Georgina Baillie fell out with her grandad after the infamous 'Sachsgate' media row. Who reconciled them? An unlikely new friend – Adam Ant. By Joanna Moorhead

I'm so sorry," says Georgina Baillie, with a look of genuine horror on her perfectly made-up face, "but the dog has farted. It's got to go ... Adam! Adam! Can you get the dog out of here?" A second later, Adam Ant – for it is he – is at the door, a slight figure in jeans and a black T-shirt, with a thin moustache, a turquoise bandana in his hair, and a symphony of colours on his finger and toenails. "Sorry," he echoes, as he sweeps up the offending dog in his tattoo–covered arms. "Terrible, isn't it?" He smiles at Georgina – Georgie Girl, as he calls her – and she smiles back. "He's brilliant," she says, as the door closes behind the apologetic Adam, and the smelly dog. "He's been such a great friend to me – I owe him such a lot."

Georgina does owe him a lot, and for a great deal more than removing his dog from our olfactory zone (welcome though it is). Because, over the last few months, Adam has been the unexpected architect of a rapprochement in Georgina's life – he has brought about a reconciliation between her and her grandfather, the actor Andrew Sachs, Manuel of Fawlty Towers fame, after their relationship was punctured by the extraordinary – and extraordinarily public – debacle in October 2008 that became known as "Sachsgate".

Sachsgate was a mega-media mess of the sort that can only happen in real life, because fiction wouldn't be big enough for it. In essence, what took place was this: Russell Brand, an on-off boyfriend of Georgina's at the time, was co-hosting a radio show with Jonathan Ross, and their phone-in guest was Sachs. Brand told Ross that he'd had a relationship with Sachs's granddaughter, Georgina Baillie – but that Sachs was unaware of this – and Ross decided to make hay with this information during the interview. The only problem was that Sachs wasn't home when the pair called, so the resulting broadcast featured them leaving a series of messages on Sachs's answerphone, one of which was punctuated with Ross shouting (of Brand) "he fucked your granddaughter!" in the background.

After the programme was broadcast, all hell let loose. The tabloids screamed about Brand, Georgina and their sex life; the broadsheets mused on the place of self–censorship, the nature of comedy in the 21st century, and the fact that there was a generational difference in what makes for a sense of humour (young people, it was said, didn't see why oldies were getting their knickers in a twist over this sort of thing).

To bring it back to Georgina, all this is interesting because talking to her today, and she's still only 26, it's crystal clear that none of it felt remotely amusing to her. "It was unbelievably horrible," she says. "It was like walking around naked; it was so exposing, so unfair."

What was especially bad, for Georgina, was that she was at the tail end of a difficult period in her life – and, she says, it was the legacy of that time that would make her particularly easy fodder for the tabloids. "After school I'd gone on a gap year in the US, and I came home to the news that my parents were splitting up. It was so shocking; I'd thought we were the perfect family. But my dad moved to the US, and my mum went through a very difficult time in her life that meant we didn't speak to one another for the next 18 months."

From always having had a supportive family around her, Georgina suddenly found herself alone. "I was living in a grotty flat, with no idea about how to pay the bills. I didn't have anyone to help me, and I made some bad choices. I got mixed up with some wrong boyfriends, and I was into drink and drugs for a while. I also made some videos that I now regret."

At a time when her life was at rock bottom, she says, she should have called on the people who would have helped her – her maternal grandparents, Andrew and Melody Sachs. "They'd always been such an important part of my life," she says. "From an early age I'd wanted to be a performer, and they both supported me in that. My grandmother had been a dancer, and my grandad was an actor – and the fact that he'd had such an iconic part, as Manuel in Fawlty Towers, gave me a huge amount of credibility as I was growing up."

From her earliest days, she says, she was aware of Fawlty Towers – but it was only at secondary school that she became aware of how widely known it was. "My friends were so impressed … they kept asking me to do impressions of Manuel, though I had to admit I couldn't do them better than anyone else just because he was my granddad," she says. "But I was really proud of him and, like everyone else, I could – and did – watch Fawlty Towers over and over again."

Once she had decided to follow her parents – her mother Kate Sachs is a voiceover artist, father Charles Baillie is a former principal at the National Theatre – and, of course, her grandparents, into performing, Grandad Andrew was only too keen to see her succeed. "He was a huge influence, and such a help when I was doing A-level drama, listening to my speeches and so on – he was there at every production," she says.

The reason Georgina didn't ask for her grandfather's help at the time things were "messed up" was, she thinks, because she was ashamed of what had happened. But the crucial thing is that, by the time the Brand/Ross programme went out, her life was turning around. "I'd been off drugs for most of the previous year and I was moving on," she says.

