MAEVE BINCHYis the subject of a documentary on RTÉ tomorrow. She wasn't sure what she was letting herself in for when she let its makers into her life. What would they find interesting enough to film, for a start?

“Continuity was ensuring I was wearing the same dress to continue a conversation as I had been wearing to begin it the day before, people with clipboards who knew far more about me than I knew about myself

WELL, I DID SAY from the very start that there was a problem. There was no extreme poverty in the tale, no family discord, no feuds, no emigration. Nothing to hang a good story on. But they said they knew all that and they still wanted to go ahead.

So Gordon and I had a working party on it and listed the arguments for and against. Against doing the whole thing were the fact that the story was too tame to hold people’s interest and the fact that I love talking so much that once I get started I can’t be stopped. And in favour of it was that it would be good to have something that would confound my enemies, but we couldn’t think of any enemies we wanted to confound, so that one didn’t really work. But also in favour of it was that we know Noel Pearson, whose company would be making it, and we knew it wouldn’t be a dull and glum sort of thing.

I checked with my sister and brother to see whether they would be horrified by it all, and they said nonsense and I should go ahead. So I said yes, because I’m as easily flattered as the next person, and I thought it would be great to be made much of and for people to arrange flattering lighting and tell me they were ready for my close-up. And of course this was all at the end of the summer, when autumn seemed miles away.

But, the way things do, the day arrived. I met the director, Sinéad O’Brien; I actually knew her mother and her father and her grandmother. I wondered mildly was she old enough to be directing documentaries, but she assured me she was, so we got that out of the way early on.

And then, bit by bit, I met everyone else, the cameramen and the sound recordists, all of them cheerful, charming and hugely apologetic about the amount of gear they had to bring into the house. We were apologising equally for the smallness of the house, as we would reverse into the bathroom, climb over what seemed like gigantic metal trunks, and negotiate floors covered with thick cables.

The lights were so bright you could see everybody’s nose hair and any other imperfection in the skin; but there was Make Up to deal with that. There were never fewer than 12 people around, each one knowing exactly their role. Archives would be taking out my papers, borrowed on a daily basis from UCD library, and getting out old scrapbooks that I had totally forgotten. Continuity was making sure I was wearing the same dress to continue a conversation as I had been wearing to begin it the day before – people with clipboards who knew far more about me than I knew about myself. When I would say vaguely that something happened back in the 1960s or 1970s, they would actually know the date.

A gloom-ridden acquaintance told me I would be demented from making them all tea. I want to put on record that no cup of tea was ever brewed in this house for the crew.

Magically, trays of sandwiches or little cakes appeared from Dalkey’s cafes and food shops; cartons of good coffee were always available.

If they had been doing a documentary with a more able-bodied person there could have been great shots of me striding along the beach at White Rock or climbing Killiney Hill. I could have been down at Dalkey Island, talking to the porpoises and the seals.

But this wasn’t on.

I find moving about very hard these days, so it all had to be done at home. I caught sight of myself on a monitor one day and almost forgot to talk, because I was in a kind of torpor, wondering why I hadn’t gone on that diet I thought I was going to try, a diet that apparently puts hollows in your cheeks and makes your neck long and thin. I had even cut it out of a newspaper and filed it away carefully in a yellow file called “Action This Day” last August and forgotten about it totally.

But otherwise I just talked and talked until I felt there wasn’t one more word to say.

Any question I was asked I answered at immense length. I exhausted myself and them.

They reassured me and said that once the editor had got at it these monologues would look much more acceptable.

I dearly hope this is so.

Then I would hear tales of the days they interviewed other people: family, friends and colleagues. It wasn’t that I was worried would these people tell any Awful Secrets, because, honestly, there aren’t any Awful Secrets, but I hated them having to say nice things on order.

I wasn’t allowed anywhere near all this filming, quite rightly, and I even had to leave the house when Gordon, my husband, was being interviewed, because they didn’t want me staring at him beadily, willing him to say how wonderful I was and am.

And it all become a pleasant and entirely unreal routine.

Even the cats got used to the film people being here and came out of hiding to take part once they realised that there was no threat to their existence and that these people left every evening having tidied up the house to a much better degree than they had found it in.

And then it was over, from our point of view anyway, and I sort of missed the huge vans drawing up outside the door, disgorging crates of equipment, and cheerful young people fitting things together and making cameras and lighting out of them as if they were children with building bricks. We used to look around our room that used to have 12 people in it, each one at some task, and now there was only us finishing breakfast, and the cats looking faintly bored that no cabaret was being put on for them today.

And then there came the whole dread feeling of self-doubt. Why had I brought this on us? We were fine as we were. What if people who had been interviewed were on the cutting-room floor? How could I ever meet their eye again? Nothing is any help. One man who tried to calm me down said that nobody will watch it anyway, because they’ll all be asleep or drunk at that time on Christmas Day. Somehow that was not as reassuring as he had intended it to be.

Another friend said that it would be undemanding and that was the key word I must remember. Once people had got through a family meal and had all eaten far too much to digest, then something totally bland and undemanding was what they were looking for. And somehow that didn’t entirely cheer me up either.

So what didI want? I suppose I wanted to acknowledge how lucky I had been in my life and that I had been dealt a great hand of cards. I didn't want it to sound smug or self-satisfied. That's not the way it feels inside, and I hope it doesn't come over like that. I suppose I wanted to thank my family and friends and all the great people I've met along the way – tell them how much I love them.

I didn’t say it like that when I was faced with the lights and the cameras. But that’s what I meant.

Maeve Binchy at Home in the Worldis on RTÉ1 tomorrow at 7pm