My mother and very happy father dancing, probably at some trade union event. Molly would have made that skirt herself which is why it is longer at the back than the front. She achieved a similar effect with the trousers she made for me which always had one leg considerably shorter than the other.

At a demonstration in Liverpool in ’68. I’ve got on the same leather jacket that I’d wear on stage eleven years later for the first night of the Comedy Store. In my top pocket there is a pencil and small sketch pad in which I would have drawn nothing except some guns.

In the canteen of Chelsea School of Art with my ‘gay friend’ David Pearce who is looking suitably Caravaggesque.

Our wedding. Both me and Linda feeling vaguely solemn over the sanctity of marriage.

Two student union cards. The first is stamped ‘September 1975’, a whole year after I’d left Chelsea, and I’ve got my date of birth wrong by 20 years. On the second, for some reason, I seem to have deliberately lied about when I was born, making myself younger by a year.

Me and Bill Monks on stage in front of our innovative portable set.

An early publicity photo I got my mate George to take. The jacket’s getting a workout.

The poster Glen Cocker designed for our show complete with some fairly unenthusiastic reviews.

History in the making. The opening night of the Comedy Store.

On stage at the Elgin, waving the unlucky gun around in the week before ‘Black Pistol Saturday’.

Me and Sting backstage at The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball. He looks like my care worker.

Sound checking on the Comic Strip tour with Dawn and Peter. What was joyous was that we spent a lot of time making each other laugh.

Me and Linda on the couch in our tower block flat.

The Comic Strip crew. Me and my children plus Arnold Brown.

With the former ‘Britain’s Most wanted Man’, John McVicar, while making the Arena Cortina documentary. We used the same picture for the cover of ‘Ullo John! Gotta New Motor?’

Rehearsing the first series of The Young Ones at the BBC rehearsal rooms in North Acton.

On location in Bristol. Mad energy crackled out of Rik all the time.

The main set of The Young Ones during a camera rehearsal. Adrian looks like he’s just noticed the photographer and is planning to hit him.

Doing the Cockney mod poet during a benefit at the Palladium for, I think, mental health. When the benefit was shown on TV my whole performance was removed.

Backstage VIP bar of the Dominion Theatre. This is one of my favourite photos, perfectly illustrating a ‘keeping the fl ies off Coco’ moment. In the foreground are Rik, Lise Mayer and Rowland Rivron, tanned, happy and relaxed. In the background is me who has just stormed a show in front of 3,000 people, pasty, overweight and exhausted.

Me and Michael Elphick on our bender in Helsinki. This is me after about an hour.

Doing my revolutionary duty, entertaining the striking miners of South Yorkshire.