Georgina was part of a girl goth band – the Satanic Sluts, a name she now admits was unfortunate in that it helped build a "bad image" of her – and, she remembers, it was on a plane journey home from a gig in Vienna that she was handed a newspaper and found her own photograph plastered across the front of it. "I was totally confused," she says. "A few days earlier, Russell had called me when I was at a rehearsal and left a message, something about me needing to break into my grandparents' house and destroy their answerphone, but I thought he'd just gone a bit mad again. There had been plenty of weird jokes before … I thought nothing of it."

Once the row became public, everything changed – including her relationship with her grandfather, who is now 81. "It really messed up my relationship with them because who wants their grandparents to know who they sleep with? My mum and dad knew about Russell, but my grandparents didn't."

As the real-life drama played out, a plot so complex and farcical that the writers of Fawlty Towers might have been proud of it, relations between Sachs and his granddaughter hit rock-bottom. He felt hurt at being dragged into such a sordid tale; she felt ashamed of her part in it. They didn't meet, or speak, for a long time. "I felt like I had a massive gap in my life," says Georgina. "I hate making anyone miserable or unhappy. And even though this wasn't my fault, I felt guilty about it."

As is so often the way in families, things might have festered on, unaddressed, without the arrival of a most unlikely knight in shining armour, musician Adam Ant, best known for his 80s punk hits and his complicated, and colourful, private life – and his experience of bipolar disorder. The two met through a mutual friend in May last year and despite the difference in their ages – he is 56 – they clicked straight away, says Georgina. (Contrary to tabloid rumours, they are just friends, not lovers.) "We've got the same sense of humour, and he's a really fascinating person."

They became firm pals. Georgina joined his band, and at some point Adam – who, like almost everyone else on the planet, turned out to be a massive fan of Fawlty Towers – got talking to her about her granddad. When he did – and realised how damaged their relationship had been by Sachsgate – he was incensed.Having deposited the smelly dog in the kitchen, he has now rejoined us in his office, where Georgina and I are chatting, to tell his part of the story. Andrew Sachs, he says, is one of those people he really admires in life – "I mean, he's a proper old gentleman, he's got real class" – whose portrayal of Manuel, he says, was "Chaplinesque". Did I know, by the way, that Fawlty Towers was Elvis's favourite TV show?

I didn't, but Adam is ploughing on. "Georgie had gone through real hell over this and because of it she'd missed out on three years of her grandfather's love." So, he says, he decided to take things into his own hands: he decided to write to Sachs, to try to smooth things over and bring grandfather and granddaughter back together.

What did he say in his letter? "I said, I've never met you but I'm a big fan of yours, and I'm a friend of Georgie's. And I told him that Georgie missed him and loved him, and was sorry if she had caused him heartache."

What happened next? Well, it seems that Sachs's heart melted; he was touched by Adam's appeal, and that he realised how much he loved and missed his granddaughter, just as she loved and missed him.

He called me," says Georgina, and it is clear that, behind her immaculate foundation, her newly sophisticated persona and her relaunched music career, that deep down inside there is still the little girl who always wanted to do her best for the grandfather who so loyally supported her by turning out for every school play. "He called me, and we made up."

Now, she says, they meet up again as they always did – and he is interested in her career, and hopes things turn out well for her. Which she believes they will – with Adam at her side, the man she now regards as her mentor. Adam, meanwhile, is cheering her on all the way: "She's the star of tomorrow, her music is great." But, thrilled as he is that Baillie and Sachs have their relationship back on track, he's not letting the issue rest.

Next year he's releasing another album and on it will be a new song called Rubber Medusa, which is all about – you guessed it – the Brand affair. "I call him the Rubber Medusa because he looks like rubber when he walks, and his hair is crazy," he says. Among the lyrics is the line: "Look up wanker/and there's a picture of you." He is, he admits, firing a shot across the bows of Brand and Ross, chastising them for the hurt they caused both his new friend, and the grandfather he had always admired. "They think it's all over, and that they got off lightly," he says. "Well, I've got news for them …they haven't."

With that he heads back into the kitchen, stepping across the now sleeping dog and reaching out for a beer – giving his Georgie Girl another smile as he goes.

• Georgina Baillie will be performing with Adam Ant and the Good the Mad and the Lovely Posse at the West Dean festival on Saturday 27 August. The festival runs from 26–29 August. www.westdeanfestival.org.uk

{loadposition user38} source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/aug/13/georgina-baillie-adam-ant

source: http://www.europerank.com/lifestyle/lifestyle/55910-time-to-talk