Five fit young men joined one rather unfit old one for an entertaining chat at Newspaper House nine days ago. My meeting with a quintet of Dreamboys — and there are five more like them at home — was part of an action-packed week that later took me from fab abs to Ab Fab as I joined Joanna Lumley on the terrace of the House of Commons at the launch of the 2013 Buxton Festival. Also present there were the Culture Secretary Maria Miller and the Arts Minister and Wantage MP Ed Vaizey, both hotfoot from Baroness Thatcher’s funeral. Two days later I was with Mr Vaizey again as we met for coffee and an informal chat at Oxford’s Malmaison Hotel. Add in a buffet lunch last Thursday at Christ Church for the presentation of a prestigious poetry prize, and you get to see there is rich variety in the life of an arts editor.

The Dreamboys were definitely my most unusual ‘gig’ when they called at our offices, with manager David Richards, to publicise their visit to Oxford’s New Theatre on May 1. After posing for photographs among the rolls of newsprint in our print hall, and another shot with me outside it, we headed for our canteen where I learned more than I previously knew about the world of male striptease.

One thing I discovered is that there isn’t that much nudity. David promises top-quality dancing and singing, with full-frontal exposure only at the climax of each routine. Those who hold up their hands in horror at such ‘vulgar’ shows might note that there was significantly more display of the male form in, for instance, the West End’s recent production of David Hare’s The Judas Kiss.

Another thing is that it is just a job — or rather a second job in the case of 24-year-old Lotan Carter, the Dreamboy I talked to longest. Once a window cleaner, he now works as a sprinkler fitter — no laughing at the back, please. Lotan certainly doesn’t laugh, when the day job begins at 7.30am, a few hours after the night one ends.

The day we spoke, he was later to be a party host. “I’ll be serving drinks naked except for a little apron,” he says matter-of-factly, “and finishing off with a strip.”

An alumnus of the Cambridge School of Visual and Performing Arts, Essex-born Lotan auditioned for the Dreamboys, believing he had the qualifications for the role.

Boss David — once a Dreamboy himself — defines these as “personality and attitude”. He adds: “These are the crucial things; body shape we can change.”

None, I think, would doubt the personality and sunshine good-humour that Lotan possesses. In this respect, if not in others, he greatly resembles his uncle, the flamboyant Louie Spence, of Sky TV’s Pineapple Dance Studio fame.

Lotan doesn’t mention the family connection to me. A pity, because I could have told him how much I enjoyed Uncle Louie’s turn as Dandini in Milton Keynes’s last year’s pantomime, Cinderella.

I wrote: “Spence, who has built a career out of camp, was a performer previously unknown to your non-tellywatching reviewer. Making his acquaintance, however, proved a far from dismaying experience, for his over-the-top antics can hardly fail to tickle one’s fancy.”

Lotan takes a prominent role in a soon-to-be-seen Channel 4 documentary on the Dreamboys. This could, I predict, propel him to stardom as well. The difficulties the night job wrought in his personal life — he was engaged until recently to a girl who took a fancy to him during a show — should supply the human interest programmes like this require.

The London launch of the Buxton Festival had been arranged, through the local MP Andrew Bingham, some weeks before the death of Lady Thatcher. I had wondered if it would be cancelled when it turned out to be on the very afternoon of the funeral. Happily it wasn’t.

Pressing business prevented the attendance, as he had planned, of David Cameron, while the deadline for a Times article on the funeral made journalist Matthew Parris, a guest speaker, so late that festival chairman Dame Janet Smith had actually apologised for his non-appearance.

My interest in this excellent festival dates from an invitation to it some five or six years ago by Trevor Osborne. The developer of the Oxford Castle site, Trevor is now involved in a major project to revive Buxton’s glorious Crescent, which was built by John Carr for the 5th Duke of Devonshire in the 1780s. It should be open as a hotel in time for the 2015 festival.

Joanna Lumley’s presence at the launch was explained by the fact that her husband, Stephen Barlow, is the festival’s artistic director. He is conducting the opening production, a double bill consisting of Camille Saint-Saëns’s La Princesse Jaune and Charles Gounod’s La Colombe. In a year in which he is much occupied with French opera, Stephen will also be conducting a production of Francis Poulenc’s thrilling opera Dialogue des Carmélites at Grange Park. Joanna shares my excitement, she was telling me, at the opportunity to see this rarely given work which ends, heartbreakingly, with the journey to the guillotine, one by one, of a convent’s entire complement of nuns.