

“What is that word ‘doyenne’?” Larry King is about to do his second take, introducing his guest, and is questioning the word written on the autocue. “I’m a Jew from Brooklyn,” he says to nobody in particular. “I’ve never heard the word ‘doyenne’.” It’s like a queen, someone says. “An expert,” I offer, from the corner of the small studio in central London where I’ve been allowed to sit and watch the taping of Larry King Now, his resurrected talkshow. The doyenne in question – Mary Berry – is perched on a stool on the other side of King’s desk looking, as she always does, queenly and expert.

It’s a curious thing, watching King, the legendary broadcaster – a man whose career spans almost six decades, who has interviewed Mandela, Arafat and every US president since Richard Nixon, quizzed Sinatra, Brando, Elizabeth Taylor and just about every celebrity ever born. He barely looks at Berry between filming, there is almost no small talk, no soothing words of encouragement. It’s Shawn, King’s wildly glamorous seventh wife, some 25 years his junior, who chats with the Great British Bake Off judge before the show starts. I don’t think he is being rude, but I wonder if he’s actually quite shy. Once the camera is rolling, he’s a different person.

But it’s clear he has little idea who Berry is. That’s OK, that’s King’s thing. He has long been proud of his ill-preparedness – he likes to say he doesn’t want to come to an interview knowing more than his audience, so he can ask the sort of questions they would ask. It has led to numerous gaffes – he thought the Dalai Lama was a Muslim, thought Ringo Starr was the late George Harrison. His questions to Berry are also typical: direct, guileless, a bit random. When he makes a bizarre inquiry about oven temperatures, I wonder what Mary Berry must make of it.

Later, when King and I are sitting in a conference room at RT, the English-language Russian state-owned television channel which distributes King’s talkshow, he says a friend once told him, “‘You know the secret of your success? You’re dumb.’ Like with the lady today – why do you want to bake cakes? What makes a good cake? What cakes do you like? What cakes don’t you like? I’m dumb. I don’t know a thing about baking.” He’s like an endearing, occasionally irksome, child who is constantly asking questions, trapped inside the body of an 81-year-old man.

King, who started on a Miami radio station, became the highest-rated, and paid, anchor in cable news. For 25 years, he hosted Larry King Live on CNN, which at its peak was bringing in 1.5 million viewers a night. By the time it ended in 2010, King was averaging just 655,000 viewers. He looked outpaced by younger, faster, funnier hosts, but he was still Larry King, a rare genuine TV icon.

What would he do if he retired? “I read a lot, I go to movies, I love theatre, I love seeing my boys play baseball but professionally…” He heaves a big sigh, shoulders slumped, famous braces slack. “I don’t know what I’d do.” He thought he’d retired once he left CNN, when he was famously usurped by the British journalist Piers Morgan. But Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionaire, liked him and told him he couldn’t give up broadcasting – “It was the same thing Putin said to me,” says King, a relentless name-dropper – and that he would bankroll King’s new online production company and network.

The Russian state broadcaster, RT (previously Russia Today) picked up the shows King had been making, a talkshow and a politics show, in 2013. It has been accused of being a propaganda machine for the Kremlin, and of censorship. In September, Ofcom found the channel breached rules on impartiality. “They have never censored one programme I’ve done,” says King. “Whenever we do programmes on PoliticKing [King’s politics show] Putin is frequently criticised and it’s never edited. I’ve never been edited or told what to ask or told not to have a certain guest.”

But when they were talking about the deal, was he not wary of RT? “When that lady quit it bothered me,” he says (“that lady” is Liz Wahl, a Washington-based correspondent for RT who resigned on air last year, criticising the network’s coverage of events in Ukraine). “I read that story. But I’ve been in news media long enough to know I don’t know the whole story. I know the head of RT, I’m going to meet with her in Moscow and I’m going to ask her what’s the story with that.” He has interviewed Putin twice before, but not for RT. Would he be wary (or at least self-censoring) if he did? “No. What are they going to do to me? Are they going to shoot me? I don’t live in that kind of fear. I’ve interviewed Yasser Arafat, Ahmadinejad. I’ve interviewed world leaders who are considered rascals. People put on their pants one leg at a time, they’re still people.”

King has often been accused of being a soft interviewer but he says he’s never understood that. “If you approach [an interview] combatively you get defensiveness and you don’t learn much.” Who does he admire? He liked Mike Wallace, the CBS correspondent, he says. “Who’s big in Britain?” Jeremy Paxman was famously fierce, I say (King hasn’t heard of Paxman). “It’s not my style but if he’s good at it...”

That was always King’s criticism of Morgan, his successor. “I didn’t like his style,” King says. “I don’t like to talk about me so when I do the interviews, I never use the word ‘I’. The guest counted so what I thought was not material. I’m just the conduit. What the host should do is do his or her best to bring out the guest.”

