In early 1996, technically to help promote the film Roommates, I got to drink whisky and talk Columbo with Peter Falk in a hotel bar in a chilly Paris (“many are cold but few are frozen,” Falk said). My key question was whether Columbo – like Falk himself – is supposed to be one-eyed. “Or are his eyes crossed, or squinting from the sun?” replied Falk with a beaming face. “Or is his eye noticing the suspect’s teeth mark in the cheese? Your guess is as good as mine.”

Falk’s earliest memory was eating an apple while in hospital to have a cancerous eye removed at three years old. “They wouldn’t take me in the navy because of my glass eye,” he fast-forwarded. “So I joined the merchant navy who allowed monocular crew, if you worked in the kitchens. You’re not wanted on deck or in the engine room with one eye, but you’re good to fire up the ovens and cook hundreds of chops.”

Later he was turned down by the CIA, “because I’d joined the union of cooks and stewards at sea. And because I’d attended a liberal college and been in Yugoslavia. But they never mentioned the eye.”

Falk said he’d sometimes popped his glass eye into a drinking glass, either his own or “some guy’s”, but such days were long past. He thought the strangest bar he’d been in was on stage, when, after veering from public administration to theatre in the 50s he’d played a barman in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh.

“Hours every night, I was just standing there, behind the bar, mainly, while everyone else acted more and more drunk and in despair. So I suppose I learnt to do lots of little things with my eyes.”