By this point of course, Bamber was a major star. He’d already had a musical, Share My Lettuce, in the West End when they met; featuring Maggie Smith and Kenneth Williams, it ran for nine months, earning him £125 a week. He wrote a couple more plays with less success and became a theatre critic instead, but his life changed forever when in 1962, at the age of 27, he became the host of University Challenge. The quiz show, featuring competing teams of students, had been intended to run for 13 episodes; in the event he hosted it for 25 years, establishing this most unassuming of men as one of television’s most recognisable faces. 

“He loved it,” says Gascoigne. “Although I didn’t. There you’d be in Florence, and people would be coming up to ask for his autograph. I’d be thinking, oh dear, but Bamber would be smiling away. He was always so generous. He didn’t mind at all.”

At the start, Bamber would set the questions himself, and his genially delivered catchphrases – “Fingers on the buzzers; I’ll have to hurry you” – became so popular that they entered the national conversation. He made a great effort, says his wife, to allay the fears of the students, saying to them before it began, “Don’t be nervous. It’s only a game!”

Though the questions apparently had to be made easier over the years, he refused to criticise the contestants themselves, once saying: “Bright students are bright students; they haven’t changed very much, except I was once their age.”

Is it true that he was so clever he did indeed know the answers, as viewers liked to assume? Gascoigne fixes me with a look. “Well, yes, in the sense that in the days leading up to each episode, he would read around the subject so that when students gave a wrong answer, he could say, ‘no, you are thinking of Philip II’, or whatever. But he didn’t carry all that knowledge around with him. It was superficially acquired and easily abandoned. Whereas I don’t think Jeremy Paxman [who has hosted the programme since its 1994 relaunch] prepares in quite the same way.”

In 2018 he was made a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for his services to the arts. But she never once felt intimidated by his firecracker mind. “I never felt inadequate. We had different qualities. I was more anarchic, in a way. My thinking would be erratic and instinctive, while his was more forensic.”