It’s not an area I want to go into.”Which is fair enough, of course, although I do rather love the idea of a lad from a council house in Knotty Ash marrying into the privileged Freud family. Do they socialise much with the extended Freud clan? “We see Bella [Esther's sister, a dress designer] a lot But it’s hard for me to talk about. But we clicked immediately.”Presumably he had heard of her father Lucian? “Her name was the least interesting thing about her,” he says, flatly I plough doggedly on. Maybe it’s that male-female thing, that I think it was planned and she thinks it was destiny I don’t know.

She thinks there were lots of single people there, and it just happened. I think I was set up, that we were the only two single people there and were deliberately sat next to each other. “We have differing things here,” he says, when I quiz him about it “I have one memory of it, she has another. I find myself liking him hugely, and nigh on three hours later float out of the pub on a tide of bonhomie (and several pints of bitter), wondering not whether I should invite him round for dinner, but when.I know he goes to dinner parties because he met Freud at one. It should be played in schools as a history lesson.”This huge enthusiasm for people – from Cage to Bleasdale, whether he has met them or not – recurs in Morrissey’s conversation And it’s infectious.

I watched Boys from the Black Stuff again recently, and it’s an amazing piece of work, “Yosser’s Story” in particular. Morrissey has never met Bleasdale, but yearns to work with him “I’m such a fan of his I just think he’s a genius. I got picked up by a fella with a really strong Scouse accent, who said ‘I’m going to be your driver during the film…’”The driver, Terry Bleasdale, was a cousin of the writer Alan Bleasdale. That was weird for me, because I was playing an upper-middle-class guy. “Actually, Hilary and Jackie [in which he played the ebullient Kiffer Finzi] was filmed in Liverpool.