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bed while paying a visit to the house; he died when I was very young.
    Nanny Margam would come to our house on Sundays, always bearing a freshly made egg custard tart (still the best I have tasted), and we would discuss that week’s show by our shared favourite, Benny Hill. I would recount one of his sketches and she would tut under her breath, ‘Well well, there’s comical …’ before we’d listen together to ‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)’.

    My fourth birthday and Nanny Margam is disappointed by the quality of the catering.

    For the rest of the week this best room was somewhat underused, and I remember it now for just two reasons. It had a glass fireplace, which I once put my head through after twirling round and round in an effort to make myself dizzy. When I think of the room, I always remember that incident. The other memory was of Saturday mornings spent sitting on the floor cross-legged with a bowl of Sugar Puffs and copies of Roy of the Rovers and Tiger laid out on the carpet in front of me. They would be delivered on a Saturday morning and I would rush downstairs full of excitement, while Mum and Dad slept on above me.
    I’ve always felt that, as a child, I had an above-average interest in several things; comedy was one of them, but magazines were also high up on the list. I had an ability then – and still do, to a lesser extent – to fixate on something and to elevate it to a loftier position than it deserves. Every week along with Roy of the Rovers and Tiger , I would also get Look-in . This was a TV-oriented magazine with features on shows such as Supersonic , The Six Million Dollar Man and other hits of the day. One week it was giving away a dragon pendant, cashing in on the success of the Kung Fu TV series. When my copy arrived the pendant had already gone and there ensued a quest, which lasted for some weeks, as I tried to track down another. I can’t remember whether or not I turned up anything, but the smell of magazines will take me right back to opening the comic and the horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach as I realized that the prized free gift was missing.
    I must have spent a lot of time in newsagents as a child; the smell of newsprint, especially on a cold frosty morning, is one of the most evocative for me as an adult, right up there with the leather of my satchel at St John’s. Mulling it over, perhaps the comics weren’t delivered; perhaps I went down to Flares, the newsagent just down the hill on the corner, and bought my comics myself, hurriedly bringing them back in time for Swap Shop – a fine BBC programme, and one to which I was devoted.
    It’s fair to say that I was a BBC child, faithful to Blue Peter and Swap Shop , with only occasional forays into the racier fields of Magpie and Tiswas , which seemed, as Alan Bennett’s mother would say, ‘common’. This is not to say that we never dipped our toes in the murky waters of ITV – far from it. We loved Rising Damp , Only When I Laugh and The Kenny Everett Video Show but were really more naturally at home with the BBC where, like millions of others, we were regular viewers of The Two Ronnies , Top of the Pops , Mike Yarwood and The Generation Game .
    A lot of my childhood seems to have been spent in front of the television, and yet I was just as content outdoors, roaming around Baglan with my friend Robert George. Robert was known as Georgie and loved the outdoors even more than I did. Together we climbed trees looking for birds’ eggs, a pursuit rightly frowned upon now but at the time it was all the rage and not seen as being at all cruel. We would cross over the main road and on to the marshy fields with their tiny waterways, where we built makeshift rafts with bits of wood and discarded plastic barrels. Once constructed, these fine vessels would carry us off to uncharted territories. While on the marshy ground we would collect frogspawn and bring it home in buckets, to be transferred into a