In the 80s I'd earned a first for my thesis on Play Your Cards Right and proposed in the Listener magazine that "Forsyth Is God". But I didn't get to meet the man until 1991. Forsyth had driven through heavy snow for our breakfast – porridge, fruit, tea and digestive biscuits – at a studio in west London. I arrived drenched to find him alone, immaculately groomed, crooning It Had to Be You.

His greatest breakfast, he thought, had been out on Bodmin Moor, as a child, eating eggs and bacon cooked on his father's portable stove. He related the stages of fame to dining. "At first you think it's marvellous – everyone's your friend and restaurants don't let you pay your bill. Then you start avoiding restaurants with more than a few people in them. Now I spend six months each year not working, in Puerto Rico, where my wife, an ex-Miss World, was born and where the waiter knows me as 'Mr Mondo'. He doesn't know whether I'm a plumber, a taxi driver or a snow-shifter. "

Forsyth's career, which even then he considered himself "in the twilight" of, had begun at a kitchen table in Edmonton, north London. Apart from serving her perfect jelly and blancmange on it, this was where Bruce's mother would sew sequins on costumes for his performances as "Boy Bruce: The Mighty Atom".

Forsyth let me watch him record a Generation Game, during which he conjured great fun from 4lb of marshmallows, and stated, a bit jealously, to his assistant Rosemary – who'd just got the job of hosting Strictly forebear Come Dancing – that, "You had to stop halfway through a tango because the bubbles kept going up your nose, dear"