Humphrey Lyttelton, who died last Friday, nearly caused my death.

I was driving along listening to the radio when he announced “All right team, put on your blindfolds, it’s now time to play Hunt The Ostrich. You all have your feather dusters and crash helmets — Samantha, open the cage!”

My explosion of laughter not only came close to bursting my heart but caused me to veer wildly into the (thankfully empty) oncoming lane. I regained control and pulled over to the side of the road. I took about five minutes to recover my composure.

I suppose you had to be there.

As the host, he was easily the funniest man on the classic BBC Radio 4 show ‘I’m Sorry, I Haven’t A Clue’. His weekly sallies at pianist Colin Sell and the showbiz charmer Lionel Blair were always classics. Blair was the star of the TV charades game ‘Give Us A Clue’, and Humph commented “Not many people knew that Lionel was subject to sudden mood swings. Doing ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, one moment Lionel could be feeling happy, the next he’d come all over grumpy.”

You can choose your own capitalisation.

I suspect the hand of Barry Cryer in a lot of what he said. But Humph’s delivery was impeccable. I can’t imagine ‘Clue’ without him. They will have to can the show. What a shame. The best 30 minutes on radio, ever.

I went to see his jazz band when I was about 17, in an effort to extend my musical horizons beyond Bobby Vee. He announced one number as something like ‘Vivada Svoboda’ and went on to say “This is a Yugoslav hora, a folk song in successive bars of 5/4, 7/4 and 9/4 tempos. Not, as some of you are thinking, a dirty old Yugoslav.”

Maybe Barry didn’t write them all.

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