An air of gentility pervaded the Theatre in Headington last Thursday, when Sir Clement Freud took to his leather chair and pedestal desk to amuse a nearly full house for 90 minutes.

The grumpiness that attended my interview with him here a fortnight ago was gone - in its place, we were taken on a well practised and affable jaunt down the lanes of the memories of his various careers. Sir Clement will be 84 this year and has crammed much into his life. At 16, he was an apprentice chef at the Dorchester ("We cooked against people - I witnessed a chef urinating into the vegetable stock!') and then went into the army for the duration of the Second World War, ending up intriguingly at Nuremberg as a War Crimes Liaison Officer. I could have taken more of this period, but it was time for light-heartedness.

So we were carried off to Nice in 1947, when Freud was a junior hotel manager and misunderstood an instruction to share a litre of wine a week with customers to mean two litres a day; then we returned to London for avuncular memories as a night-club owner and TV chef, that dog-food commercial, being elected both Rector of Dundee University and - he gave this interesting length - his thoughts on being a Liberal MP.

Curiously - and to Freud's credit - there was little mention of Just A Minute, the Radio 4 panel game he has played since its inception. What was welcome was the way Sir Clement was happy to go through a sheaf of questions put in by the audience during the interval. Unlike Rabbi Lionel Blue the other week at the New Theatre - who dealt with only three - Freud read and reacted to 30 (all genuine - the couple to my right had put in two of them!)? Golden Age of Broadcasting? "The '50s"; Best food at a racecourse? "Kelso"; Best performer in the Commons? "Undoubtedly Enoch Powell"; Your main insecurity? "Whether I'm going to wake up in the morning".

The Headington audience clearly enjoyed this very pleasant wallow, and Sir Clement, with his unique voice and deadpan delivery, gave every impression of having had fun too.