Did he not think Morgan’s stance on gun ownership was quite brave? “It wasn’t brave, it was the way he acted. I didn’t learn anything. Yelling at a guest and a guest yelling back. I’ve done hundreds of interviews on guns, I’m against people who use guns, I don’t like guns, but I’ve never yelled at anyone.” I’m convinced he must have been secretly pleased when Morgan’s US talkshow career failed after three years, but King insists not. “No. I don’t enjoy that. I don’t wish anybody ill, I really don’t. I’ve got a lot of faults but I was never jealous or envious or… it’s a waste of time.”

Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) The old goat's UK bitching tour continues. > RT @BBCNewsnight: TONIGHT Larry King talks to @EvanHD @piersmorgan. pic.twitter.com/JOMhwoGGFH

Their spat continues. Morgan seems to believe the US broadcaster goes out of his way to criticise him (“The old goat’s UK bitching tour continues,” Morgan tweeted on Tuesday) but to be fair to King, it’s me who brings Morgan up, and he looks a little weary when I do. King says he has never read any of Morgan’s tweets. “I’ll show you my phone.” He plonks an antique flip phone on the table. King dictates his own tweets to his wife or an assistant for his own delightfully weird Twitter account. His wife has tried to give him an iPhone several times but he doesn’t want one; he thinks fax machines, which he still uses, are a marvel of technology enough.

King’s parents were eastern European Orthodox Jews who left for the US in the 1930s; his father died of a heart attack when King was nine, and his mother raised their two sons on welfare. His earliest memory is of listening to the radio when he was about five, and wanting to be on it. As a teenager, he would hang around the WOR radio building in Manhattan, pretending he worked there. He says he never expected all this – a long career, worldwide fame. “I thought I would be a sports announcer. All I was was a curious kid who wanted to be on the radio.”

In television, cable news has become louder, shoutier and pressure for ratings means more short, quick tabloid stories. Does he think television is less intelligent than it was? “There’s more of it. There’s a lot of good, there’s a lot of bad. There’s so much variety”

He doesn’t watch reality TV. “It can’t be reality, you have a camera. It’s forced. If you know you’re being filmed, you’re not being the same as when you’re not being filmed. The Kardashians can be famous for being famous.” His eyes widen. “What do they do? I can’t figure it out.”

Does it annoy him that millions of people watch it? “Well, HL Mencken said ‘no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the folk’ [sic]. I think that’s pretty true. So, the public watches the Kardashians. But we all have little things we do, don’t we? We stop and watch a car accident – why? We’re intrigued by it.” He doesn’t like gossip. “People who publish things like the Daily Mail or the Enquirer – they don’t have a great talent, but they feed off the misfortunes or fortunes of talented people. They’re parasites.”

He is proud of his awards, and his lifetime achievement Emmy. “Hopefully I’ve brought enjoyment and knowledge to people by being a conduit.” But he says his biggest achievement is being a father. And regrets? “Some of my marriages, they were mistakes. I’ve only loved three women in my life, two of my ex-wives and Shawn.” Why did he get married so many times (eight times to seven women)? “I don’t know. What I liked at 20 was not what I liked at 30. I’m amazed at people who are married 60 years. And my work always came first.”

He thinks all women are “crazy”, he doesn’t understand women. “But I appreciate them. I’ve always been for equal rights. I’ve worked for women, always been for equal pay. I’m a feminist.” Is America ready for a female president? “Absolutely.”

He considers Hillary Clinton to be the favourite, “unless something bad happens. The Republican challenger that’s emerging is [Marco] Rubio.” He doesn’t believe his friend Donald Trump, for all his attention and good poll results, will become president but will burn out. “I like Donald a lot, but I don’t agree with a lot of what he says. He’s always been very kind to me. The night before my surgery, he took my wife out to dinner.”

King has survived a quintuple heart bypass, prostate cancer, bankruptcy, multiple divorces, and perhaps worst of all, losing his primetime show. When I ask him what he thinks about when he’s lying awake at night, he immediately says “dying. I fear death. I don’t believe in anything after, I can’t make that leap of faith.” Does he have a sense of time running out? “Of course. What really hurt me the other day [was] I’m going to be 82 and my insurance agent said to me ‘You look great, you’re going to live to 90’. And I said ‘That’s only eight years! Are you out of your mind – eight years?’” What does he have left to achieve? He’d like to manage a big league baseball team for a day, and do An Evening With Larry King on Broadway.

“If I could live forever,” says King, “I’d live forever.” He has previously talked about planning to have his body cryogenically frozen, but he says he’s started to rethink that. It’s expensive to keep him on ice and he doesn’t want it to become a burden on his great-great-great grandchildren. “I don’t know what I’m going to do yet. I’m undecided.” King, as always, has some questions.