'When it comes to talking about myself, I find I’m quite dull,’ he says. I protest, but he persists: ‘Oh I am, I think I am’. He pauses. ‘My work is interesting, what I am is not, really. ‘What I am is somebody who’s been married a long time with a broad range of tastes, reasonably healthy.’ For heaven’s sake! He doesn’t understand, either, that one of the facts which makes people, women, like him even more is that he and his wife Helen, whom he met when he was 15, have been married for such a long time (50 years come 2016). This particularly when of all the Pythons he was the most attractive, the Secret Fancy of women the world over. He won’t have it. ‘You must have had women throwing themselves at you all the time,’ I say. ‘They all missed!’ he shoots back, and laughs. I mention the Secret Fancy thing, and he grins and looks a bit shuffly and says, ‘The thing is, I’ve still not got over that slight feeling I had as a teenager, that, 'How on earth do you talk to women? Why is my hair so strange? I’m wearing the wrong clothes.'