Mr Gibbs, the headteacher, had a bristling white moustache and obviously had trouble shaving because he always had cotton wool on his face where he had cut himself. He used to do up my football boots for me because I couldn’t tie knots, and he would sing as he did so. He had boy scout camps in his garden, in which I took part. He was rather vague and when he drove us in his Austin 12 he would absent-mindedly change gear with my knee and be surprised when the gear hadn’t taken. I think he taught us divinity occasionally, which was later taken over by Professor F OM Earp - known to us all as Foam.

Foam wasn’t really cut out for divinity. He was a man of science. He had invented a bicycle with eight gears, but the trouble was you had to stop the bicycle before you engaged each gear. He attempted to solve Christ’s miracles chemically. I remember him saying that water changing into wine was probably due to permanganate of potash deposits in the hills, which had a purple colour, being blown into the water and making it look like wine.

In chemistry lessons his experiments didn’t always turn out as expected. He frightened us tremendously on one occasion when he created a colossal explosion and disappeared from sight. Suddenly, very slowly, after a dramatic pause, he rose from behind his desk with a blackened face and his dress in disarray and demanded: “What did I do wrong?” pointing at the space between me and the next boy. When neither of us answered he told us what he had done, supposedly deliberately. He put me off chemistry completely. I can’t bear the smell of sulphuric acid and all those things, which seem to me intrinsically dangerous.

On the whole, I was quiet as a schoolboy and used the fact that I was slightly prematurely corpulent and clumsy as a defence. I learned to survive by making people laugh. And although I hated cricket, I helped the school to win quite a lot of matches by some creative scoring and distracting the attention of other schools’ scorers at vital moments.

I was impatient to grow up and be my own master. School days were something to be got through. I’ve never quite recovered from the psychological impact of the comment on one report from Mr Gibbs: “This boy shows great originality, which must be curbed at all costs.”

I was top in English, French, history and geography, and bottom in all the other subjects, which made life difficult because the School Certificate in those days required an average in all. So I didn’t take the exam. I went to drama school instead.

It wasn’t until I was on a discussion show with Melvyn Bragg and two scientists many years later that I realised how interesting science could be. I wished then I had spent less time at school gazing out of the window. Now I am frightfully interested in education. I was elected chancellor of Durham University nearly 11 years ago and have learned a great deal more than most students can have done. I learned none of the languages I now speak when I was a child, apart from French.

I regret I didn’t know my teachers better because when I met one of them on This is Your Life, I liked him and got on well with him. Mr Gomme, who I think taught English, surprised me by talking to my wife in perfect French and saying: “My great ambition was to be a French master, but nobody ever allowed me to.”

Actor Sir Peter Ustinov was talking to Pamela Coleman

Portrait by Neil Turner

THE STORY SO FAR

1921 Born in London

1938 First stage performance in The Wood Demon

1961 Academy award: best supporting actor, Spartacus

1962 Writes, acts in and directs Billy Budd

1964 Academy award: best supporting actor, Topkapi

1968 onwards Goodwill ambassador for UNICEF

1979 Voted best actor by Variety Club for Death on the Nile

1990 Knighted; publication of novel The Old Man and Mr Smith

September 2002 Publication of biography Peter Ustinov, the Gift of Laughter, by John Miller