I have been asked on many occasions when I will be producing my autobiography. This may surprise those of you who share my feeling that the numbers of those who have earned the right to expect others to care about the minutiae of their lives is considerably less than the number of those who write them.

But even if I were convinced that there were sufficient numbers of people avidly awaiting me to parade my life for inspection to justify my doing so, I have a major problem.

I can remember very little about my childhood, teenage years or indeed much of my life. I just have a vague feeling that it was alright and normal, really.

Yes, I was bullied at school, but so it seems was everyone else. So nothing to write home about there.

I kept diaries intermittently over the years, but I don’t think the time that I got up, what I had for supper and the times of my appointments with the dentist and doctor are of great universal interest.

Yes I have had a high profile career but, I am glad to say, a comparatively low profile life.

I once spoke to a very successful actor and comedian, now deceased, who gave me excellent advice on the whole after-dinner speaking and book writing thing.

He told me to make most of it up. Tell scurrilous, racy and funny stories about dead people who you have known (when they were alive) and no one can argue with you. Certainly no one can sue you.

But the fact that I am not naming him in this article is sufficient to establish that I don’t have the bottle for that.

And the other impediment is that what I do remember often turns out to be simply wrong.

I had an English teacher whom I have for years regarded as the genius inspirational teacher who gave me an enduring passion for language. In my mind he had taught me for five years.

It turns out to have been less than a year. He was still inspirational, but an autobiography is about detail and I don’t have a handle on that.

A fiend recently recounted to me a succession of things I got up to when in repertory in Canterbury in the early ’70s. I couldn’t remember any of them.

Maybe I should get him to ghost my autobiography?