IN THE WEEK that I joined Radio Luxembourg and was offered my first TV series, the first The Guinness Book of British Hit Singles was published, co-written with Tim Rice, his brother Jo and my future Radio One colleague Paul Gambaccini. We just thought that it’d be quite useful for us to have all the hit records listed in one book. The project had been given the thumbs-up by the ‘Guinness Twins’, Norris and Ross McWhirter, a short while before Ross was tragically gunned down on his own doorstep. We assumed that Norris wouldn’t want to continue with the book, but he must have had amazing fortitude, as things carried on and he remained firmly in the saddle. For my part, I spent weeks and weeks at Colindale, where the British Library’s magazines and newspapers were stored until 2013, requisitioning the old music papers, logging every chart entry and its weekly movement on huge sheets of graph paper. Having ordered my periodicals for that day, an expressionless porter would eventually glide towards me with my ‘kill’ on a trolley fitted with specially muffled wheels. I would then toil away for hours at a time. Looking back, it seems such a cumbersome and lengthy process now that everyone is so laptop friendly and computer literate. There was a strict ‘no food’ rule at Colindale and as I became a notorious grub smuggler and as such a marked man, I was frisked on a regular basis. I did manage to sneak the odd snack past the Colditz-style guards, but trying to consume stuff without being spotted was like trying to eat in class; you never really enjoy the pork pie or sausage roll as much as when you can savour it with a cup of tea and reading a book. Shovelling in the odd mouthful when you think no one’s looking doesn’t hold as much appeal for me. The moment is to be savoured. Nevertheless avarice won the day.

We had no idea that the books would take off in the way they did, with the second edition even topping the bestsellers. We assembled an intriguing mix of chart artists from different eras to grace its cover. Cliff Richard, Joe Brown and Craig Douglas posed alongside Elton John and Kate Bush as Errol Brown and Danny Williams lined up with the Drifters, Hank Marvin and Paul Jones. The four most senior representatives were Vera Lynn, Russ Conway, Johnny Ray and David Whitfield. The new breed were represented by Bob Geldof, Billy Idol and Tom Robinson.

It was fascinating watching the interaction between the artists, one of the most memorable moments being Elton sidling up to Johnny Ray asking for an autograph for his mother Sheila, who was apparently a huge fan. Tim, Jo, Paul and I were photographed with Kate Bush with the happy snap being captioned ‘Three men with Kate Bush in their eyes’, a bastardisation of one of her song titles. Another edition had a front cover that featured the artists who had been the most successful each year. Then we started issuing albums books and other spin-offs. One of these was Hits of the ’70s, when again we assembled a rather decent crowd of hit makers, this time at the House of Commons, with Norman St John-Stevas, Minister for the Arts, as our host. The criterion for inclusion was a number one hit from that decade. The Village People in full stage gear seemed delightfully outrageous in those surroundings and Freddie Mercury was his usual charming and erudite self. Lieutenant Pigeon and Bryan & Michael mingled with members of Mud and Slade and dozens of others, and we ate, drank and made merry. It was Elton, though, who grabbed the next day’s headlines. He perched himself on the Speaker’s Chair and shouted ‘Order! Order!’

We also published The Guinness Hits Challenge and The Guinness Book of 500 Number Ones. The launch for our number ones book, which came out in 1982, was held at Abbey Road Studios, where more UK chart toppers had been recorded than any other studio. It is famous for recording the Beatles, Cliff Richard and the Shadows and Pink Floyd among hundreds of major acts including, outside rock and pop, Glenn Miller, Sir Edward Elgar, Sir Malcolm Sargent and Yehudi Menuhin. We invited everyone who’d topped the chart, with Billy Fury as a special guest representing all those great acts who almost made it to the coveted number one spot. Among his string of success running from 1959 to 1983, Billy had seven top five hits. It was an emotional re-union for Billy and Cliff, who hadn’t met up since the early days of rock & roll. It wasn’t long before Sting appropriated a patrolling policeman’s helmet, which he sported for some of the evening. I think there must have been a timeshare on the helmet as Cliff also wore it for a while before it appeared on the head of former Shadows drummer Tony Meehan. The brothers McCartney were there, Mike representing the Scaffold and Paul representing the Beatles, for whom this studio had been the crucible for most of their global success. Linda McCartney was there too, representing Wings with Paul. Unit Four Plus Two swapped stories with Bucks Fizz; The Hollies, who topped the chart in 1965, chatted with one of the Johnston Brothers, who’d been at the number one with ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’ in 1955. Of course George Martin was there, and how could he not be? He practically kept the place going single handed and produced a heck of a lot of number ones. In fact I’m not sure that we didn’t interrupt one of his sessions to start the party. The other great Abbey Road producer of the era was Norrie Paramor, responsible for hits from Cliff and the Shadows, Helen Shapiro and more. We invited his widow in his stead. Even St Winifred’s School Choir made it … well, not all of them, obviously. Brian Poole and the Tremeloes were photographed with Alvin Stardust, Bob Geldof with Ray Dorset of Mungo Jerry and Des O’Connor with Ricky Valance. Roger Waters of Pink Floyd shared a drink with Aneka of ‘Japanese Boy’ fame, the first UK number one to be recorded in Scotland. And for the big finale, a happy snap of the most number one artists ever assembled. Among them was Micky Dolenz, who’d written the lyric ‘The four kings of EMI are sitting stately on the floor’, referring to the Beatles, for the Monkees’ hit ‘Alternate Title’, and here he was, sitting stately on the floor, next to one of the four kings, Paul McCartney.

