The production by the National Theatre of One Man, Two Guvnors, which I review today on Page 43, brings back memories of the Cambridge Theatre Company’s rollicking revival of Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters, the play on which it is based, at the Oxford Playhouse in 1982.

This starred Patrick Mower (left), now famed as Rodney Blackstock in Emmerdale, camping it up as Florindo. He is a man who has not forgotten his Oxford roots, dedicating his 2007 autobiography to The Oxford Times’s legendary arts critic Frank Dibb who (as Mower wrote) “sowed the first seed”.

Also in the cast, though unmentioned in my Oxford Mail review, was Anita Dobson, soon to find fame as the landlady of EastEnders’ Queen Vic. Frank spotted her, though, calling her a “dusky, sexually yearning maidservant . . . for whom the old term ‘comely wench’ is very apt”.