How on earth did Harold Pinter and Danny Dyer become such good friends?

Collectors of TV titles that sound as if they were thought of by Alan Partridge will presumably have spotted Danny Dyer on Harold Pinter. As Dyer himself understatedly put it: ‘This might seem an unlikely pairing: the likely lad and the Nobel Prize winner.’ Yet, what made the programme such an intriguing if undeniably peculiar watch is that the pairing in question wasn’t dreamed up by a desperate (or drunk) commissioning editor.

In 2000, aged 22, Dyer auditioned for Pinter’s Celebration at the Almeida Theatre in Islington. ‘I knew the money would be rubbish,’ he told us, ‘so I didn’t care much.’ Nor, unlike his rivals, did he really know who Pinter was. When the moment came, he looked down into the stalls, enquired of the great man ‘How are you doing, son?’ and wholeheartedly went for it. (‘I was fearless then,’ he recalled ruefully.)

And with that, he not only got the part — and retained it through the West End and Broadway — but, to his continuing and rather touching bewilderment, found himself being taken under Pinter’s wing. The following year he was cast in a revival of No Man’s Land at the National. He was also invited to what he inevitably called Pinter’s ‘gaff’ for discussions about poetry, where Pinter would drink red wine but always make sure to ‘get some lagers in’ for his guest. In one Broadway performance, Dyer forgot his lines — largely, he explained, because ‘I was off my nut’. Pinter greeted him afterwards with a fatherly ‘Don’t worry, Danny, it happens to the best of us’: a memory that still brings tears to Dyer’s eyes.

Given that Pinter is not generally known for such rascibility, all of this did feel like a new perspective on him.