We soon sailed through the half-million sales mark and on, with Guinness presenting us with ‘Half Million Club’ awards in front of another crowd of major artists, including Lonnie Donegan and Adam Faith. From 1978 to 1986 our Guinness books were phenomenally successful, and they continued to be after that, but I bowed out after a delightfully long run.

There were books off the back of the TV series Saturday Superstore and Pop Quiz, as well as The Cliff Richard Chronicle, which was repackaged and re-written a few times, and a biography of the Shadows. The Story of the Shadows was enormous fun to write, with Hank Marvin, Bruce Welch and Brian Bennett giving me a colossal amount of time, some of which was spent on Hank’s or Brian’s tennis court. If we ran late they’d give me a bed for the night, even though I had to get up at the crack of dawn for the Radio One breakfast show. Hank had been my inspiration for learning the guitar, but I could never have imagined back then that he’d be bringing me a cup of tea at five o’clock in the morning. The book has now acquired some sort of rarity value, one guy even telling me how he’d heard of one in a shop in Haverfordwest on the west coast of Wales and had driven the round trip from London just to secure a copy. Many Shadows fans have asked me to bring it up to date, so who knows … one day?

As I’ve mentioned here and there, I’d always written poetry from a very young age and had a few bits and pieces that I added to for my first collection of poems. I ended up buying as many copies as I could, not through vanity, but the juvenilia soon made me squirm a little, so I reasoned that the more I snapped up the less other people could buy them. I guess there are still a few copies of The Aldermoor Poems out there somewhere that I missed. The next collection, Elizabethan Dragonflies, was better, with poems on places such as Rutland, Invergowrie, Badminton, Hurlingham, Land’s End, Loch Lomond and St Enedoc. There were also poems on diverse characters including the painter Georges Braque and ‘William Hickey’. I was asked to write some lines for the last-ever Hickey column in the Daily Express, so I had the final word in the diary that had been going since 1928, when Tom Driberg, later a Labour MP, became the first journalist to use the pseudonym of the infamous eighteenth-century diarist. In the ’60s Nigel Dempster took the helm, perhaps the most famous name to do so, and the last of some fifty journalists to fill the role was Richard Compton Miller.

My poem ‘William Hickey – 1933–1987’, had the final word:

It has been pointed out that the column started in 1928, but the date the Daily Express gave me at the time was 1933. So we re-write history?

A ‘funeral’ was held in which the theatrical procession marched across Fleet Street to the journalists’ and printers’ spiritual home, St Bride’s Church, complete with New Orleans-style jazz band and a coffin filled with champagne bottles, topped by a rusty typewriter. The contents of the coffin were consumed, naturally, in a nearby pub. It was a privilege to be a part of the send-off.

I was delighted to have many of my poems featured in the Poet’s England series, each book representing poetry about each county down the ages. Several poems were spread around the volumes with Surrey, rather wonderfully, featuring four of them; Effingham Station, High Surrey (Coldharbour,) Along the Banks of Mole and Wey, and The Great Fire of 1951. Effingham Station was also featured in a volume of railway verse, Marigolds Grow Wild on Platforms.

