Had Ned Sherrin been made a peer — which sadly he wasn’t — he would have called himself Lord Sherrin of High and Low Ham, between which Somerset villages he was born to farming stock in 1931.

He considered this as the title for his autobiography, published in 2005, two years before his death. In the end, he simply called it The Autobiography.

I have been reading it this week with huge enjoyment, but mildly surprised at some of the curious errors it contains.

In the letter to BBC bosses in which he first proposed what became his phenomenally successful show That Was the Week That Was he wrote of ‘complimentary’ rather than ‘complementary’ ingredients — an odd error for an Oxford man.

Later, describing a Chelsea lunch with David Bowie, he tells how the rock star “weaved [sic] a fascinating story about his apparently glass eye”.

But the oddest error, from a man steeped in showbiz, was to find him referring to “Alan Galton and Ray Simpson”, thereby switching round the first names of perhaps the nation’s most famous comedy scriptwriters.