(Away from the body, in case you're wondering, with a gentle swooping movement.) He speaks nostalgically about these childhood trips, recalling how, once arrived in Falkirk, hordes of relatives crushed into his grandparents' house, and would – in that ominous phrase of the days when there was only Barbara Kelly and Gilbert Harding on the telly – make their own entertainment A Hylda Baker impression, in Russ's case And he launches into it. Which pleases me, because it gives me a chance to tell him my favourite Hylda Baker gag. It's the one where she goes into the greengrocers and asks for 20lb of onions "Are you pickling?" asks the shopkeeper. "No, it's just me umbrella." "Terrible," mutters Russ.Elizabeth Roberts died in 1992, from Alzheimer's "She became like a child in the end," her son recalls "We'd spoon-feed her like a little sparrow But it was upsetting at times. My wife took a small party from my mum's nursing- home to see a show I was doing in Blackpool.
After the show, she came round to my dressing-room and I asked her if she'd enjoyed it And she said, 'I thoroughly enjoyed that It was lovely But I must go now because my family's waiting for me'. And I said, 'But I'm your family', and she said, 'thank you, it's been lovely meeting you'. And that hurt."Russ doesn't believe in being cagey about such matters. He'll even discuss his hair transplant – carried out in the alarmingly distant year of 1970 – with equanimity "I was one of the pioneers But Frank Sinatra was the first, I think I had hair, and it was just going thin. But there was no way I was wearing a wig, so somebody – a salesman – talked me into it." After the surgery, he returned home wearing a trilby and dark glasses, his head swathed in bandages "I did it on the spur of the moment.
You don't realise that it's going to recede even more." It left him with gaps like the public footpaths that bisect the Sussex Downs. So, about a decade or so, he began to depilate, rediscovering his natural hairline.This unself-consciousness also has its negative side. Russ Abbot says things like, "I've always felt I've got a lot of talent to be tapped"; and "It was good stuff, even though I say so myself"; and "the accolades I received in the Eighties", when he must know that, written down, such remarks will sound a bit gruesome.But he also knows when not to push it too far. When I mention a diary story in the Telegraph that suggested he has aspirations to play King Lear, he bats off the idea with a bashful grin.