Archibald Ormsby-Gore, Betjeman's trusted and beloved teddy bear, was a regular visitor too, Jumbo the elephant slightly less so. "Archie's feeling very gloomy today," Betjeman would say, as he fetched it out of the carrier-bag. "Well, let's cheer him up," Ted would reply, carefully placing the bedraggled old teddy-bear on the film rewind machine, where it would sit, spinning round faster and faster, as on a merry-go-round. "Oh, Archie's much more cheerful now," Betjeman would cry, and his wonderful smile would break out, as if the sun had emerged from behind the clouds. Archie's moods were, of course, John's own.

I found Betjeman's uncertainty and thin-skinned self-doubt unexpected and rather surprising. "Oh, Brigstocke won't like this," he kept saying, meaning that the BBC bosses would reject what he had written. I assured him that Brigstocke would be delighted. More seriously, "What will Sean Day-Lewis say?" Sean Day-Lewis was at that time an influential journalist and TV critic of the Daily Telegraph. He was also the son of Betjeman's old chum Cecil Day-Lewis. For whatever complicated personal reasons, Sean Day-Lewis lost no opportunity to do down Betjeman in print — or so the poet believed. And he cared.

So much so that he composed an anticipated version of Day-Lewis's attack words, and put it in a sealed envelope — to be opened and compared with the real hurtfulness on the day.

Sean Day-Lewis didn't let him down. All the other reviews of "The Englishman's Home", the first in the series, were raves — "totally fascinating", "I am full of admiration", and so on. Sean Day-Lewis said it was "irritating", adding: "Mr Betjeman was invited to air his prejudices and he did so predictably, and with more illogicality than usual, in a poetic manner that at best sounded like tongue-in-cheek parody of his own verse." The sealed envelope was opened, and the prediction was almost word-for-word.

Sean Day-Lewis was one of the small group of people Betjeman couldn't take. His Oxford tutor, C.S. Lewis, was another. So were developers, in general. Betjeman could be quite a good hater.

But equally there was no one like him for enthusiasm, warmth and generosity. He had the rare gift of making people somehow feel livelier, and funnier, by being lively and funny himself. His generosity knew no bounds. Praise for quality of work was one thing; beyond that, there were drinks and lunches, gifts and treats. In those days the Craftsman Potter Shop was just down the road from the cutting-room, and we would frequently pop in. Betjeman had a liking for the stoneware of Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie, born to an aristocratic family at Coleshill, a house Betjeman loved, which later burned down. He often bought a pot or two for himself, and then made sure to add others for Ted and for me.