During my time at Classic FM, one of the programmes had a feature where they asked various folk to talk about the favourite room in their house. I decided, unquestionably, that mine would be the library. On reflection I thought that the word ‘library’ might come over as being a little stuffy so I called it ‘a room with books’, and wrote a poem to go with it. Not surprisingly, it would end up being the title of my next book of poems, published in 1996. After reading ‘A Room with Books’ for the programme, I found myself inundated with favourite poems from listeners. This led, rather inevitably, to my producer, Tim Lihoreau, and myself compiling the listeners’ top 100 poems. Thousands and thousands of votes poured in, giving us a logistical, but ultimately rewarding, nightmare. Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ and Kipling’s ‘If’ came out as the top two, with de la Mare, Browning, Tennyson, Masefield, Keats, Brooke and Rossetti all featuring in the top ten. I edited the volume of poems, and wrote a one-page biography of each poet in the top 100 and a foreword that included the poem that had started it all off, ‘A Room with Books’.

In 1998, we followed One Hundred Favourite Poems with One Hundred Favourite Humorous Poems, again with a single-page biography of each poet. While pondering on how to write a more novel introduction, I began to amuse myself by thinking of links between the various poets featured in the top 100. I ended up with something called ‘Stanley Holloway in Thirty Moves’, starting with Holloway and seeing if I could get back to him in thirty moves using poets featured in the book. I was allowed to use a poet more than once if applicable. It’s a wedge of literary fun, so let’s include it here.

Stanley Holloway made his London debut in Kissing Time in 1919, which was co-written by P. G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse wrote with Ira and George Gershwin, whose song ‘I Don’t Think I’ll Fall in Love Again’ was influenced by G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton was such good friends with Hilaire Belloc that people referred to them as ‘ChesterBelloc.’ Belloc’s farrago ‘The Four Men’ heavily influenced ‘The Soldier’, Rupert Brooke’s most famous poem. Brooke’s early poems were  published in the Granta magazine, once edited by A. A. Milne. Milne successfully adapted Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows for the stage, as did Alan Bennett. Bennett contributed to the book Larkin at Sixty, a celebration of Philip Larkin’s life and work. Larkin was the librarian at Hull University, where he met and influenced a young student called Roger McGough. McGough wrote hit records, as did Cole Porter. Cole Porter wrote the music and lyrics for Kiss Me Kate, based on The Taming of the Shrew by Shakespeare. The Shakespearian characters Othello, Richard III, Hamlet and Macbeth were all portrayed on stage by William McGonagall. McGonagall’s American counterpart was Julia Moore (known as the American McGonagall), who was a major influence on Ogden Nash. Nash wrote the musical One Touch of Venus with Kurt Weill, who collaborated on Lady in the Dark with Ira Gershwin, who wrote with P. G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse was knighted, as was John Betjeman. Betjeman was a pupil at Marlborough with Louis MacNeice. MacNeice described John Cornford as ‘the first inspiring communist I have met’. Cornford had actually been christened Rupert in memory of Rupert Brooke. Brooke was remembered in the poem ‘At Grantchester’ by Charles Causley. Causley wrote the poem ‘Betjeman 1984’. Betjeman bought a new book of poems in 1976 and praised it as being full of ‘good, honest country poems’. It was a collection of poetry by Pam Ayres. Pam Ayres presented a radio documentary about Jane Austen, who read and was influenced by William Cowper. Cowper’s father was a rector, as was the father of Lewis Carroll. Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark was influenced by Bab Ballads by W. S. Gilbert. Gilbert almost became the artist for the Alice books by Lewis Carroll. Carroll was educated at Rugby, as was Walter Savage Landor. Landor was the model for Lawrence Boythorn in Dickens’s Bleak House, while the Dickens musical Oliver! once starred Barry Humphries. Humphries was a regular contributor to Private Eye magazine, home of their fictitious poet-in-residence, E. J. Thribb. Thribb was created by Richard Ingrams, one of the Private Eye founders, while the founder of the Eton College magazine, The Etonian, was W. M. Praed. Praed’s work was often compared to that of Thomas Hood. Hood was the joint editor of the London Magazine, while the editor of the Classical Review was A. D. Godley. Godley’s translations of Horace were published in 1898, while another poet to translate and write poems in the style of Horace was Rupert Brooke. Brooke’s cousin Erica was infatuated with George Bernard Shaw, whose play Pygmalion became My Fair Lady and starred … Stanley Holloway!

Thankfully the two volumes have been selling consistently since 1997 and 1998.

