The quickest way to Headington?

We got off on the wrong foot, Sir Clement Freud and I, when we talked about his life and times - as he will be before an audience next week at the Theatre in Headington. You feel you ought to do a little advance research for these pieces, and so it seemed not unreasonable to ask him first whether he had any memories of the Nazi Germany his family escaped from in the early 1930s when he was a small boy.

"This is absurd!" was his answer. "All I'm doing is a light-hearted 90-minute show. You want me to talk about the Holocaust or something?"

Lengthy pause, with an air of curmudgeon hanging heavily. Well, no actually, I was just trying to give readers a vaguely rounded picture of someone they have been listening to on Radio 4's Just A Minute for 40 years and has had a fantastically busy life. Am I allowed to ask you about the school your parents sent you to on arrival in Britain, the incredibly (for then) progressive Dartington Hall?

"It was the most awful school. Here was I, a very ordinary nanny-reared boy, sent to a school where there were absolutely no rules and no obligation to go to classes. I was a 'come-on' boy, by which I mean that they thought that if they were seen to have attracted the scholarly offshoots of families such as the Freuds and the Gollanczs, loads of other moneyed families would send their kids there as well."

It seemed easier to move on to those light-hearted' elements. An early interest in food led to time cooking at the Dorchester Hotel in London, but showbusiness and journalism called, and more specifically the bright lights of London club-land.

"There were a couple of rooms above the Royal Court Theatre and I opened a night club which I ran for ten years. I visited OUDS Oxford University Dramatic Society and the Footlights and tried to spot some talent. I had £10 a week to spend, so if I had three performers, for example, they each received a cheque for £3.6/8d!"

Talent he certainly spotted: Messrs. Millar, Cooke and Moore before Beyond The Fringe and David Frost well before That Was The Week That Was. Then, in 1968, Just A Minute came along, and suddenly Freud is at ease: "People tend to forget that the permanent team of myself, Kenneth Williams, Peter Jones and Derek Nimmo was only settled upon a few years in. Before that, although I was a fixture, there were all sorts of strange people - Tommy Trinder, Cardew Robinson, Terry-Thomas.

"Peter Jones was brilliant with his sense of timing and Nimmo was great fun, always talking about his travels. But it was impossible to gel with Kenny Williams. He didn't play the game; he just did monologues and used the show to display his flair and quirkiness. He sulked if anyone interrupted."

And then, really cattily: "It's said that the listenership went up by 200,000 after he died."

Freud, of course, is the only surviving member of that classic quartet and pays warm tribute to two of the more recent players: Paul Merton and Stephen Fry ("simply the most brilliant man in the world, don't you agree?") In 1973, Sir Clement took a surprising step and entered mainstream politics. "I was never a political animal. My father said he would vote Liberal because they were nicer people! Personally, I could never vote Conservative nor for Clause 4 Labour. My hero was Jo Grimond, and when the sitting MP for Ely died, I thought it would be fun to stand for Parliament - I'd done everything else."

He stood as a Liberal, put £1,000 on himself to win at 33/1 ("I came out of the betting shop and the odds had dropped to 8/1. People started saying that the 'clever' money was on me. Actually, it was Freud money on me!"), won and stayed in the House of Commons until 1987.

He loved the House and loved the then Liberal Party of old; but he has harsh words to say of David Owen: "He first f***ed up the Labour Party, then the Liberals. How could he have claimed to run a new party occupying the middle ground? We're talking about a time when you had Thatcher and Michael Foot: that's an awful lot of middle ground to occupy."

Sir Clement now basks in multiple roles as wit, raconteur and - nearly - national treasure. He is a gambler, has owned racing horses for years and writes two columns a week sustaining those interests.

He looks forward to his engagement in Headington - he told me that his wife was hijacked' when evacuated to Oxford in 1939 by C.S.Lewis's housekeeper and spent much of the war living at The Kilns - but desperately hopes that the Q and A session with which he will end his Evening With . . . will not contain anything like one query he was asked to deal with on stage recently: "What's the quickest route to Sidmouth?"

An Evening with Sir Clement Freud is at Headington Theatre on Thursday.

For tickets call 01865 759138.