When I first got into the film game, I’d get a day’s work and then I’d miss a week and then I’d get another day’s work. If I didn’t have any film work one week, I would be a compere and guitarist in pubs all around London.

Then all of a sudden, they said to me, “Can you say a line?” and I said, “Yes, of course I can.”  So on the next job, they’d say, “Get that Aitch down - he can say a line, or fall over, or whatever.” I was there to earn money; I’d had a tough upbringing, I had three kids and that was what life was about.

I was a supporting artist; my main business was to react to actors or scenes. I was lucky in the fact that being six foot tall and slim, you could be anything on any show in film or TV. There were about a hundred of us out of - I don’t know - 10,000 extras who earned a good living. You could work eight days a week then.

I came home from work one night about nine o’clock, absolutely knackered, and I was having my dinner when the phone rang: “Aitch, can you come down to Wales in the morning?” So you forget about everything else, pack some stuff and go down to Wales for a few days. That job was with the comedian Jerry Lewis, who was a wonderful man. He was my hero when I was a kid and there I was, working with him.

A great show that I did for a year in 1969 was Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased). I did some tests for special effects and then I was asked, “Would you be a stand-in for Mike Pratt [Randall] if he gets on with you?” We got on like a house on fire from the first day. Mike told me that he and Lionel Bart wrote all of Tommy Steele’s early songs. With all the years I spent with the bands, we had something in common, and we used to have a singalong in the dressing-rooms or wherever we could. I met Tommy Steele himself when I worked on ‘Half A Sixpence’ in 1967 - a good old Cockney geezer.

I worked with some of the top people - Steven Spielberg, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick - and I’ve been all around the world, but I’ve never left English shores. There was no need. Films are all make-believe, aren’t they? I went to the moon before the Americans in 1968 on a film called ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ at MGM Studios in Borehamwood. My job was to walk across the moon’s surface from ten or thirty yards and it took ten hours, because Kubrick was directing and it had to be right. And I remember that, because the oxygen was turned off in the spacesuit and I was struggling!

The phone has stopped ringing now - it happens to us all. I’ve still got the guitar and I’m teaching my two grandsons to play. I’ve had a great life so far - and it’s not finished yet!

What were your favourite films and TV shows of the Sixties? And who were your favourite stars? Share your memories of the Sixties here.