Within three months of his first radio recording, Thackray landed a slot on regional TV and, through the persistence of Howe and the BBC’s head of radio light entertainment, Roy Rich, scored an EMI recording contract and made his first national TV appearance, on the highbrow 1968 BBC sketch show Beryl Reid Says Good Evening. To slightly bowdlerise an introduction to a song Thackray used to give, “it happens to be a true story… it’s not a story with a punchy bit at the end, it’s not a moralising story, or a whimsical, or a sentimentalising story; it’s just a story”.

Brilliantly performed songs, with uncannily precise enunciation, and accurately capturing the unique Thackray guitar style. However, Thackray was not an unconditionally staunch believer in Roman Catholic doctrine, once saying of his religion “it’s my backbone, but it’s also my burden.This playfully eerie song describes how, in a candlelit upstairs room, with broomsticks from Woolworth's and unbeknownst to their husbands, various respectable ladies engage in pagan rituals. In the hands of other biographers, these final years might read like tragedy, but it is to Thompson and Watterson’s credit that they focus on the positives, including the columns Thackray wrote for the Yorkshire Post and The Catholic Herald, his involvement with a group of committed fans planning a Jake Thackray musical, Sister Josephine Kicks the Habit, and the discovery of a cache of never publicly performed Thackray lyrics. When the doctor advises Bertie to live the quiet life, he and Jeeves head for the pure air and peace of Maiden Eggesford. lambasts only “some women” who talk too much, and that he might “cheerfully have done it about a bloke” This defence falls rather flat when you imagine it extrapolated to other jokes stereotyping different minorities.

Although not met with the same critical acclaim as his first LP, Jake’s Progress still achieved its fair share of plaudits, with one journalist describing Thackray as nothing less than a North Country Noel Coward. John Rebus stands accused: on trial for a crime that could put him behind bars for the rest of his life. Those lads, by now they’re out to the bus stop…So in a spirit of politeness you carry on clapping for a bit…there’s the last few claps in you and suddenly we come swerving back on here and you’ve got to start all over again.He refused point blank to do a commercial for Dulux paint, even in the depths of his financial problems when his family were begging him to do it. McTell believes that, in another world, Thackray would have been celebrated in the cafes and concert halls of France and Belgium, where they understood his clever, poetic European wordplay: “Instead he became part of the 70s pub circuit, up next after a bunch of sea shanties. That man would have swum a river on fire to get to a gig before, because he had made a promise to do it . He’d spent four years in a Catholic seminary and then from 1960, aged 22, he lived and worked in France and Algeria. Though in a performance at the Cambridge Folk Festival he looks magnificent - giant, chiselled, veins popping out of brawny forearms from the exertion of those quicksilver guitar parts - he’s also pouring with sweat, voice occasionally cracking, his fear occasionally revealed by equine whites of eyes.