Victor Spinetti has been performing since the late 1950s. When I first became aware of him, in 1964, he was already a fixed point in the second class of the entertainment firmament; he had been picked up by Joan Littlewood and many will recall his sergeant in the original production of Oh! What A Lovely War — a part he reprised in the Richard Attenborough film. Why 1964? He appeared with The Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night as the delightfully frazzled TV director who is terrified that the Fabs won’t turn up in time for their show.

That is a long time ago, but Spinetti never went away; after other films, including three others with The Beatles, he returned to the stage and, more recently, has toured with his one-man show. The evening was originally beaten into shape by his friend Ned Sherrin, and this version premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe last year.

Spinetti calls it A Very Private Diary Revisited, a title which somehow implies a bit more than mere showbiz anecdotes. There is, however, little sauce and much name-dropping. To be fair, he did seem to be at the centre of everything during the 1960s, and he revels — quite understandably — in his association with Paul, George, Ringo and especially John, wirg whom he is pictured above. "Tallulah Bankhead made Amy Winehouse look like a nun"; "What could I, a Welsh-Italian, play in an Irish play? I asked Brendan Behan".

He saw Sean Connery peeing in a sink backstage during a tour of South Pacific and upstaged Peter Sellers during a press preview of The Return of the Pink Panther by arriving with Burton and Taylor. When Spinetti goes to the favourite New York restaurant Sardi’s, it seems hardly surprising that he met Henry Fonda for the first time. He seems to have been quite close to Marlene Dietrich, was on first-name terms with Claudette Colbert and told a very funny story involving Princess Margaret, frogs and violin bows.

d=3,3,1He was briefly serious as well, reciting a couple of rather good poems that he had written, and reminding anyone who wishes to go into the acting trade of the Three Rs: "Redundancy, Rejection and Resting". But above all it was for his anecdotage that the disappointingly small audience had come. A rotund and greying 76-year-old is not necessarily an obvious man for the limelight — as he himself said: "In lots of books I appear to be a historical footnote". But as he also said: "You’ve got to tell these stories now, or else it’ll be too late." He had a great fund of them and it was all great fun.