Many years ago my friend Chris and I used to play cricket together. We could do this without having to leave the comfort of the pub by using 2 dice in a game called ‘Owzthat?’ It was a fabulous game in which the ‘batter ‘ would roll a dice to score runs, if the dice landed on ‘Owzthat’ the ‘bowler’ would then roll his dice to decide what happened to the batsman’

It might sound boring but, especially played whilst quaffing a few pints of Old Boycott’s ‘Runemout’ bitter, it can get very exciting.

We would choose our teams, not just from lists of cricketers but from people from all walks of life. Oddly enough the named players, although just a roll of a dice, had good or bad runs of form. My female film stars top batter was Hattie Jacques who scored many a century during her career and Marilyn Monroe was a demon fast bowler with amazing bouncers’ One night Chris and I met up for a match, his team were ‘Roman Emperors’ and mine were ‘Crippled Men from Fiction and History’

When Chris came into the pub I told him that before we played our match I was having to have a chat with my team as one of them wasn’t pulling his weight and would have to go.

What is the problem? Chris asked.

It’s my wicketkeeper, he’s pants, dropping catches and missing stumpings, I’ve got to sack him.’

‘Well get on with it you can’t have dead wood in your team Caligula has been practicing his googlies, you’ll need a good ‘keeper’

That’s all very well but my ‘keeper is Davros (who created the Daleks); how do I tell the most evil man in the Universe that I’m dropping him from my cricket team?’

Strange as it may seem to you (probably) but I was really getting afraid of telling Davros the bad news. What would he do to me! Anyway I bit the bullet, told him, fired him and brought in Blind Pew the pirate as ‘keeper who did a fantastic job until Davros regained his form and rejoined the team.