I’ve always had Rupert Brooke’s poems around for as long as I can remember. He looked too modern for his era and I always thought that he and his circle were the forerunners of the Swinging Sixties set, but were curtailed by two world wars and two periods of austerity. They went barefoot, had unchaperoned weekend camps, played guitars, read poetry and planned to change the world; the girls were emancipated and Brooke grew his hair long. Brooke was feted with eulogies and effigies after his death at the age of twenty-seven. Much has been made of our stars who died at this age, such as Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and Robert Johnson, but Brooke was the first icon of the twentieth century to do so and create a stir in the hearts of those he left behind. He was referred to as a ‘Young Apollo’, whence the name of my Rupert Brooke musical, and Winston Churchill wrote a glowing obituary in The Times, commenting, ‘We shall not see his like again.’

Brooke’s Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Ian Hamilton, reflected on why so many people thought him charismatic and rather special:

After a couple of decades the inevitable iconoclasts appeared in an attempt to swing the pendulum the other way, so in the ’90s I decided to write a balanced account of his life, neither being eulogistic nor iconoclastic. In working on Forever England I travelled the length and breadth of the country, taking in places that he’d been drawn to for one reason or another. I motored from Becky Falls to Llanbedr, East Knoyle to Dymock, Lulworth Cove to the Lizard and Rye to Moffat. All were able to add something to a fuller and more rounded story that uncovered some unknown facts and facets of Brooke’s character and 27-year journey. On my travels I met with the son of Brooke’s great friend Dudley Ward. Peter Ward was one of only two people I encountered that had been alive during Brooke’s time, albeit as very young children. Peter was mentioned in Rupert’s correspondence twice, once in 1914 and again early in 1915 following a long-lost letter being delivered to him from his Tahitian girlfriend Taatamata. There were hints in that letter that she may have been pregnant with his child. As Dudley Ward had been Rupert’s main confidant, I asked Peter if he could throw any light on the possibility of a child. Boxes came down from the loft that had never seen the light of day, containing hundreds of snapshots sent back to England from Tahiti with the intention that some would be enlarged when Brooke returned. The outbreak of World War One consigned them to sit in an attic for decades and decades. In the bottom of one of the boxes were a few letters that told an extraordinary tale. Late in 1935, twenty years after Brooke’s death and a respectful time after the death of his mother, Dudley Ward, a man not given to flights of fancy, began to make serious enquiries about the possibility of Brooke having had a son or daughter. It appeared that Rupert had asked him to put these wheels in motion. With little to go on, he wrote to Viscount Hastings, who owned a property on Moorea, an island north-west of Tahiti. Hastings thought that Norman Hall, who had recently directed Mutiny on the Bounty, might be able to help as he had a wide circle of friends there. Word came back from Hall that Taatamata was still alive, but he was leaving Polynesia for San Francisco and wouldn’t be able to contact her. Hall died in 1951, but I tracked down his daughter Nancy, who confirmed that her mother had told her in confidence that Arlice Rapoto, a great friend of theirs, was the daughter of Rupert Brooke and Taatamata. A photograph she sent me of Arlice, taken around 1950, shows an uncanny resemblance to Brooke. And so I was able to add to the Brooke legend and publish a photograph of his daughter, who sadly died a few years before I wrote the book.

The other person I met who had known Brooke was his second cousin, Winifred Kinsman, whose grandmother, Lucy Hoare, had been Rupert’s mother’s sister. Winifred was a charming lady and it turned out that she also used to ski at Lech, but back in the ’30s. She kindly opened our Rupert Brooke Museum at the Orchard, Grantchester in 1999. There were three of us who founded the Rupert Brooke Society: the late Robin Callan, the owner of the Orchard, where Rupert had lived; Dr Peter Miller, former chairman of the Brooke Centenary Committee; and me. Peter, no inconsiderable age himself, took on the mantle of president, Robin enabled the re-construction of the museum building and staffed it, while I chaired the society and edited the magazine as well as ensuring that the museum contained the story of Brooke, books, artefacts and some of his belongings. Between us we had his steeplechase cup from Rugby School, the binoculars he wore en route to a Gallipoli that he never reached, buckles from his uniform, signed books, a lock of his hair and a growing amount of things that people offered or brought in.

