TWO unexpected phone calls from '80s comedy legends have peppered my recent days. Although both would rather we dropped the ‘comedy’ prefix so they could both become more general legends, it isn’t going to happen. One was Baldrick and one was a Young One and it will be ever thus.

“I’ve been a writer for ten years,” Alexei Sayle made sure he got in there when I asked him if he was going to be funny when he led a tour around the Tate last weekend. Bah. Embrace your inner Balowski brother, man!

So he led an interesting trail around the gallery, which I consequently attended after our chat, speaking about most things but the art, which he didn’t seem to like much of (he had an interesting tale to account for his dislike of Damien Hirst that it’s probably more than my job’s worth to repeat, as well).

By the time he was up against Andy Warhol’s portraits of Chairman Mao and talking about Communism, all I could see was a heavy-set 25-year-old in a donkey jacket doing that routine about being sent to the back of a union march for being famous and made to flog the TV Times while everyone else sold the Socialist Worker.

But age and gravitas serve Sayle well and it is great to have such a Liverpool legend on side. As much as I enjoyed just being in his presence, the urge to point at him and yell “you were in the Young Ones!” was disturbingly overwhelming.

This encounter had followed me accidentally fielding a phone call from Tony Robinson for a colleague doing a piece on his (brilliant) Liverpool Time Team show. Again, I turned into a bit of a starstruck arse, something that only seems to happen to me with comedians – even if they’ve only got the wrong number.

“Hello, my name’s Tony Robinson,” he said sweetly, explaining why he was calling. Nobody has ever sounded more like you would expect them to, and therein was the excitement.

The thought process went thus: “It’s Tony Robinson. DON’T ask him if he has a cunning plan! He’s a normal bloke. He couldn’t care less whether you like Blackadder. He’s not even calling for you. And he isn’t really Baldrick!” On a loop until I’d put him through to Mike Chapple amid much overexcited burbling about our troubles with switchboard.

So there you are. Two inconsequential occurrences for the celebrities, two almost entertaining anecdotes for me. Almost.

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