My uncle was a theatre critic. One of the all-new sixties vanguard at the heart of a dazzling cultural explosion of bright young working-class talent. Catapulted directly from Royton into the West End, suddenly he knew them all. Or most of them at least. Olivier, Dietrich, Tennessee Williams, Burton and Taylor. He told me the story of giving a Terence Rattigan play a particularly poor review – only to have Rattigan himself summon him over for a cup of tea and a lesson in playwrighting. The grand old man of theatre gently educating the young upstart critic.

We lived up North ourselves, marooned in a pseudo-quaint seaside town, but were often invited down to Brighton or London – where my uncle had a small flat above the Phoenix Theatre. Once in his theatrical orbit, there we would be, temporarily circulating with actors and critics and theatre owners. The seemingly ever-genial Chris Biggins lived a floor or two above in the Phoenix. Meanwhile, in his Brighton kitchen one day, I was surprised to encounter Mrs. McClusky from Grange Hill singing songs from Oklahoma! When he took us to the theatre we were treated not unlike royalty, ushered into overly ornate royal rooms at the interval for overly ornate buffets. Afterwards we would visit Joe Allen’s, the famous New York-styled bistro constantly overflowing with boisterous post-show thespians. I remember seeing an excitable Ernie Wise bursting in with a cry of “Get me to the bar!” It felt like we had somehow bluffed our way into the enemy camp.

For a gauche, rather awkward youth of no fixed hairstyle, this was a glimpse into a glamorous parallel dimension. Meeting the twinkly eyed Michael Crawford backstage at the London Palladium after a performance of Barnum. Bumping into the actorly Fox brothers, my uncle coaxing me into telling them one of my own uniquely unamusing jokes. They laughed ever so kindly. Which reminds me how encouraging my uncle could be. Not just of my poor-quality humour, but my earliest creative efforts too, playing Kenny Everett a tape of juvenile comedy skits I’d recorded (“Kenny loved it!”) He also actively inspired my embryonic political leanings – taking my twelve-year-old self to see Warren Beatty’s Reds, an epic three-hour homage to the joys of the Russian Revolution. The last time I saw him he took me to Hamlet in Stratford-upon-Avon, incorporating my tentative critique of Mark Rylance’s performance into his review. It would be the first and last time I ever saw my words in a national newspaper.

The main thing about my uncle though – he was just fantastically good fun.