I was lucky to beat an American university to one of several poems that Brooke lost somewhere in Canada, en route to San Francisco in the summer of 1913. The poem, ‘For Mildred’s Urn’, was in Brooke’s handwriting but experts had no idea what the subject matter was. I adore literary sleuthing, and was soon able to come up with a rational explanation by bringing together the literary, genealogical, historical and geographical. When Brooke sailed to the USA on the SS Cedric from Liverpool in May 1913, he discovered that the poet Richard Le Gallienne and his wife Julie were also on the ship. Rupert was disparaging (probably a pose) about the man, ‘who mooches about with grizzled hair and a bleary eye’, in a letter to Eddie Marsh. Le Gallienne would also have been carrying the ashes of his former wife in an urn. Case solved; the poem is on sometime loan to the museum. Fifteen years on the society is still going strong, spurred on by Forever England, which will be re-published in 2015, the centenary of Brooke’s death. Sadly Robin Callan won’t be here for the anniversary and the erection of a blue plaque, having passed away in April 2014. I read ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ at his memorial service.

For twenty years I’ve been in and out of the Orchard, letting many an hour slip away with Robin, discussing Brooke, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Henry James and many others who passed through these gardens and stayed at the house. We also talked of England, its past, present and future, and the future of the Orchard, which he put into a charitable trust to preserve this piece of history. In the Orchard an hour turns into a morning turns into a day; as Brooke himself wrote, ‘I only know that you may lie, day-long and watch the Cambridge sky…’ Robin was a quietly spoken but brilliant man, who invented a method of learning English at four times the normal speed, the Callan Method. At his memorial service the vicar mentioned that he’d lived life as an eighteenth-century aristocrat.

Sometime in 2000, I was at a small gathering on the south coast that included several musicians. Tales were swapped and old photographs from the ’60s were dragged out, and I knew this could provide the foundation for another book. The photographs could be dated almost to the month, by the hairstyles, clothes, stances, and the makes of guitars and amplifiers. Putting the book together was a labour of love. I didn’t realise it would take me a year with my nose firmly to the grindstone, or in this case the Fender Stratocaster. I interviewed hundreds of singers, guitarists, drummers, bass players, pianists, organists, managers and other folk of all kinds, many still playing, who were on the scene during the decade of musical excellence. Long-disbanded groups got together round kitchen tables to reminisce, recall, sometimes argue over historical points and laugh about old disputes or the musical differences that had brought about the outfit’s demise. For some, their roots went back to the days of skiffle or jazz; others had bought instruments and learned as they went, and there were those who’d tried to run before they could walk and had fallen by the wayside. There were some tragedies, some success stories, but mainly tales of almost making it. All of them were delighted that The South Coast Beat Scene of the 1960s brought their own stories to life and gave them their own personal place in musical history. Tim Rice’s school group at Lancing College had cunningly called themselves the Aardvarks, so that when fame arrived they would always be top of the bill alphabetically, even when touring with the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. I was glad to be able to fulfil his distant schoolboy dream when the Aardvarks opened the batting for the groups, listed alphabetically, in the book. The Urchins, the Vikings and the Web clearly hadn’t thought it through. There were potted histories too of south coast clubs, including the Shoreline at Bognor Regis, the Top Hat at Littlehampton and the Mexican Hat at Worthing. A good year’s work.

About the same time another book, Major to Minor, was published. I’d been working on and off on this book for a year or two, looking at the reasons behind the rise of the professional songwriter from the mid-1800s to the present day. Classical composers aside, for one could make a great case for someone like Schubert being a writer of popular songs, Stephen Foster was the man that led the way. Songs became so powerful that they almost became weapons in the American Civil War, with the Confederates singing ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’, ‘God Save the South’ and ‘Dixie’s Land’, while the Unionists gave out with ‘The Minstrel Boy’, ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ and ‘John Brown’s Body’. Both sides used ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’, a hit exactly 100 years later for Adam Faith. While those songs were firing up the South and the North in the US, we were cheerily chirping the smash of 1862, ‘Blaydon Races’.

Stephen Foster died prematurely and in poverty. Like Elvis he earned more after his death than he did during his lifetime. Despite the racial divide, especially in the South, there were successful black writers too. James A. Bland wrote over 700 songs, thirty-seven of which are in the US Library of Congress. The music halls opened the door for songwriters in Britain, although they also encouraged charlatans who claimed they owned the publishing rights. Performers would often cough up a relatively small amount rather than go through the extensive and complex system of checking credibility or getting entangled in litigation.

By the end of the nineteenth century, sheet music had become phenomenally popular, with upwards of twenty million copies being sold annually from 40,000 song titles. Eminent UK songwriter Leslie Stuart came to blows with someone on a street corner illegally selling sheet music for one of his songs, while in the US the songwriters fought to get royalties from the newly formed gramophone companies. New York restaurants were brought into question: should they be paying for playing music on their premises? Did the diners come because of the music or was it incidental?

