For her new book, Into Danger, Kate Adie interviewed prostitutes, stunt women, armed robbers and missionaries – people who risk their lives for work. Apparently, war reporter isn’t an occupation that necessarily falls into that category unless you’re particularly careless, gung-ho or just plain unlucky.

“People say, ‘My goodness. It’s such a dangerous job’. I don’t think so. It’s a job that watches other people do dangerous things. As a journalist, you are never sent to tackle danger, it’s not part of the job. The job is to watch and bring the story back.”

Over the years Adie has reported from the sorts of places most people would want to avoid – from the moment she came to our attention in 1980 reporting behind a car door during the Iranian embassy siege, to Tiananmen Square, the Balkans, Iraq and Sierra Leone. During that time she has been shot three times, had a knife held to her throat and a gun thrust in her face by a drunk Croatian.

According to Adie, the danger “comes with the turf”.

“There were dangers inherent in the job, but in lots of jobs you can run into trouble. A soldier goes into battle, and that’s it. You can’t say, ‘I don't really fancy it today’.” Whereas a journalist, she argues, can. What about pushy news editors, desperate to get the story? A myth apparently. “Find me that news editor... There isn’t such a person, for obvious reasons.”

You get the feeling Adie thinks we’re all a little too cautious these days. That maybe by trying to anticipate and avoid trouble, we’re in a way missing out on something.

A more exciting life, maybe?

“We live in a risk averse society and there is a problem in that some things you only learn by experience. A child who touches a hot pan never touches it again. You don’t want people learning everything that way, but if you have a society that shields people from the smallest danger, you don’t learn until something nasty comes along.”

Does she believe in fate?

“No. I had a good look at the historic argument but it is all because of superstition and ignorance.” And anyway, she’s seen the results of putting yourself in the hands of the gods. “There are fateful religions. In Afghanistan, I saw a stupid young man bouncing across an area covered in mines, saying, ‘Allah will protect me’. He was blown to smithereens.

“Having seen that, I think with fatefulness comes a certain degree of stupidity.”

I ask Adie if witnessing such things has left her scared and, in her cheery but brisk schoolmarm way, she tells me, “You have been reading too many women’s magazines. Journalists do not collapse in wobbly heaps”. Although she concedes in her book that some occasionally do.

“A few don’t come out of things too happily. But they tend, in my experience, to be those who went in with an unequivocal attitude or quite a lot of unresolved personal baggage – those who would make a mess of being a chartered accountant, never mind a war correspondent.”

You wonder what makes a nice girl from Sunderland, who went to a posh girls’ school, want to become a journalist or even a war reporter and you find out she didn’t.

“I never planned anything,” she says. “My generation didn’t think about it. I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do.” Which is how she came to do a degree in Scandinavian Studies. A course she jokes, “qualified me for a massively important national role, should the Vikings ever invade us again”.

Anyway, along her unplanned way she landed a job with the BBC and at one point ended up at Radio Brighton, a period she has described in the past as, “almost completely disastrous”.

“Everything went wrong,” she laughs. Such as? “I once went off to interview a man and discovered he was dead.” Adie had obliviously trotted off to the deceased’s house in Hove only to be greeted by a policeman.

“I asked if I could speak to the man and he said no.” Adie, putting on a haughty voice, told him “I’m from Radio Brighton”, at which point she discovered her interviewee was a corpse and scuttled off back to the newsroom. When she returned, her boss wanted more detail so Adie went back to the house in Hove. “I asked what had happened and the policeman said, ‘He’s been murdered’.” This being the stuff young reporters dreams are made of, Adie rushed back to the newsroom, where once again her thunder was stolen by her boss. “He said, ‘Murdered by whom? How? When? Where? Off you go.’ I wasn’t exactly prepared.”

Despite the dubious start, Adie eventually rose to become a veteran war-reporter and, according to a Radio Times readers’ poll, the nation’s favourite correspondent.

Does the 63-year-old straight talker, who now presents Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent from behind the safety of a BBC desk, ever miss her old job on the frontline?

“It isn’t there to do. I’m often asked that but life is too short. The job has changed. In these days of 24-hour news, you tend to get reporters standing by the satellite dishes instead of discovering the story.” A situation that obviously doesn't impress her. “Years back, my forbears were coach and horse drivers, then along came the horseless carriage. There was really no point in them sitting on their rump and saying, ‘I wish I was out with the horses again’. Life changes. You can’t hang on to things for ever.”

  • Kate Adie appears alongside Libby Purves at The Old Market, Upper Market Street, Hove, May 2, 12.30pm. Call 01273 709709
  • Into Danger – Risking Your Life For Work, published by Hodder and Stoughton, is out now.