offered an easier start in life.

Did being gay and Afro-Asian push him towards running his own outfit? Perhaps, he says, he wanted to create an environment more welcoming than others he had experienced. He credits Parsons with a lot. “He’s a creative genius. Look at the programmes he thought up: Network 7, The Big Breakfast, The Word, Survivor.”

Others credit Alli with the entrepreneurial nous that turned those ideas into profitable business, and he clearly loves the buzz of making money. His stint at Chorion could be a dry run before he looks at offers from FTSE 100 companies. How odd it must be, after spending so much time as an outsider, to become such an insider?

Alli shrugs. “It is odd, but I assume a peerage is a bit like an Oxbridge degree. People suddenly say ‘oh, you’re fine’.” In return, he remains a staunch Blairite. Yet he knows that, for some Labour supporters, his mix of serious and frivolous — the millionaire lifestyle, the lavish homes in London and Kent, the apartment in Amsterdam and “as many suits as Imelda Marcos had shoes” (according to Airey) — makes him rather hard to take.

But he’s a generous giver. By the end, he’s offering me a new Miss Marple video and a book by photographer Alison Jackson, with whom he is working at Shine. When I joke, “Hey, no bribes”, he throws a camp pose. “Well, you come pretty cheap.”

Later he’s off to Stockton-on-Tees to appear on BBC1’s Question Time. Giving interviews, appearing on television — he never used to do all that. “I’m so worried they’re going to ask me about Michael Green’s payoff from Carlton (£15m). I’m having lunch with him at The Wolseley next week. What will I say?”

Oh problems, problems. Green and Alli get along famously, despite operating from different ends of the political spectrum. Perhaps each sees a bit of himself in the other. If only The Wolseley wasn’t so noisy, we could all listen in.

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