Ever in the van of fashion, I was naturally first off the starting pad when advised by the Daily Mail to use Dictionary.com’s word of the year ‘tergiversate’ (which means to change repeatedly one’s attitude or opinions). As it happens, I have been popping it into conversation and print ever since discovering it (or at least a variant of it) more than 40 years ago when I played the title role in David Halliwell’s Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs. The production took place in 1970, four years after the play’s West End premiere starring John Hurt (above) who later reprised the role in a film. “The Lord Chamberlain’s licence for this play is conditional upon the phrase ‘Party of Dynamic Erection’ throughout the play being changed to ‘Party of Dynamic Insurrection’,” it says on the first page of my battered, beer-stained French’s acting edition. Looking back on my performance as Huddersfield art student Malcolm Scrawdyke, I would say — no false modesty here! — that acting ability of a rare order was demanded, especially in the vast monologues that punctuate the piece. Some of the language is arcane and unlikely. Until called upon to snarl “tergiversator!” at one of Scrawdyke’s cronies, I had never previously heard the word. Halliwell clearly wrote with a dictionary in his hand. I played the part, aged 18, during the early months of my studies in Sheffield on a National Council for the Training of Journalists’ pre-entry course — a title to which the Lord Chamberlain might well have objected in earlier days had it been uttered on stage. I took some pride then — and still do now — in the fact that I was able to pass myself off as a Yorkshireman before audiences composed almost entirely of Yorkshire people. It helped that I had a flatmate from Harrogate who not only took a bath (to rhyme with Kath) but filled it with water (to rhyme with matter).