Memory is one of the most fundamental things about being alive - and it will be under the spotlight during Andy Hamilton’s Night To Remember.

The co-writer of Drop The Dead Donkey and Outnumbered will be looking back at his own life and encouraging his audience to do the same at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford on April 7 at 7.30pm.

Andy, 71, said: “It’s a very interesting topic - and as I explored it, it got more interesting. But the show has more jokes than facts.

“A lot of scientific research is very dismissive of memory, calling it unconscious bias. So I thought I’d do a show that sticks up for the human memory, how wonderful and valuable it is.

“At the end of the first half I’m going to leave a bucket in which people can place a form filled with their significant and formative memories to discuss. I’ve always left a bucket at the end of the first half for things the audience want to talk about.”

Many of Andy’s earliest memories revolve around football - he even wrote a book, Blue Was the Colour, about his “troubled relationship” with the beautiful game.

He said: “My house I grew up in virtually backed on to Stamford Bridge, so I’m congenitally a Chelsea fan. It was the most important thing in my life for the first 18 years. But like many fans I’ve become disenchanted with the changes brought by money and Sky.

“My first game was when I was aged five, in the spring of 1960. One of the happiest nights was seeing us beat Portsmouth 7-0 in the last game of the 1962-63 season to win promotion to Division 1. I was nine so that was a very happy night.”

As well as enjoying actual football, Andy - like countless boys at the time - also loved Subbuteo, which marketed itself as “the table top replica of the real game”.

Andy said: “I was Subbuteo-mad as a kid. The second most important thing in my life after football was pretend football.

“I spent hours kneeling on the carpet, I found it very relaxing - it was a good way of unwinding during exam periods.”

But while Subbuteo still reigned supreme among football games in the 1970s and 1980s, by the time Outnumbered covered it in 2012 it had long been superseded by computerised versions of soccer.

The episode featured Hugh Dennis - born in 1962 - as a father trying to instil the joys of “flick to kick” football into his teenage son.

He quit the game bewildered and bored after a few minutes, leaving Hugh alone with his 22 plastic players and green baize pitch.

Andy said: “It was a funny but quite sad episode - it’s a generational thing. Hugh Dennis was brilliant in the episode.

“I played against my son, we got it out on the carpet. He was used to playing games with very lifelike depictions of footballers, so he found the little men on round discs quite problematic. But I quite enjoyed it, because I won!”

Outnumbered was co-written with Andy’s friend Guy Jenkin, as was his early 1990s hit Drop The Dead Donkey, set in a television newsroom and famous for revising its scripts until the last minute to accommodate breaking news in the real world.

Andy explained that they both “knew about news” but had no experience of the profession to draw on when writing the show.

He said: “A lot of people wondered if we were former journalists, but we weren’t. The sum total of our research was when BBC News very kindly let us shadow them for one day.

“What we learned was a news office is like any other office, a coming together of various personalities. They were quite universal characters - over-promoted men, under-promoted women, a lecherous older man, the office lothario.”

Cynical and surly production assistant Joy Merryweather was possibly the least appropriately named character on television.

Andy said: “Joy is her own person. Characters who don’t give a toss are always attractive. She’s fearless, and that’s attractive.”

Success with his own television programmes saw Andy receive invitations to take part in celebrity versions of quiz shows.

He said: “I did celebrity The Chase and Pointless. The stupid competitive streak in me wants to win, but it doesn’t matter.

“I maintain I got knocked out of The Chase because of a badly worded question. It went to the arbiter - The Chase’s equivalent of VAR - for about five minutes, and I lost to the Vixen.

“On Pointless the 100 randomly selected people were idiots - I can’t believe they chose the things they did - but I got to the semi-finals. I enjoyed those shows. They were a good laugh.”

Andy has even had a voice role on children’s television, playing Dr Elephant the dentist in Peppa Pig.

He said: “He’s an elephant who’s a dentist, so he’s had to overcome a lot of obstacles. There’s a lot of prejudice against elephants in the dental profession.

“Sadly my character has never done any dentistry. That’s what I’d like to see.”

Unlike the cartoon elephant dentist, Andy was reluctant to blow his own trumpet ahead of the show - but gave a hint of what was to come.

He concluded: “I’m quietly confident it’s going to be a funny evening!”

For tickets, priced £24 (members £22), call 01483 440000 or visit https://www.yvonne-arnaud.co.uk