That’s an unfashionable belief when everything’s supposed to be `relative’ and `ironic’ and `post-modernist,’ which means, in fact, that nobody gives a shit about anything.”After Cambridge, Bird plunged into serious dramaturgy; at 22, he was telling Lotte Lenya what to do at the Royal Court in a tribute evening to his beloved Brecht. And as for Fortune, “When I went to university, I’d always wanted to do something in adult education. In my last year, I went for an interview, and these people said, `Well fine, if you want to teach miners to love DH Lawrence, we can get you a room in a mining town and pay you, ooh, eight quid a week.’ And I thought, do I want to do that – or do I want to go and open a nightclub in Soho with Peter Cook?”Incredibly, he chose the latter route. The club they founded in 1961 was called The Establishment, and served drinks, meals and twice-nightly cabaret, featuring the likes of the newly arrived Barry Humphries. Originally Bird and Fortune were to be only writers, and Fortune was meant to co- direct performances with Cook. But after auditioning a succession of actors, they’d found hardly anyone who shared their sense of humour. “Peter said, `Why don’t you do it for three months, just until we find somebody.’ And now, 36 years later…”With the benefit of hindsight, one can only wonder what happened to Bird and Fortune.

Two of the architects of the Sixties satire boom, which produced Private Eye, That Was the Week That Was, their careers seemed to run a parallel course to the comedy mainstream of the next 30 years. There was one moment on which cultural history now seems to have hinged. John Bird shared a flat with an ATV researcher called David Frost, who did occasional cabaret turns. One day, Bird was approached by Ned Sherrin and asked if he’d like to write for the pilot edition of That Was the Week That Was (TW3), which Sherrin was to produce Bird agreed, “and Ned asked me if I’d front it.

So I had to ask myself, `Do I go and set up another Establishment Club in Chicago, as I’d more or less already agreed, or do I stay in London? So I turned it down. Ned said, `Do you have any suggestions for front men?’ And I said, `Well, David Frost, who shares my flat, does cabaret…’ “You can almost hear the wings of fate beating o’erhead. Frost, of course, took over Sixties TV, TW3 begat The Frost Report, which begat I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again, which begat The Goodies and Monty Python… By the time Bird and Fortune returned from their years in America, things had moved on. They won enthusiastic audiences for satirical excursions like Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life, but subsequent visits to the well, like The Late Show and BBC3, showed a dwindling interest.

John and I did a couple of sitcoms for the BBC,” said Bird, “but we were always pretty bad at getting scripts in on time. And by then I was very interested in Jean-Luc Godard, and I kept wanting to have background shots of posters with the word `WAR’ on them.”They are both a little vague about how life has treated them in the intervening years. Fortune has found himself living, at different times, in a Scottish castle, a Georgian mansion in Cork and a certain degree of marital disharmony; he now lives in Chiswick with a film producer called Emma Bird lives in Reigate with a piano teacher called Libby. “We moved there in 1985,” he says, “only about a mile from the previous house.