NOW that I have shaken the dust of pantomime from my weary feet, I am able to look back at the week that immediately preceded it, when I took part in my first ‘reality’ TV show - ‘Come Dine With Me’.

We all found it exhausting, as being a one camera shoot, each episode offers very little down-time to the participants.

How the crew maintain the relentless pressure, I do not know.

For example, on my cooking day they arrived at my house at 9am and the last person left at 5.30am the following day.

For five 25 minute programmes, they shot over 90 hours of material. The editing must take forever. I have always been reluctant to allow my own home to be used for filming purposes, not just for reasons of privacy (mercifully I am not famous enough for that to be a real issue) but more because I have seen how people’s homes have been treated when I have been on location as an actor. But I was very impressed by the care taken by the CDWM team and I learned a lot.

Any pictures in vision (and we have a lot) for copyright reasons either had to get clearance from the artists concerned or had to be taken down.

My main worry though had been the cooking.

I had genuinely never cooked a meal other than a breakfast fry-up or beans on toast since I married my wife, who cooks superbly.

I was so scared that I actually did a couple of practice runs for my family in the weeks before the filming. Otherwise I would certainly have floundered. Perhaps unlike the usual version of the programme, where they put together potentially explosive mixtures of people, in this ‘celeb’ version we all got on really well, especially given the increasing lack of sleep!

Linda Nolan was great fun and made me laugh a lot, Bianca Gascoigne and Danny Young were both smashing young people and delightful dinner companions although they did perhaps lack the staying power of we oldies, and ‘Nasty’ Nick Bateman is a rather sensitive and gentle soul trapped to a certain extent by his Big Brother history.

To have won the £1,000 prize for Stokenchurch Dog Rescue was a fabulous bonus – and totally unexpected.

And I am more than happy now to pass the chef’s hat back to my wife! I can’t take the stress!