[14][15] He discovered a fascination for place and the built environment whilst accompanying his father on sales trips during school holidays; he would be left unattended and free to explore while the elder Meades conducted his business with the grocer.

[16][13][14] He also developed an early love of France on the frequent trips which his family took there, made possible by his Francophile mother's father, who worked for Southern Railway, the company which ran the Saint-Malo and Le Havre ferries.

[17][14] After a year at the University of Bordeaux[18] and unsure of what to do next, he decided to become an actor after a chance meeting with Charles Collingwood[19] and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) from 1966 to 1969.

[7] Although he ultimately decided against joining the acting profession,[19] the training which he received would prove essential in his later television career,[23] as would his extra-curricular interest in French New Wave cinema, in particular the work of Jean-Pierre Melville and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

[26] On leaving RADA, he was told by the Principal, Hugh Cruttwell, that he might as well abandon acting until he reached middle age, at which point he might become an interesting character actor.

[1] In the years since, he has done less journalism but has contributed essays and reviews to numerous publications including the New Statesman, The Independent, The Guardian, The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement.

[39] A few more stories appeared in his first anthology of journalism and essays, 1989's Peter Knows What Dick Likes,[40] the title of which is a reference to the supposed superiority of male-on-male fellatio.

A dark, epic family saga centred around the titular city of Portsmouth, it was widely praised and favourably compared to Sterne, Scarfe, Steadman, Nabokov and Joyce, amongst other "great stylists".

[43][44][45] On its 2013 reissue, Matthew Adams wrote in The Independent, "Where his first collection of stories, Filthy English, achieved the distinction of covering in aggressively vivid prose the disciplines of murder, addiction, incest and bestial pornography, Pompey exhibits an even greater concentration of his aptitude for squalor ... by the end of the opening two pages, which must rank among the most startling affirmations of omniscience in 20th-century literature, the reader has met with an arresting injunction: 'After using this book please wash your hands.

"[47][40][2][45][3] In 2015, the publisher and record label Test Centre released a spoken word vinyl album by Meades entitled Pedigree Mongrel, consisting of readings from Pompey, Museum Without Walls, An Encyclopaedia of Myself and unpublished fiction, combined with soundscapes created by Mordant Music.

"[53] Isle of Rust, a collaboration with the photographer Alex Boyd featuring text based on Meades' script for his 2009 film about Lewis and Harris, was published by Luath Press in 2019.

[5] An anthology of uncollected writing from 1988 to 2020 entitled Pedro and Ricky Come Again, described as "the best of three decades of Jonathan Meades" and the sequel to Peter Knows What Dick Likes, was published by Unbound in March 2021.

This contained many stylistic similarities to his other work, but the producer of the series, John Marshall, received the sole writing credit and it was not a happy experience for Meades.

[56] It featured five irreverent, "slightly bonkers"[57] films which explored unusual and neglected aspects of the built environment: informal plotland dwellings along the Severn Valley, nautical culture around the Solent and architectural forms associated with utopianism, bohemians and the military.

[61][3][28][19][23] Rachel Cooke of The Guardian later described his TV persona as "pugnacious, sardonic and seemingly super-confident", while noting the RADA training and that it was "not the real Jonathan Meades, who is an altogether more diffident and shy character ... except when drunk".

[58] Meades made two other stand-alone films which aired earlier in 2001: Victoria Died in 1901 and is Still Alive Today examined the other-worldly legacy of Victorian architecture and culture one hundred years on, set to a soundtrack of late 1960s psychedelic rock by artists such as The Velvet Underground, The Kinks and Pink Floyd, while suRREAL FILM (or tvSSFBM EHKL, the letters of the title moved forwards then backwards) sought to expound on surrealism in a manner befitting the subject, and reflected on, inter alia, the fact that Meades had recently lost a considerable amount of weight.

Meades travelled from the slag heaps of northern France to Belgian cities, the red-light district of Hamburg, Gdańsk, the Baltic States and finally Helsinki, musing on the architecture, food and art of the places he visited.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, James Walton praised the programme as "Sparkling, thought-provoking, constantly challenging the accepted view, Meades seemed at times inspired, at others deranged.

"[66][6][58] A 9-DVD box set collecting all of his BBC work to date was planned for release in April 2008, but was reduced to a 3-disc anthology due to the expense of licensing the music used in the programmes.

He visited Aberdeen, Lewis and Harris (the 'Isle of Rust') and the less-renowned footballing towns of south-west Fife, Clackmannanshire and Falkirk, guided by his foul-mouthed 'ScotNav'.

[72][73] The BBC Four website described it as a "provocative television essay" which "dissects politics, the law, football commentary, business, the arts, tabloid-speak and management consultancy to show how jargon is used to cover up, confuse and generally keep us in the dark".

[39][1] In around 2007, the couple sold their penthouse flat on Tyers Gate, off Bermondsey Street, Southwark, where they had lived for 10 years, and moved to a converted mill near Bordeaux.

[81][82] Discovering that they found country life boring, they then moved to Marseille in around 2011, where they live in Le Corbusier's Unité d'habitation apartment block.

[52][20][2] During his time at RADA, he became friends with the painter Duggie Fields, whose flatmate was the former Pink Floyd singer, songwriter and guitarist Syd Barrett.