‘Would you like to meet Eric Idle? Don’t worry, he and his wife Tania are smashing.’ This was 2009. I was visiting my old art teacher from school, Frank Docherty, and his wife, Chrissie, in the village of Montfort-sur-Argens. Eric had a house nearby, they said. They’d got to know one another a few years before when Eric had begun buying Frank’s surrealist paintings. I was too wee for early Python but as a teenager knew every line of The Life of Brian. And all the voices. I apologise now to anyone who was on late-night double-decker buses from Paisley to Glasgow in 1982. On the way home from the pub, Gaynor, a student nurse like me, and I would go upstairs, sit in the front seats and perform endless giggling recitations and songs from the film all the way from Paisley town centre to Hawkhead nurses’ home. For me, Eric was like the Queen or Billy Connolly or Stanley Baxter; there my entire life. So yes, I did want to meet him.

Perhaps I’d read that Eric could be prickly and was slightly in awe – scared, even – of his quick-fire wit and intelligence, but he was a delight: friendly, interesting and funny. Tania was dazzling. I’d never met anyone with such LA glamour and charm. By then I’d stopped watchingTVand, never one for magazines (apart from The Spectator and Private Eye), I wasn’t interested in celebrity as such – just........

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