This week, with comedian and radio presenter JIM BOWEN

MEMORY: Getting a Mars Bar in 1945 after the war when sweets came off ration. I was eight and I'd never seen one before. Bananas became available at about the same time.

LOVE: A girl called Christine Rhodes, who lived at Clayton-le-Moors. She dropped me when I went to train as a teacher. I was a late developer and I wasn't very good in the playground as I had National Health glasses and a bad eye, so I wasn't a good pick-up.

HOUSE: The first house my wife Phyllis and I bought was a semi in Queen Elizabeth Crescent, Accrington. It was 1959 and it cost £1,760.

RECORD: A song by the Saints Jazz Band called I Want a Girl Just Like The Girl Who Married Dear Old Dad.

CAR: A 1955 Ford 100E Prefect, pale blue, PLW 714. I bought it in 1958.

PET: Phyllis and I have always had pets and the first was a black sheep dog called Bess. She lived with us for 18 years. Touch wood, every animal we have had has made it into its teens.

JOB: I worked at a brickworks in Accrington in 1955. PUBLIC COMEDY ROUTINE: 1966, the Regent Hotel in Blackburn. I went on at lunchtime and someone came and asked me if I wanted to do a job that night, so I went home to write some more jokes.

HOLIDAY: 1946, at the North Bank Private Hotel. It cost £7 per week, use of cruets one shilling extra. A bath was a shilling extra. They used to give you the plug and you had to take it back afterwards. Blackpool landladies used to have a phrase in those days if there were any fat children staying: "Put the fat lad in the bay window. It'll make the food look better."

EMBARRASSMENT: I was in a club working and doing really well. Men at a table next to me were talking and I gave them a right telling-off. I lost the rest of the audience because I got so cross. One of the men came to my dressing-room afterwards and said his three friends were Italian and he was trying to tell them my jokes.