Even without his clipboard, Denis Norden is instantly recognisable as one of television’s most enduring personalities. Whether or not the tall, bespectacled gagmeister registers as anything other than the man who talks us through the cock-ups in It’ll Be Alright on the Night and Laughter File depends on how old you are.

Readers who have said goodbye to 50 will know that Denis Norden’s career stretches back more than half a century to the golden age of radio and the pioneering years of television comedy.

With the late Frank Muir, he created the long-running Take It From Here, with Joy Nichols, Dick Bentley and Jimmy Edwards, for the wireless - as he still prefers to call it - in 1947. This was followed by one of the first TV sitcoms, Whack-O!, which starred Jimmy Edwards as a whisky-swigging, cane-wielding headmaster and notched up eight series.

What made the partnership of Muir and Norden all the more remarkable, not to say unique, is that they emerged in the mid-fifties - radio personalities in their own right - in the panel games My Word and My Music, which ran for 34 years and 24 years respectively.