It was later discovered however that the cause of their fractious behaviour was not the forthcoming

It was later discovered, however, that the cause of their fractious behaviour was not the forthcoming vacancy but the sending-off of Newcastle’s David Ginola for discouraging Lee Dixon’s close attention by sharp use of his elbow – the same joint favoured by that other French wizard Eric Cantona.If Napoleon is watching from some far-off place he may be reflecting that if the French had made more use of their elbows at Waterloo the course of European history could have been dramatically changed. A lesser man would have run away screaming long ago but Venables looked commendably composed when attending to his duties as assessor during ITV’s coverage of the Arsenal v NewcastleCoca-Cola Cup quarter-final and he made a coherent explanation of the sensational announcement he had made earlier that day.
I thought at the time how ironic it was that, even as he spoke, members of the two club managements were fighting over his job on the touchline. If they had shown any reasonable speed off the mark, the thicket of writs in which Terry Venables finds himself entangled would surely have been cut down to a more manageable level by now. Sadly, our legal system has proved to be even slower than the England back four and the poor man had to submit his career as national coach to a painful do-it-yourself death sentence last week to buy himself the respite he needs for the job he was hired to do

It was a correct and courageous decision. I BLAME the lawyers.

He does this smilingly, jumping up and down with clenched fists and shouts of “Get off my land”. As we leave his house to drive away through the Steadmanesquely-named Kentish village of Loose, Ralph stands outside his house, very sweetly waving.. His next book was going to be about cannibals until his agent said if he ever wrote anything about cannibals, he’d never represent him again.”I get claustrophobic in traffic jams,” Steadman says in a brief conversational hiatus, as his sheepdog Flop looks up at him fondly. “That’s why I hope there’s no life after death, because if there is and someone puts me in a coffin, I’ll feel very claustrophic.” He laughs “What a horrible thought … Oh Jesus, let’s not talk about that.”A short while later, the photographer asks him to pose on his raked gravel drive.

Ralph Steadman obviously doesn’t like falling out with people. “I feel a part of that tradition – that’s what we did, and I say ‘we’ because I mention Gerald Scarfe quite happily, though he’d never mention me.” Why not? “We fell out years ago. We both started out at the same time, and we spent so much time together and what we did was so similar that in a way it was frightening – some people thought we were the same person.” Scarfe, it turns out, was godfather to the eldest of Steadman’s five children, but he is reluctant to go further into their falling out. But cartooning has got a really bad name now hasn’t it? People think it’s just something for filling up a column in a newspaper [adopts condescending voice] ‘Oh, it’s only a cartoon, here’s a fiver …’ I’m not trying to be artsy-fartsy but I don’t like the division that one thing is fine art and another thing isn’t.”Steadman is happy to be thought of as being in the same line as Gillray and Hogarth. Goya was a cartoonist, Daumier was a cartoonist, even Picasso used the cartoon form to express himself. I always wanted to be an artist, period: I hate the word illustrator – it just sounds so limp – I prefer cartoonist. “I’d tried Woolworths; I’d tried De Havillands aeroplane factory; swimming pool attendant; wall of death motorbike cleaner in Marine Lake, Rhyl; rat-catching.” How was he as a rat-catcher? “You know that woman, what’s her name? Hettie, the one from Keeping Up Appearances [Patricia Routledge], who’s now trying to be a detective? I think I was as much of a rat-catcher as she is a detective.”How would he describe what he does now? “I’m not sure what I am.

I thought it was something to do with my heart and it became something that obsessed me … That’s why I’m still swimming” – a small, very chilly-looking pool outside the back door is in daily use throughout the winter months – “to keep my tubes open. If you can give the body a bit of help,” Ralph observes hopefully, stubbing out his roll-up cigarette in a beautifully carved vulture ashtray, “sometimes it’ll keep going.”It was also during National Service that Steadman took Percy V Bradshaw’s prophetically-named correspondence course “Learn To Draw and Earn Pounds” It wasn’t just a hobby he was after “I was looking for something to do,” he remembers. I had a terrible pain under my heart where a rib had cracked.