Nick Ahad: Some stars need to learn that good manners cost nothing

Ian Botham, a hero from boyhood, turned out to have feet of clay – ironic, as he was doing some charity walk when I had the displeasure of meeting him.

Tom Courtenay, who I was nervous about meeting from the start, did untold damage to the psyche of this reporter who, at the time, was still wet behind the ears and feeling my way around this lark called journalism. He was not gentle. Singer Paolo Nutini's interview was so tooth-pullingly bad and unintelligible that I hurriedly had to find a replacement article.

Fortunately, the instances where the interview goes so badly wrong are pretty rare. I've also been lucky in that I've interviewed some absolute gems.

Pulitzer prize-winning author Richard Ford: a gentleman through and through. Alan Bennett, interviewed twice: mischievous, lovely and so quotable.

Ronald Harwood, the Oscar-winning writer of The Piano is an absolute riot – although he ruins your lungs by insisting you chain smoke with him during interviews.

Most of the people I meet are simply good, friendly people and quite up for a nice chat with someone who is interested in their work. If they are not in the mood for a chat, they enter the professional arena of the interview space and perform. All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players: nowhere is this truer than in an interview. When I step into the interview '"scene", even if I have no interest in the person I'm talking to, my part insists I demonstrate I do. And similarly their responsibility is to play the part of engaged and interesting interviewee.

This message does not seem to have reached Russell Crowe. The New Zealand actor was interviewed for Radio Four's Front Row by Mark Lawson this week and he was his usual truculent self. Admittedly, Lawson was slightly antagonistic in suggesting Crowe's version of Robin Hood (out in cinemas this week) has an accent that starts in Ireland and travels around Britain, but Crowe's behaviour in walking out at the end of the interview, swearing and generally being difficult – you could virtually hear him slumped in his chair – was annoying and annoyingly typical.

I recently met the writer of Gladiator, Bill Nicholson. Bill told me a story of when he was on set of one of his TV movies in the Eighties, which starred Dirk Bogarde.

Dirk was not performing well and Bill took the director to one side to have a quiet word behind a pillar. The pillar was a cardboard prop, Bogarde was on the other side and heard every word. "Either he goes, or I go," Bill told me Bogarde had said. Bill was kicked off the set of the film he had written. There is a direct line to be drawn between that kind of behaviour and Crowe storming out on Lawson earlier this week.

Yes, these modern gods stand dozens of feet tall on cinema screens but, Russell, as my nanna used to say: it's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice and good manners cost nowt.