Ian Adam was the ideal singing teacher. The proof lay in the fact that he could teach a block of wood to sing. I was the block of wood. Around about the turn of the millennium, in the last flickerings of my career on main-channel television, I was running short of puff. Nothing serious, but after a two-day rehearsal for a big show I would sometimes need to breathe again before the end of a long sentence. I was advised that this crimp in the fluency could be taken care of by singing training.