Sitting in a pub garden, drinking pints of bitter and smoking heavily, the former BBC radio presenter Andy Kershaw shows little physical evidence of the past few harrowing months.

There are still the same trademark bags under his eyes, there is still the same broad Lancashire accent and there is still a measure of biting, black wit.

But his behaviour tells a different story.

For the record: Former DJ Andy Kershaw with new love Catherine Turner

He swings wildly from laughter one minute to spittle-flecked waves of fury the next. At one point he breaks down in tears.

It's a far cry from the character that his fans know and love.

As a radio DJ in the Nineties, Kershaw became one of the nation's most respected broadcasters.

His shows on Radio 1 provided an outlet for his love of world music, soul, reggae and blues, and this continued when he transferred to Radio 3 in 2001.

Andy with former partner Juliette Banner in 2004

He married this with successful forays into journalism - reporting, for example, from various international troublespots for Radio 4's Today programme, including despatches from the midst of a volcanic eruption in Montserrat in 1996 where he had gone for 'a quiet Caribbean holiday', and on 1994's Rwandan genocide.

When he moved from London to the Isle of Man in 2006, he continued to host his show there, and helped organise concerts featuring acts such as Robert Plant, The Who, The Kinks, Billy Bragg and Lou Reed.

But over the past year, Kershaw has seen troubled times.

He separated from his partner, the restaurateur Juliette Banner, in October 2006 and has been locked up three times - and arrested many more - for breaking the terms of a restraining order that forbids him from contacting her.

After his most recent arrest, in March, he was given a six-month jail term suspended for two years after pleading guilty, and left the Isle of Man to address his problems.

But after moving to Northamptonshire to stay with his sister, fellow BBC broadcaster Liz Kershaw, he again made contact with Banner and their two children. The Isle of Man authorities attempted to issue a warrant for his arrest.

Since May, Kershaw has been living out of a holdall with his dog, Buster, and staying on friends' floors. He has also been sleeping rough.

Fearful of arrest, he has been staying in each place for only the briefest of times, and for a short while was even placed on the Missing Persons Register, at Liz's request.

In this, Kershaw's first interview since he went under the radar to avoid arrest, he talks of his despair, frustration and lack of hope for the future.

Now 48, Kershaw describes how he is in the middle of a bitter separation battle and how he feels he has been punished out of all proportion to his various indiscretions during the 17-year relationship with Banner.

He stresses that he has been 'non-violent' throughout his ordeal, but has been banished from his property and has no way of working, because his extensive collection of music is back at his Isle of Man home in the island's west-coast city of Peel.

And now, for breaking the terms of his most recent suspended sentence, he faces a year in prison if he returns.

The former Radio 1 favourite is pictured checking his lobster pots from his boat on the Peel seafront in the Isle of Man and, right, returning to his parents home near Rochdale after a judge ruled he should leave the island

Kershaw claims he has barely seen his son and daughter, aged 11 and nine, in the past year.

'Can you imagine what it was like a week last Saturday when it was my son's 11th birthday?' he asks.

'I had sent him a card. I had scraped together £20 to put in an envelope for him because I've been away from him so long I don't even know what his tastes and interests are.

'All I could do was send him some money, and I don't really have any money. And waiting and waiting for a phone call that never came. How cruel is that?'

He is also critical of his former employers at the BBC, for whom he stopped working in May 2007.

'The BBC aren't paying me,' he adds. 'Not like Johnnie Walker.

'When Johnnie Walker was fingered by the News Of The World for taking cocaine , he had to go into rehab in Antigua for months.

'The BBC continued to pay his wages. They haven't done that with me.

'Still, they have, very generously, said the door is open. They said that six months ago.'

Record collection: But Andy can't access his extensive selection because it is at home on the Isle of Man

He talks of his enduring affection for the Isle of Man, of how he played truant from Hulme Grammar School in Oldham in 1975 to travel there for the annual TT motorcycling event.

In 2006, worried about the state of schools in Crouch End, North London, where he lived with Banner, the couple bought a £420,000 property in Peel and moved there in April of that year.

This, he felt, would be a better environment for his children to grow up in.

'No sooner had we got there - and I hold my hands up about this - Juliette found out that the previous summer I'd had a fling at the Womad festival with a journalist,' he says.

'She found a one-year-old text message on a mobile phone, which alluded to a leg-over in the Reading area.

'What on earth was going through her mind? She borrowed my mobile - I was in the pub with the removal men, buying them a drink.

'She went back to the house with the phone, ostensibly to ring the electricity company or something. Then she went through all my old messages.

'It wasn't even a long-running affair.

'We had gone to the Isle of Man for a new start. I had put my London ways and London life behind me. I had walked away from that life. Otherwise, things were fine.'

He says that Banner moved out on October 13, 2006, taking the children with her.

Until the following spring, he says, he was trying to convince his former partner, whom he never married, to return. She refused.

Kershaw appeared on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs in March 2007 and dedicated the 1973 song Return Of The Grievous Angel (by Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris) to Banner, saying she was 'the love of my life'.

(It features the lyrics: 'Twenty thousand roads I went down, down, down/And they all led me straight back home to you.')

But Banner was unimpressed by his public declaration of commitment and sent him a note saying that she was not coming back.

By June last year, according to Kershaw, Banner had met her new partner, a Scottish prison officer called Jim Imrie, and had moved in with him near their former family home.

'She had set up home with this bloke, a man she barely knew, a stranger to my children, in the next street,' he says.

'This stranger was playing daddy to my kids around town.

'And I was supposed to take it with serenity or equanimity? Can you imagine how tough that was?

'Throughout all this, I have never laid a finger on anyone.

'I would go to the supermarket to buy a pint of milk and I would see a stranger walking hand-in-hand with my children.

