I can’t recommend enough the two-part film about General de Gaulle. The first is Résistance and the second is Liberté and you have to find them with a metal detector and a pair of field glasses because they only seem to show at around 2 p.m. at one of those armchair cinemas which insist you eat steak frites and drink Beaujolais while the advertisements pound away at your brain. Believe me, it is worth it. There are subtitles, epic episodes, battles both physical and mental, detailed direction and French and English performers who are very, very good. Simon Russell Beale is more Churchillian than Churchill. He makes you believe everything you’ve ever read about the man. Most importantly, he can properly smoke. In fact, most of the actors can. By which I mean, they smoke in a ritualistic and personalised way, unlike the novice smokers in Noël Coward revivals who drive me nuts by puffing without inhaling and stubbing out their cigarettes in wet ashtrays after one and a half puffs.

When we smoked, we savoured every moment of it, from the tapping of the filter on the packet to the lighting, with head inclined and eyes locked, Princess Diana-like, on the flame-giver. That first inhalation was a godsend, followed by the drawing up of the smoke, the holding of the precious moment and the measured blowing out through cupid-bow lips. By the 1970s, we were being given dire warnings, so I cut down to one a day. After whatever play I was doing, my dresser, Sally, used to hand me my cigarette at 10.15 p.m., and, with my feet on the dressing-room table, I inhaled it with a nice glass of port. Of course, in those days we all drank like manatees too, before the show and after and – shh, shh! – sometimes during. At home, when the kids were small, I’d put them both in the bath, pour myself a gin and tonic, light up a Silk Cut and watch People and Places until the bath got cold and the fights started.

Obviously, I know the stage-prop fags are herbal because you can smell the virtue from the stalls, but, actually, if an out-of-work, still smoking actor is in need of a job, it might be an idea to hire himself out as a smoking coach. ‘Smoking was punctuation,’ I would tell young actors. ‘It gave you time to think.’ You know on radio interviews when a politician is asked something and says, ‘Aah, ye-esss… That’s a very good question…’? Well, he wouldn’t have to do that if he had a cigarette in his hand. It covered silences. And in affairs of the heart, it seduced and sedated you and gave you something to do afterwards.

My late husband, Jack Rosenthal, was a serious smoker. I often see him in my mind’s eye changing Amy’s nappy on the tan leather Chesterfield with a cigarette dangling from his lips. Or balancing it on the typewriter as he pummelled away at the keys, only stopping to pick it up while he planned out the next line. I often wonder if he didn’t get ill the moment he gave it up in favour of a new hip. He told a rueful story about working for some years with the writer Harry Driver. One day, he reached for his packet of cigarettes and his matches when Harry screamed: ‘Don’t do it! I can’t bear it one more time. Just don’t do it!’ Jack scrabbled for his dropped matches: ‘What did I do?’ ‘What you bloody do 20 bloody times a day – and I can’t bloody watch it again. Do you have any idea what you do every time you light a bloody ciggie?’ ‘I just… light it… don’t I?’ ‘No, you bloody don’t just light it, Jack. What you do is, you take the cigarette out of the packet. Then you tap the filter on the packet. Twice.’ ‘Do I?’ (Jack could be a bit Eric Morecambe in a conflict situation.) ‘Yes, you bloody do. Then, then, you tap the cigarette on your forehead, your nose and your chin. Twice.’ ‘I don’t, do I? I’d not realis…’ ‘THEN you get a match out and tap it on the box. Twice. Then you light the cigarette. THEN you tap the lit fag again on your forehead and your chin. Twice. Then, and only then, do you smoke the cigarette. And you do this 20 times a day! And I have to sit here and watch you bloody do it.’ After this exchange, I don’t think Harry and Jack worked together much. Which just goes to show, smoking was more than a habit; it was almost a language, almost choreography, and one which actors should learn.

Another language which is worth learning is sign. I was the guest speaker at a Jewish Deaf Association fundraiser last week and my interpreter, Bev Wilson, was dynamic. Not only did I make her sign ‘Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry/ When I take you out in the surrey’ but also ‘discarded Lime bikes’, ‘mixed metaphors’, ‘kibitzing’ and ‘penis’. She did it all with grace. It was a resoundingly successful night with just the right number of speeches and appeals. I even got away with a few proper jokes and you don’t hear many of those in these ‘appropriate’ days.