I have a much simpler life which I wish I’d discovered long ago. I’ve written a book of poems [The Reluctant Pote] and a novel and I sit in front of a log fire listening to classical music I’m much more content than I’ve been for a long time. A friend who worked at the National Trust offered Hull a dilapidated two-bedroom 1810 brick cottage near Rye in East Sussex. In 1997 he told the Daily Mail:I could live cheaply if I renovated it. A few weeks later, his wife Cher went back to Australia with the children Rod Hull had hit rock bottom.

It was someone I trusted absolutely,” he said.When I phoned him to ask what was going on, he broke down and said he was very sorry, that he had mismanaged everything At first, I couldn’t believe it. Then I decided that I could either cry my heart out and feel sorry for myself or smile and get on with it.The house was eventually requisitioned by the Receiver to help pay a huge tax bill and in October 1994, Hull was declared bankrupt.Savings had to be made and the villa in Portugal also went, along with the Mercedes, the Bentley and the children’s private education. Ever since I’d started in show business, I’d had the same person to manage my money. “I didn’t realise how bad things were until I received a buff envelope from the taxman saying I hadn’t paid tax for five years.

I felt so proud that I – who was once a little child with a speech impediment – was able to restore such a historic place. Dickens, who writes about the house both in Great Expectations and The Mystery Of Edwin Drood, was my idol,” said Hull, who played Fagin in several fund- raising productions of Oliver! at his children’s public school.However, the Eighties property boom bubble burst and, by the turn of the Nineties, Hull’s pounds 350,000 investment became an albatross around his neck An unscrupulous accountant didn’t help. “We were trying to save it from being knocked down and replaced by a car park. By 1986, Hull had become one of the highest paid entertainers on TV and bought Restoration House, a 32-roomed Elizabethan mansion in Rochester, Kent, which he hoped to restore to its original splendour. Life could not have been better,” remembered Hull, who, at the time, could command pounds 5,000 per show.