Create

Now meet Paul Jay. Paul is fascinating – for 25 years he ran the Chuckle Club, which is still the second longest-running comedy club in Britain, after the Comedy Store. His father was a mime – Larry Jay of Dr Crock and his Crackpots – and his son travelled with him on the road until he started school. He loved it but he says it damaged him, because he never met another child.

‘I paint, I draw, I write poetry, I write songs, I write plays. I sing.

I don’t dance but I used to,’ he says. (Now he has a horror of anything he describes as ‘strenuous’. He initially came to the Albany – with his wife Margaret, from Canning Town – because it didn’t sound strenuous.)