Purely by chance, Bradford played a large part in establishing Peter Sallis as an actor and setting him on the path that was to lead years later to him becoming a national treasure thanks to his roles in Last of the Summer Wine and Wallace and Gromit.

During his wartime RAF services (he was a teacher of telephony at Cranwell) the young Peter met Bradford actor Leslie Sands, who had already had some professional theatrical experience as a member of Harry Hanson's touring company and who was to go on to find national fame in the TV series Cluff, in which he played a Grassington-based detective.

Together they formed a company called The Little Theatre, acquired a couple of leading ladies, and performed Bradford-born writer J.B. Priestley's time-warp drama I Have Been Here Before in the station's cinema.

It was as a result of this that a gas officer at the station, a man called Walter Wade who had been a professional entertainer - Sallis describes him as "a sort of poor man's Noël Coward" - suggested that the future Norman Clegg should also consider turning professional.

"It was all encouraging and there's no doubt that he gave me an enormous boost early on," Peter Sallis writes in Fading Into the Limelight, which is now out in paperback.

It's subtitled "The Autobiography", but really it should be "The Professional Biography" because there is very little in it about the private life of the actor beyond his childhood years, during which his mother introduced him to the delights of the theatre.

Is he married? We aren't told. Has there been romance in his life? There's no clue beyond the fact that when he was involved with The Little Theatre he fell in love with Maureen Shaw, one of the leading ladies.

That and what he describes as his "first heterosexual experience" as a five-year-old holidaying in Bournemouth when he and a four-year-old girl became inseparable.

"We were holding hands always. We used to roll on the floor together. Oh dear, yes, I was quite a success in those days," he writes, adding: "As the years went on, I seem to have become less and less successful, but there we are."

What we do find out, though, is a great deal about the work Peter Sallis has done over the years, much of it in the theatre and bringing him into contact with most of the great actors and actresses of the 20th century.

The story is told in the sort of chatty, whimsical, self-effacing style you could imagine Norman Clegg using to recount incidents from that character's early life to his elderly chums in Last of the Summer Wine. It was that series that transformed an urbane actor into a major television figure.

He had already met the show's creator and writer Roy Clarke and had performed in a couple of his TV dramas. So when he was invited to appear, with fellow actors Michael Bates and Bill Owen, in a Comedy Playhouse pilot drama about three elderly men meandering around the streets of a West Yorkshire town he was quite happy to set his mind to working out just what this character called Norman Clegg would wear.

He settled on the look that Cleggy has sported for 35 years during which the leading characters around him have changed, largely because of the deaths of the actors who played them in the much-loved Last of the Summer Wine.

Peter Sallis first thought that Holmfirth, where the series is filmed, was a dead sort of place. Now he loves it.

"I cannot describe to you the pleasure that it gives me just to go back there, and climb up those hills, or be driven up those hills, more particularly, to look across that landscape; it is magical.

"You can stand there filming and you have a break from your scene, and I find myself standing or squatting, sitting and just looking at it and thinking: you lucky sod to be here doing this with a great writer behind you, a fine director, and let's call it a ripping cast, very, very lucky indeed'."

And if that wasn't enough, there's the international recognition that the Sallis voice has achieved as Wallace in Nick Park's award-winning animated films about a man and his dog.

His wide-eyed pleasure on being taken to Hollywood at the age of 87 and driven in a stretch limo to the ceremony at which Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit picked up an Oscar is infectious, providing yet another delightful moment.

  • Fading Into the Limelight, by Peter Sallis, is published as an Orion paperback at £8.99.