'Luckily, I remembered to do my trousers up'

Getting to the Kent countryside from London is about contrast. You arrive to all the things you'd expect, such as quiet, big skies, stars that are visible at night, snowdrops in bloom and peace. However, not all is calm in my little country corner. This weekend I arrive to find that a neighbouring farmer has, without permission, placed about 500 sheep in my field to graze. The field was being left empty for Farmer B, and Farmer A, with the ruthlessness you'd more likely expect in a FTSE 100 boardroom, let his sheep into my field to feed on the lush green turf that has been accumulating.

I telephone Farmer A and he says he's too busy shooting to move them now but that he'll move them next week. I'm so cross I tell him I'm going to let them out myself. He retorts by asking, wisely, where I'd move them to. Of course, it would be a hopeless task for me to get into my boots and try to chase all 500 sheep to a neighbouring field. Even though my dog looks like a sheepdog, he's been wary of sheep ever since he was a puppy when I put him in a pen with a ewe, a traditional country method of stopping dogs chasing sheep. So, humiliatingly, I'm forced to back down, let him carry on with his shooting, and the field is to be emptied next week. At least I don't have to spend my first country day trying to round up 500 sheep.

Back to London to a scary meeting with some venture capitalists who are working on the figures of a project I'm developing. Eight brainy MBA graduates sit round a large boardroom table festooned with biscuits, still and sparkling water. There's a whiteboard on which there are diagrams, and everyone except me has placed a BlackBerry next to the print-out of their PowerPoint presentation.

This kind of thing is not my natural milieu at all. I find the assumptions and speculative accounting far removed from my rather old-fashioned notion of only paying out what has arrived in. But, then, would these guys, despite their six-figure salaries, be as swift to seize an advantage as Farmer A? They're certainly very courteous: I'm slightly late and have just realised that I don't seem to have done up my trousers or my belt, something I'd probably have gotten away with in the country.

It's the first day of rehearsals and a "meet and greet" for a musical I am producing based on the songs of Take That - a musical that tries to do for Take That what Mamma Mia did for Abba. Every member of the cast in this show has to be able to sing, dance and act eight shows a week. The show is so ambitious that there is hardly any rest time for the actors during the whole two hours it's on.

The actors may not have MBAs qualifying them for huge salaries, share options and bonuses but they're talented, they love what they do, and work every bit as hard. This makes it hugely enjoyable. Added to that, I love the experience because it has all the ingredients necessary to make me happy: great songs, greasepaint, talent in tights, cute girls and boys singing their hearts out. And I get to see the audience enjoying the show, something I never saw in my days as a television producer, as they get to their feet for the finale. The party is the first time the cast and crew have been together since the unifying experience of a regional tour, so it's very much like the first day of a new term at school. Everybody's had their hair done and has dressed up. Luckily, I remembered to do my trousers up.

Another contrast: I go to two book launches shortly after each other. The first book launch is for Henry James's Waistcoat, a small but perfectly formed hardback whose subtitle is Letters to Mrs Ford, 1907-1915. Mrs Ford was an Edwardian lady who owned my house in Kent until 1920. An Oxford academic found the letters in her mother's boudoir, turned up unannounced at our door asking to see the house they referred to, and edited them into a sweet book. The event is low-key, in a room in the University of London, with a few mild and brainy academics dressed in tweed jackets with leather elbow patches and eating crisps and drinking warm white wine. It has a family flavour.

The second launch is for Janet Street-Porter's newest book Life's too F***ing Short. Here there is a smattering of minor celebrities and the great and the good, smart people in designer clothes, drinking perfectly chilled champagne and tucking into wraps of scallops and calamari. The contrasting subtitles say it all: Janet's subtitle, rather the opposite of Jamesian in its directness, is A guide to getting what you want out of life without wasting time, effort or money. Obviously, her book will sell far more copies - especially as I'm told the biggest growth area for publishers is celebrities' lifestyle books, where readers can learn how they should live their lives.

I think of this when I go to see my 93-year-old uncle in Oxfordshire. He says: "Why can't the heroes of today be like the heroes I had?" He's trying to understand why people now seem to revere Amy Winehouse, Russell Brand and, presumably, people like Janet instead of people such as Shackleton the explorer or Scott of the Antarctic.

He goes on to say how much he admires Jamie Oliver for changing the way people think about chicken and the work he did on school fees, so it's not just a grumpy-old-man rant. In my old-fashioned, country way, I sort of agree with him - both about Jamie Oliver and the heroes (though I do like Janet S-P for speaking her mind).

But the visit has a purpose. I'm very excited. I had earlier casually browsed the National Portrait Gallery's computer catalogue, entering my name "Parsons" and, to my astonishment, had found pictures of my uncle aged nine and his brother (not my father) aged 13, from January 1925, 83 years ago. The posed picture shows the two of them in anachronistic military uniform. I show the photograph to my uncle: I think it is the first time he has seen it. He remembers the occasion immediately: the picture was taken at the Guildhall at the Lord Mayor's Ball - not, as I thought, in a studio. The costumes were hired at a shop in Covent Garden. "I could even show you where the shop is now," he says. He sheds a quiet tear for his brother, my uncle, who died after a rugby accident five years later. I am fascinated because it is such a curious find; but because it was just an event that happened in his past, my uncle is much more interested in my stage show than the picture, probably because he knows that, like most of our family, I have no obvious musical talent.