'Given the torment I have been through, I think I have behaved with enormous dignity and self-restraint.'

After a series of disagreements between them, in July 2007 Banner won a restraining order against Kershaw.

He was first arrested in August for going to her house - on his son's birthday. In October, he was given a three-month suspended sentence and spent six nights in jail for breaching the order a second time, after he tried to force his way into their home.

The same month, he was arrested again for 'approaching his former partner in a threatening manner', and five days later, was arrested once more for drunkenly shouting abuse to officers inside Peel police station.

The final breach of the order came as Banner and her new partner walked on the beach outside his house.

Kershaw claims that all he did was look at her, though his behaviour was deemed to be unlawful and he was sentenced to three months in prison in January 2008. He was released on February 29 after just over half his sentence.

'It's a small place,' he says. 'On November 2, I went digging for lugworms on Peel beach to go fishing.

'Then, at 11.30am, I walked around to the kiosk at Peel breakwater to get a cup of coffee. The two of them happened to be there.

'It was acknowledged in court that the encounter was accidental: I didn't speak to them, didn't make any physical contact.

'When I was sentenced after Christmas, I ended up doing six-and-a-half weeks for looking at my ex-partner. The court decision's was outrageous. I am no threat to anybody.'

Of his time in prison, he says: 'It would have made Charles Dickens wince. The place was full of heroin and vermin.

'I feel no bitterness or hostility towards the officers in that jail, the majority of whom were very nice and sympathetic.

'Just about every officer and prisoner said I shouldn't be in there. The majority were in there for drugs offences - a lot of Liverpudlians who had gone over there to deal drugs.

'I was with heroin dealers and men of violence. They realised I was a regular bloke and that I was in there for an enormous injustice.

'The main problem that I had was the sheer, crushing boredom. I read 32 books in 47 days.

'Unless you go in there you won't understand how boring it is. You are locked up for 22 hours a day.'

Just three days after his release at the beginning of March, Kershaw returned to jail after being arrested near his home for breaching the restraining order again.

At a court hearing the following day, he pleaded guilty and was given a one-year jail term, suspended for two years.

But by Kershaw's own account, he has already broken the terms of his sentence, again by making contact with his former partner.

'I f****d up on April 30,' he says. 'I had been at our Elizabeth's for five to seven weeks.

'I had written to my children from there every day for that time. I heard nothing back.

'On April 30, Elizabeth phoned Juliette and asked why had I not heard anything.

'I had shown all the letters to Elizabeth first to see if anything in them was controversial or might be upsetting to either the kids, Juliette or Jim.

'Because we have this young, nutty dog - a Schnauzer called Buster - with a huge personality, I even sent, for the entertainment of the kids, letters ostensibly written by Buster.

'On that day, Elizabeth phoned up and Juliette said she had not shown the kids any of the letters. I hit the roof.

'I picked up the phone, gave her a rocket and sent her a number of text messages. I shouldn't have done it.

'The point about all of this is, yes, I have technically broken the law on the Isle of Man with my phone calls and messages.

'I have technically broken the restraining order and the suspended sentence which I was given.

'That's why I am wanted by the police, although I have now made no contact in four months.

'This is not harassment. I simply contacted her in a desperate attempt to get in touch with my kids.'

After the most recent episode, he says, he left his sister's home to get some space.

He says: 'Our Elizabeth, when I went missing, had me listed as a missing person. Silly bugger.

'Mr Bloody Adventure can go across Africa by himself, but she has to alert the police in Northamptonshire that I am missing. What a stupid thing to do.

'She said: "You have to present yourself at a police station to say that you are all right." So I went to Derby central police station.

'I met a nice police officer and said I was fine. The officer said he had read all about my situation in the papers and he really sympathised with me.

'I said that was really kind. I was worried I was going to be nicked.

'A couple of days later, I wrote him a thank-you letter and put the address of where I was staying.

'It said, thank you for your concern and sympathy, thank you for taking me off the Missing Person's Register and thank you for all your advice.

'A day later, I'm sitting in the back yard on a nice afternoon. Two coppers turn up and say they have a warrant for my arrest from the Isle of Man.

'I went to the police headquarters to be formally charged. There, the two arresting officers said the Isle of Man had not completed the warrant request properly.

'They drove me home, saying they felt sorry for me. They said they had real crime to deal with.'

Kershaw stresses that he does not want to aggravate the Isle of Man police because they might extend the warrant for his arrest nationwide.

But he then leans over and shouts into the tape recorder: 'The Isle of Man police have got nothing better to do.

'There are a few Liverpudlian drug dealers who come over, there is the odd fight in a nightclub in Douglas on a Friday or Saturday evening and... er, that's it.

'They've nothing better to do than bully me.

'There is a syndrome in the Isle of Man called the Manx crab. The scenario is that there are a number of crabs in a bucket and one shows the initiative to climb out.

'What do the others do? They drag it back in to the bucket. People tell me time and time again that I am a victim of the Manx crab syndrome.'

Kershaw's latest attempts to contact Banner through her lawyers have been unsuccessful. He hopes to meet with his own Liverpool-based QC on September 22 to attempt to take matters forward.

Who owns what in his former partnership will be subjected to months of expensive legal wrangling.

'It's not a huge issue, it's a tiff. I just want to be home and get my tools of the trade. I am not interested in her.

'I am in love with another woman .

'If it's cruel on me, and she thinks that's OK, that's fine. But it is also cruel on those children.

'I don't care what it does to me. I shouldn't have had flings here, there and everywhere. Of course I shouldn't. And I am accepting the blame.

'But the response has been hugely out of proportion.'

• © The Independent. This first appeared in yesterday's Independent newspaper.