The Revd Steve

Christopher Biggins has managed to bag some of the nation’s favourite TV characters over the years: Lukewarm in Porridge and Nero in I, Claudius, to name but two. Yet there’s a good chance he wouldn’t have had a career at all if it hadn’t been for his Aunty Vi. She was ‘the most terrible snob’, he tells me. The family accent (a mishmash of northern and broad Wiltshire) troubled her, so she sent the young Biggins off for elocution lessons. His teacher was also into theatre, and saw he had potential. Her encouragement and the new accent saw him start in rep on £2 a week. He left school at 16, bitten by the bug. Fifty-five years later he’s still busy, still bitten.

At 6.50 p.m. on 31 August 1997 a plane touched down at Northolt Airport. It was a lamentable and dismal evening. Prince Charles, wretched and ghastly, accompanied the coffin that carried the body of his former wife Diana. Watching from the wings was Tony Blair. The nation mourned. And Northolt Airport did the job it has done so often — being the receiver of the great and the good and the bad, dead and alive. As a boy I’d get on my bike and head down the road to Northolt Airport to watch the planes. Being from the suburbs, the airport held me in a grip. Friends’ parents recounted stories of dog-fights in the skies over Northolt during the second world war and of a German plane being shot down by the glorious and brave Polish Spitfire pilots.