My next book of poetry, New Poems for Old Paintings, which came out in 2003, was inspired by a birthday present. When Julie Dene, the wife of my pal and radio colleague Graham Dene, sent out the invitations to her celebrations, I hit upon a wheeze for a unique present. She is a direct descendent of the painter J. M. W. Turner so I got Tony James (you remember, Rhino) to copy Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed, which famously depicts a railway engine going over Maidenhead Bridge. He did such a stunning job that I had it framed and was moved to write a poem to go with it, as part of the gift. I have to say, it went down rather splendidly. The night of the party Tony Blackburn and I had a slow waltz to encourage other people to get on the dance-floor. A tender moment, but we remain just good friends.

The poem, and Julie’s enthusiasm, spurred me to write some more. Music has inspired art, art has inspired music, words have inspired music and music has inspired words. In this book, art was the inspiration for poetry. Sometimes the poems took the title of the painting and sometimes not. The paintings appeared on one page and the poem, unless longer, on the facing page. I wrote poems based around paintings by the likes of Pissarro, Monet, John Singer Sargent, Cézanne, Constable, Holman Hunt, Lowry, Toulouse-Lautrec and, of course, Turner. I also had to include a couple of my favourite paintings by John Atkinson Grimshaw, Golden Light and October.

The following year I collaborated with Richard Havers on Read’s Musical Reciter, intriguingly subtitled ‘Lids lifted, stones turned, tales told, stars stripped, rock mined, pop plundered and pseuds cornered’. Bursting with tales of all kinds from the world of music, it sits on the shelf of many a downstairs loo. Neither friend, acquaintance nor the coolly cordial can deny the fact. I have visited some loos even when unnecessary, with the sole purpose of checking the location of their Read’s Reciter. I’ve lost count of how many loos I’ve flushed without reason and how many taps I’ve washed my hands under for the sake of appearances. The book seems to have found its spiritual home.

Having inherited the spirit of enjoying comics from my maternal grandfather, as a boy I read them, re-read them, studied the characters, and even smelled the paper. I’ve already touched on the US comics that I obtained from our American neighbours, but The Beano, The Dandy and later Wizard and Roy of the Rovers were favourites. My mother also had old copies of Film Fun and Radio Fun kicking around, both of which ran until the early ’60s. Radio Fun had strips featuring the likes of Benny Hill, Arthur Askey, Petula Clark and Norman Wisdom. I reflected, if indeed young boys do reflect, on how marvellous must be to actually feature in a comic. I would never have imagined then that I’d not only feature in Britain’s most popular comic, The Beano, but on three occasions. As my grandmother pointed out, ‘Your grandfather would have been tickled pink.’

The first time I was written into a Dennis the Menace strip where his dog Gnasher has gone missing and Dennis pops into my studio to ask if I can help. Top stuff. My second Beano appearance was in a Biffo the Bear story, with, rather bizarrely, a woodpecker carving my face in a tree in the final frame. The trio of appearances was rounded off by being the subject of a whole Billy Whizz page, with the speedy schoolboy hero desperate to hear the show and hoping that his uncle is going to buy him a mug that we were giving away on Radio One at the time, Mike Read’s Tee Hee Mug. There were also appearances in lesser organs, such as Oink!, where I had my guitar stuffed down my throat, much to the consternation of a brace of perplexed doctors. I was featured in my Saturday Superstore persona in Whizzer and Chips and as one of Roy Race’s mates in Roy of the Rovers. I popped up again in a 1981 issue after Roy had been shot (shades of JR in Dallas) and a few of his friends were asked to send ‘get well’ messages. Cripes, I was in esteemed company on that double-page spread, alongside Morecambe & Wise, Alf Ramsey, Kevin Keegan, Trevor Francis, Malcolm McLaren and Lawrie McMenemy.

As was alluded to in the Preface, even the cobbling together of this book was not without some excitement. By the end of 2012 I had written just short of 100,000 words. Whether any of it made any sense I can no longer judge, as some lazy bastard who couldn’t be bothered to work broke in and, stole my car, my laptop and my cards. The car and the cards were sortable of course, but the laptop contained the second novel, the autobiography, the history of the FA Cup Final and hundreds more literary gems. I know, I know, I should have backed it up. You’re right, of course, and I do now. Horse, stable, door, bolted. Got it. I’ll never write the novel again, but with this weighty tome I had to start from scratch. If you don’t like it, I can always claim the original to be superior.