BLAME it on the girl, but if it hadn't been for a certain lady who happened to catch young Andrew Marr's eye, then London's political empire might have breathed a little easier.
But, perhaps more importantly, a nation of television viewers might never have come face to face with the small screen's most unlikely star.
Today Loretto-educated Marr is among the country's best known faces - and pair of ears - in television current affairs, balancing incisive political comment with celebrity interviews as host of a Sunday morning chat show and as a regular contributor to a catalogue of programmes and publications.
Soon he will adopt yet another, slightly more surprising persona: that of fearless action man, as he takes to the heavens on board a variety of flimsy flying machines and wobbly sky-borne apparatus to present his new series, Britain from Above.
In it, he tours the country from hundreds of feet in the air, swooping through the Great Glen on a microlight, plunging to earth tied to a skydiver and trying to keep talking through chattering teeth while strapped to a paraglider.
It's all intended to bring us a new perspective on a familiar landscape. Yet none of it might have come about if it hadn't been for a
romantic crush, way back when the young Andrew Marr was carving himself a name in journalism here in Edinburgh.
"My first job was on The Scotsman," he says. "It was quite some time ago now but I remember leaving to go to London thinking I'd only be going there very briefly. I fully intended to be back in Scotland quickly.
"I was chasing a woman, of course," he reveals. "But when I caught her, I fairly quickly realised that I had been the fish and she was the angler - she didn't waste much time in throwing me back."
The story makes him roar with laughter - it is, he adds, the reason why London is now home and not Edinburgh.
"But I very much feel that Edinburgh is my adoptive home," he adds quickly. "I'm from Dundee, sure, but I went to school at Loretto in Musselburgh and I feel very, very close to Edinburgh."
Which might make viewers of his newest television series wonder why the city he feels such a connection with is rather skirted around as the flying Mr Marr skims the nation's horizon, pointing out geological rarities, historical and industrial landmarks, hills and rugged coastlines.
Throughout the series he whizzes over the Welsh Borders in a hang glider, buzzes once secret military bases in the Midlands and soars over Oxford in a biplane. As for Edinburgh...
"The series is driven by stories about ancient history, geology," he says. "But it's completely non-comprehensive in terms of the places we were able to take in.
"The Scottish sequence ended up being the Great Glen - it's like the San Andreas Fault of Great Britain and Europe, it's a huge geological issue. So we did that.
"We did a lot of London too, obviously because of the size, and we looked at Oxford as an example of how a town has spread over the years."
Certainly, filming Britain From Above is about as far from Marr's typical working environment - a stuffy W12 television studio - as possible.
"I can't remember how many different ways I've been in the air but it's at least two or three different helicopters, four or five different planes, including historic planes from the Thirties, a Tigermoth and a silver Synergy jet - which is, apparently, Kylie's transport of choice," he says.
"On my first day I was strapped in a microlight, which is like a motorised tricycle with wings which goes faster, then dangerously fast until suddenly you are a couple of thousand feet up.
"It's an astonishing feeling. Zipping down the Great Glen very low and seeing it from a bird's eye view, a buzzard's binoculars, was spectacular."
He may not give the immediate impression of a James Bond in waiting - Marr's biggest claim to fame apart from his journalistic skills has been in having a set of distinctive lugs - yet it appears the new series has unleashed the action man in him.
Paragliding, he says, was a surprising experience that "essentially involves jumping off a hill holding on to a plastic bag attached to some string".
But most shocking of all was the skydiving. "There's no doubt that the biggest highlight was being dropped out of a plane twice, two miles up, which was completely unlike what I'd expected."
"I thought it was going to be the most fun, full-on moment - partly because you see all these pictures of people skydiving and they look like they're floating.
"I thought it would be a bit like floating. You get out the plane, there's a rush of air and a skoosh and then you would be floating.
"But, I can report, it is categorically not like floating. You are plummeting. You are going down as fast as the human body could go. You drop about a mile before the parachute is opened."
It all sounds terrifying, but having viewed Britain from angles most of us couldn't contemplate, Marr emerged a fan.
"In terms of sheer, unadulterated fun, this has been a wonderful shoot," he adds. "And it does truly give you a completely different perspective on life in Britain."
Dundee-born Marr went to Loretto School in Musselburgh before heading to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to study English. He joined the Scotsman as a trainee junior business reporter in 1981 and left in 1988 after a spell as political editor.
He became London-based, working for a variety of newspapers before hitting television screens as the BBC's distinctive political editor in 2000.
Amidst all of that, he has published five books and more recently evolved from hard news and comment to presenting his talk-based show on Sunday mornings and his documentary series, Andrew Marr's History Of Modern Britain.
Filming is already underway on a prequel to his History Of Modern Britain, Britannia, and a major documentary for BBC Two about evolution - Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
He certainly appears to live up to his workaholic reputation - even if there's a fine line between how much of what he does in the new series is work and how much is sheer personal enjoyment.
"It's been a blast," he says. "Most of us are familiar with being up there from our flights to various holiday destinations. But here we're in smaller planes or helicopters talking with experts who know exactly what they are looking at. The effect is completely different.
"There are so many of us on such a small, historic space the miracle is that we avoid some kind of dramatic national catastrophe," he adds.
"What I hope people take away from this is a sense of how extraordinary it is that we all manage to get along without tipping into utter mayhem and chaos."
Edinburgh Evening News August 2008
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