I once met Mrs Gandhi; now if you knew me you would wonder how some bum of an actor with only one TV credit in the year 1983 could get to meet the leader of the world’s largest democracy.

It had, indeed, started off as a bad year which I had inherited from the year before; in February I was offered one episode of “The Angels” – a BBC soap – playing the role of a cop in one scene; I jumped at it; we had three kids to feed.

On the first day of rehearsals I bumped into the producer Innes Lloyd in the lift at the North Acton Hilton – the BBC rehearsal rooms – and he told me that he had tried to get me for his John Schlessinger film “An Englishman Abroad” but that my agent had told him I was unavailable.

As I was a big fan of John Schlessinger’s films I wasn’t very pleased; surely we could have come to some arrangement after all I was only in one scene in “The Angels” and we could have…..oh it doesn’t bear thinking about.

I did my one scene – filmed at some hospital in Coventry and started to look for another agent. When I got home one day my wife was buzzing with excitement; I couldn’t calm her down.

She had received a telephone call from The Guardian newspaper: our fourteen year old daughter, Rebecca, had won an essay writing competition and the prize was a couple of weeks in India for two. We would visit New Delhi, Jaipur, Agra, Bombay and Lonavala; we would stay in the best hotels and they would give us £250 spending money each.

The essay compared life in The Himalayas to life in England; of course Rebecca had never been to The Himalayas and her observations were taken from her geography lessons and her reading of Victor Zorza’s Indian columns in The Guardian under the title “The Village Voice” – which was about a village north of New Delhi and not The Himalayas at all. I have to take the credit for pointing out the columns to her and telling her about the competition.

My wife was adamant that I should accompany Rebecca to India; it was a world away in those days – it’s a world away these days but we have seen live cricket from there – and she felt Rebecca needed her father; as it happens she was right but that’s another story.