He was subdued during the recording, though outwardly his confident and charming TV self. I thought, unkindly, that it took only this modest swelling, probably a cyst or mild iodine deficiency, to touch his one vulnerable point—his own body. As he smiled and spoke to camera his familiar repertory of gestures and mannerisms suddenly seemed like so much decorative armour breaking loose from a stumbling warrior. When I drove him home to Richmond, before going on to Shepperton, he was already complaining about his sore throat, almost needing to punish his body. I knew he had been slightly ill during the past year and urged him to see his doctor.

Soon after, Dick entered hospital for observation, passing into the paradoxical world of modern medicine, with all its professional expertise, ultra-high technology, and complete uncertainty. As Dick pointed out on my first visit to Kingston Hospital, the qualities traditionally ascribed to patients—self-delusion, a refusal to face the truth, irrational hope, and a despair born of underlying pessimism—in fact were those of their doctors.

“You have to realise,” he whispered to me when a nurse had declined to answer a direct question about his suspected cancer, “that the first and most important job of medical science is to protect the profession from the patients. We unsettle them and make them feel vaguely guilty. We ask questions they know they can’t answer—the one thing they really want us to do is go away, or pretend that there’s nothing wrong with us. What they like best of all is to admit us to hospital and then hear us say we feel fine, even if we’re at death’s door.”

Despite the prospect of exploratory surgery, Dick had already recovered his spirits. He flirted with the nurses and tamed the formidable senior sisters, promising them parts in his next TV series. But the reductive and grinding logic of hospital life began to take its toll, and he was astute enough to see behind the façade of ward-level optimism.

“The nurses are amazingly sunny,” I commented. “I feel as if I ought to climb into the next bed.”

“Not a good idea, on the whole. Remember, they’re like hostesses in a nightclub who know the customers aren’t going to enjoy the floor show.” Dick leaned against the big pillows, his keen eyes scanning the ward. “It’s interesting that the higher you move up the professional ladder the more depressed the doctor becomes. Your local G.P. and the junior housemen are reasonably cheerful—they can pass on the serious decisions. But as you meet the senior consultants you find this deepening gloom, because they realise there’s almost nothing they can do to help you. Serious cancers are the worst thing they have to face—they remind them of how helpless medicine really is.”