FRED Dibnah is the original reality TV star. In 1979 – long before the producers of Big Brother and their ilk caught on to the ratings pull of the ‘ordinary man’ – a BBC documentary crew filmed Fred the steeplejack dramatically felling an industrial chimney. The 41-year-old flat-capped grafter instantly won over the nation, dolling out Lancastrian philosophy while tottering precariously atop gravity-defying stacks. Now, some 19 films and three marriages later, Fred is still a steeplejack and is still on our small screens. Jennie Dennett went to meet him.

Fred is late for his book signing. His publicist got disorientated in Kendal’s one-way system and the Ottaker’s staff are standing in the street hoping to flag him down. I’m told the in-car Global Satellite Positioning system is not working properly.

This is sounding suspicious. A GPS? Surely Fred Dibnah, the man who is coming to the Stricklandgate store to talk about his new book, The Age of Steam, the one that accompanies the BBC TV series with him enthusing about traction and pistons, would have nothing to do with a GPS?

Surely Fred – the kind of TV celebrity people have in mind when they talk about ‘down to earth’ - would spurn fancy modern cars with fancy in-car toys.

I’m instantly reassured when Fred finally arrives. He’s dressed in his trademark flat cap with granddaddy-waistcoat stretched over a beer-lover’s paunch. The cap is certainly too threadbare to be a public appearance prop.

“The GPS didn’t show the new one-way system,” the publicist explains. It was his car and his gadget. Fred says he’s not into the cyber age and keeps away from computers.

Well, that’s that tower of expectation left un-toppled.

Mr Dibnah really is just like he is on the telly - utterly affable and charming.

Born in 1938, Fred was a Bolton lad and retains his thick Lancastrian accent. His passion for everything industrial can be explained by a childhood spent living between the railway and steam engine sheds.

When the fair came to call, Fred could be found round the back inspecting what he lustily calls the “magnificent engines”.

At school he was dismissed as “not academic” and teachers put him forward for a Bolton Art School entrance exam aged 14 – something he passed by drawing a traction engine.

“I never learnt a lot. All the masters were modernists,” he says. “They did them paintings that you couldn’t tell what they were and called themselves bloody geniuses! I would be scratching away on my drawings. The master would appear with a fat pencil and draw all over it.” After leaving school, he did a seven-year stint as a joiner, switching to steeple jacking after national service.

And that was where the BBC found him – up a tower mending the Bolton Town Hall clock.

“I could have died a happy steeplejack on that job,” says Fred. But of course he didn’t. After he was briefly featured on North West TV news, a BBC documentary crew came knocking on his door and changed his life.

Fred told the director he was only interested in taking part in his film if he could explain about steeple jacking.

“All he wanted me to do was stand on the chimney, chuck a few bricks off and he would point the camera and it would be a film about people with funny jobs.” But when Fred did get in front of the camera and took his chance to recount the science of felling chimneys, the filmmakers realised they’d captured a bit of TV magic.

After the one-hour documentary Fred Dibnah – Steeplejack, came two biography series and later Fred Dibnah’s Industrial Age in 1999 and the latest outing Fred Dibnah’s Age of Steam.

Fred’s on-screen longevity and apparent psychological good health seems largely to do with the way he found his TV fame. This was a man out to explain his craft rather than grab celebrity for its own sake.

“Things like Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, they are a lot of sensation seekers. They could never talk me into anything like that,” says Fred.

Meanwhile, he has come to terms with the side effects of having his face all over the small screen.

“I got used to it. It was a bit embarrassing at the beginning. It’s wherever you go. People stop you, you know, walking down street.” Those close to him were not so keen on the attention. Fred partly blames it for the breakdown of his first marriage, although the fact that he has spent much of the last 27 years in his shed restoring a 1912 road traction engine may also have something to do with it.

But Fred is certainly happy with his current profession of, as he calls it, “steeplejack and minor TV personality”.

“All this is nice, this is,” he says, waving his hand around the book shop – just another stop on his northern tour. “We travel around from one swanky hotel to another.” So what advice would this successful reality TV graduate proffer to the newcomers?

“Try and stay the same you were before fame came along,” he offers.

Coming from a 65-year-old who’s still sane and happy living with his third wife in the Bolton home that he’s had thoughout his whole adult life, this sounds like a bit of old wisdom worth following.