Ray D'Arcy grew up watching Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music and listening to their soundtrack albums over and over again. So when he tells Dame Julie Andrews that it's a pleasure and a privilege to be talking to her, it's no surprise that he sounds thoroughly sincere. But why wouldn't he? She is, after all, practically perfect in every way.

Dame Julie has published a second volume of her autobiography – written with her daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton – which begins as she's whisked away to Hollywood by Walt Disney to star in Mary Poppins. Disney came to see Julie when she was in a show called Camelot and seems to have been convinced by her performance to cast her as the all-singing, flying umbrella-wielding nanny.

"I think he was seeing the show because I'd been recommended to him and he just made up his mind then and there that he was going to ask me."

But Julie had to turn Walt Disney down because she was pregnant. Disney didn't want to take no for an answer, though, so he told her he'd wait. And wait he did. And when Julie's daughter Emma was two months old, she headed off to Hollywood to begin her motion picture career.

Hollywood movies these days are full of computer-generated imagery, but in 1964 most computers were people employed by NASA do work on the space programme. So, when Mary Poppins pulls a standard lamp out of a carpet bag, she's really pulling a standard lamp out of a carpet bag. And when Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke dance with animated penguins, they're really dancing with animated penguins. Wait – maybe I heard that wrong?

Maybe the standout moment of Ray's chat with Dame Julie was when, challenged by Ray, she said Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious backwards.

"It's gotten me past many a young child on the street who says, 'I can say Supercal' and I say, 'yeah, but can you say it backwards?'"

And then she just says it. Take that, kid on the street. Don’t mess with Mary Poppins.

When the conversation turns to The Sound of Music, Ray asks why it was so successful and why it endures. As a musical, Julie explains, it's up there with South Pacific and West Side Story.

"They were so beautifully made with such attention to detail and this one in particular, The Sound of Music, had, you know, children and nuns and beautiful countryside… It was all done first class and it was a great learning experience."

Dame Julie has latterly done voices for animations, including Shrek and, especially Despicable Me, where she plays Gru's mother who is, she says, a terrible character, but she loves playing her.

Hollywood parties get a look-in as well, as Julie recounts being offered cocaine at a party and her husband Blake Edwards stepping in, saying:

"Oh for God's sake, don't give her any, she's high enough on life as it is."

That could be a line from a song, couldn’t it?

Home Work: A Memoir of My Hollywood Years by Julie Andrews is published by Orion Publishing.

And you can hear Ray's full chat with Julie, as well as the rest of the Ray D'Arcy Show, here.

Niall Ó Sioradáin