Which will only mean something if you are a jazz fan or listen to I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue on Radio 4, in which case you will call Lyttleton 'Humph' and be a member of one of the most cheerfully disorganised clubs in the land.

When Humph died last week, aged 86, the Humph club reacted by giggling away while recalling the most filthy jokes he told over decades on the programme, which went out on Sunday lunchtime and heaven knows how he got away with it.

The Radio 4 News obituary said the show was 'often bawdy'. No it wasn't, it was always completely, gloriously, and in a strange way innocently, filthy.

I can't demonstrate how filthy it was because writing the jokes out would make me go red, but usually (when they didn't involve Lionel Blair or Christopher Biggins) the jokes were about the doings of the beautiful but somewhat loose Samantha, who supposedly kept score, although Samantha didn't exist and the score didn't exist either and neither did the rules of Mornington Crescent, a game based on the London Underground which I can't explain now because we would be here all night.

Searching through the net, I've only found one Samantha joke I can tell and that, by virtue of the fact that I can tell it, is not particularly funny: "Samantha has to nip off to the National Opera where she's been giving private tuition to the singers. Having seen what she did to the baritone, the director is keen to see what she might do for a tenor."

Glamorous

Obviously the Chemic Humph Tribute Night will have difficulty casting Samantha, what with her being non-existent, but I think she can be appropriately represented by a glamorous and tasteful blow-up lady doll.

Humph, being primarily a jazz musician, ensured I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue was built largely around improvisation and music, which are particularly strong points at the Chemic Tavern.

The music games include 'one song to the tune of another' (you can try this at home – for example by singing My Old Man's a Dustman to the tune of A Whiter Shade of Pale, although it might drive you mad); 'swannee kazoo', in which the swannee whistle duets with the kazoo to demonstrate the true meaning of the word mismatch and (although I think they only tried this once) 'Chas and Dave'.

In 'Chas and Dave', a sensitive, quiet song, such as the Beatles' Yesterday, is massacred by playing it at 80mph on a thumping piano and in a shouty voice while barking words like 'wallop' and 'rabbit' at random. It makes you want to shoot yourself.

Actually, the number of games that can be adapted for use in the Chemic tribute night is, well, not endless but quite enough. 'Sound charades' is very good, as is 'Name That Barcode' – for example, thick black, thin white, thin black, thick black, thick white…and to put you out of your misery, it's Always With Wings.

Humph finished each edition of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue with an utterly ludicrous sign-off line, which is why, when it comes to the memorial service, things are likely to get very silly: "So, as the short-sighted terrier of Time chases the startled stick insect of Hope, and the supple daschund of Fate is knotted by the absent-minded balloon magician of Eternity, it's time to say goodbye."


Splendour in the grass at a jewel of a park


AT the weekend, me and Lynne and Lynne and I, which is a phrase that covers all the bases and will stop pedants saying 'It should be me and Lynne' or it should be 'Lynne and I' and sod them anyway because I'm sick of pendants, who have been bothering me particularly of late and seem to want to take over this column although I'm determined not to let them, went to Lister Park in Bradford.

Lister Park is a great park, created in the tradition which took urban parks to be opportunities for restoring and enhancing the lives of the workers rather than a hopelessly naïve waste of prime building land.

And it's got a boating lake, which Lynne didn't expect. She learned to row there as a child but assumed that Health and Safety would have banned that sort of thing by now.

But the boats are still there, in pedallo form, along with a functioning (unlike some I could mention) lakeside café.

The café has remarkable decorations on each table: small ceramic pots filled with growing clods of grass or, in two cases, dead ferns.

Clods

I can't explain the dead ferns but I think the clods of grass are probably some sort of artistic statement connected with (or should that be 'connected to' and do you think I give a fig?) the Cartwright Hall gallery, which lies in the middle of Lister Park and contains many modern Brit artworks (by Tracey Emin, for example) which challenge the observer to examine what exactly we mean by 'art', and, come to think of it, what we mean by 'mean' and by 'by' ('Oh… are you off? See you later.')

I mean, I think there's a certain post-modern buzz to be had in sitting surrounded by grass in a grassy park while having a clod of grass offered to you as an object of interest.

It's also given me a fantastic idea for my pension fund. I will grow (or possibly pinch from the side of roundabouts) clods of grass which I will place in stylish recyclable containers as pioneered by Müller Lite and sell through Harvey Nichols.

This will allow wealthy city-living flat dwellers to get back to their roots by recreating the sight and feel of grass, which they won't find in the wild in Leeds city centre. Grass is also the ideal houseplant for the busy professional, needing only the occasional mow and roll to keep it in prime condition.

Also at Cartwright Hall is a great photography exhibition by Felicitas Vogler, who took rather conventional but often haunting pictures of her travels in picturesque places.

She was apparently not at all interested in the technical side of photography and her favourite camera was one she found on a bench.

This encouraged me to think that in spite of my technical ineptitudeness (or is that ineptitudeability?), I might be able to make some contribution to photographic art, being very practised at leaving cameras on benches.