As a Radio 1 DJ you were expected to do ludicrous things. We had these Radio 1 funweeks, which usually consisted of travelling the country with a bunch of other DJs and Noel Edmonds filling people’s hotel rooms with chickens. In more enlightened days than ours you’d be burnt at the stake for doing that. There was always a lot of shouting and showing off – awful events.

But these things did have compensations. Perhaps the best moment for me took place in a multi-storey hotel in Birmingham, in something called The Dickens Bar, lots of dark-wood booths full of people who no doubt travelled around the country selling Dickens bars to other hotels. Tony Blackburn got up with Paul Williams, a Radio 1 producer who used to play the piano tolerably well, and sang for about half an hour. There was massive indifference to his efforts, if not downright hostility, yet he went through the whole thing as if he was Barry Manilow at the Copacabana, as if everyone was absolutely adoring everything he did. He soared in my estimation after that. I thought, He’s not such a tosser after all.

People like Mike Read and DLT would often complain that they couldn’t go anywhere without being recognised, but of course would go everywhere in a tartan suit carrying a guitar, so they would have attracted attention in a lunatic asylum. In the streets of London people would go, “Who the fuck is that? Isn’t that that Mike Read bloke?”

Garfield also wrote a couple of wartime books comprising extracts from the diaries kept by people for the national archive (the one that inspired Victoria Wood’s film Housewife, 49) – less successful than the Radio 1 book but a mammoth achievement in condensing material to its essence.