Very often of course the Irish are more English than the English - you know it's only in Dublin that you really see people with monocles and felt tweed suites and extraordinary diamond-topped walking canes - you very rarely see it in London.

You often do in Dublin for some reason. And of course he was born in India, I believe, and I think he was of a generation that just began to start questioning and to make fun of the really grand imperial ideas.

We often think that that's something that was done in the 1960s. We associate it with Peter Cook and Private Eye and everything - the first rumblings against the Establishment.

But I think it was that generation of people who came out of the army. The Attlee landslide generation if you like, who kind of thought this world was not going to be the same again thank you very much.

It was as if they said, we remember the 30s, we've done our bit and now we're going to play according to our rules, and officers are not gods that we follow - they're often silly asses that we make fun of. That's principally what the Goon Show did - is that it was so brilliant at portraying the officer type.

That was quite a breakthrough - it doesn't seem it to us because we're so used to making fun of the officer types - I've done it myself and it is pretty easy - but it wasn't then...

This article is sourced from BBC News