FIRST to wish Ludovic Kennedy happy birthday yesterday morning. He had just hit 86. "Well, that's very nice of you. And, yes, I do hope to see many happy returns."

The Edinburgh-born broadcaster, author, human rights campaigner, euthanasia supporter - it goes on - was speaking from a retirement home in Oxford. His wife, the former ballet star Moira Shearer, is also resident there. But why so far from his home town?

"We have a daughter who lives here and keeps an eye on us. In fact, she and her two sisters are taking Moira and I out for lunch today. Our son would have been in the celebratory party too but he is in Singapore with a Gurkha contingent."

His books roughly number 50, with more to come. "I'm fiddling with another one," he admits, but then there hasn't been a time when he wasn't tinkering with a prospective best-seller. Indeed asking him if he feels it's time to put his pen down, he says: "The thought of retiring doesn't enter my mind at all. Graham Greene once said 'is what a writer does, really, in the end, nothing more than a fight against boredom?"

He considers 10 Rillington Place, his story of Timothy Evans, who was wrongly hanged for murder (Richard Attenborough starred as the real killer, John Christie, in the film adaptation) one of his best, along with Pursuit. That covered the sinking of the Bismarck, the pride of the German navy. "I witnessed that momentous event of the Second World War from a destroyer. But, I have to say, in my four and half years at sea in that war I never came to grips with the enemy.

"We took the crew prisoners but those were the only Germans I saw in the conflict. My father was a captain in the Royal Navy and he was killed on the Rawalpindi, an armed merchant cruiser, in action against the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in 1939.

The first volume of his memoirs in 1987 was titled The Feckless Lad, the second On My Way to the Club. Feckless was never a word that could be pinned on him in later life. The hyperactive, Eton-educated Ludo at one time lived in Edinburgh's New Town, but his first lingering recollections of the city are childhood holidays at his grandfather's house in Belgrave Crescent, a quiet backwater just a stone's throw from the Water of Leith, where he's said he wants his ashes scattered.

"It's mainly Christmases I remember there. Those were truly wonderful times, snow-on-the-ground days, for a youngster like me. I'd be eight or nine and I kept coming up from the south during the holidays until I was 16 or so. My grandfather was Professor of Law at Edinburgh University and his father, Sir Alexander Grant, was vice-chancellor of the university."

IT was at Belgrave Crescent that he first whetted his appetite for crime. Climbing ladders to reach his grandfather's collection of Notable British Trials, the young Ludo's mind was filled with stories of sex, violence and death - and also with justice. "I was very impressed by the panoply and the majesty of the court proceedings. I thought this was what ought to happen - that wickedness was punished," he says.

That view changed when, as a newscaster with ITN, he emerged as a leading campaigner against miscarriages of justice, railing against the system.

"Everybody said it was the finest justice system in the world, but the people who said that most frequently were those who had never experienced anything else. Nobody questioned the integrity of the courts, or that police could lie, or that judges could be biased."

He once described the system of criminal justice in England and Wales as "childish and unsatisfactory" and recalls with considerable satisfaction his jousts with the judiciary. "Their Achilles heel," he declares, "is their unwillingness to reject dubious police evidence, even when it stares them in the face."

For Ludo, the crunch came with the case of Derek Bentley, hanged in 1953 for the murder of Pc Sidney Miles during a break-in. The murder was committed by Bentley's friend, 16-year-old Christopher Craig, who shot the policeman between the eyes. But three police officers testified that Bentley - who was in police custody at the time - had called out: "Let him have it, Chris", later presumed by the jury to be an invitation to open fire.

"Bentley was old enough to hang, but he had been in custody when the shot was fired," he says, still infuriated at the conviction it took Bentley's family more than 40 years to overturn.

The temptation to seek his views on criminal justice as we know it today was strong. But not on his birthday. Nor did he need the reminder that his vigorous campaigning against miscarriages of justice was supposed to have cost him his membership at Muirfield Golf Club and at the New Club in Princes Street.

Firebrand days indeed, and there were plenty of them. During that time he was high-profile in Edinburgh. He was chairman of the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company, which was seriously cash-strapped at the time. On the lighter side, he also used to compete in the Scottish Backgammon Championships in the Cafe Royal (at the back of Woolworths at the city's east end, now Burger King) in 1970.

He never sees much of his home town now. He's had one visit so far this year - "for lunch with my nephew Richard [Calvocoressi] at the Gallery of Modern Art, where he's director".

Television too comes in for some Ludo criticism. "Television will become more anonymous. There'll still be a need at the BBC and ITV for presenters - personalities is a word I hate - whom the public will know and like.

"I think ITV will go through a tough period and, after the huge profits they've creamed off, maybe it's about time. The competition between newspapers and TV has levelled off and they are now complementary.

"The trouble with television is that it dies as you see it. Newspapers you can at least re-read, keep for a day or to, refer to or quote from. Television is the most ephemeral of mediums. As you watch it, it dies . . . like a butterfly."

So, with a book still to be fiddled with, what next for Ludo? Here he was, bound for his 86th birthday lunch, saying to me: "Don't ask where longevity will take me from here. It's in the hand of Him upstairs." Which seems completely uncharacteristic of the man. He is a devout non-believer.

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