Before the First World War my grandfather, Fred Elcock, was a small-time music hall performer who often appeared on bills in the Midlands region of Britain. Fred was a strongman and acrobat, and his speciality was leaping a billiard-table lengthways. Often big touring shows would seek Fred out because his simple front-cloth act was a useful filler to keep the audience occupied during big scene-changes.

One such show was Karno's Army, a troupe of boisterous slapstick comedians enormously popular at the time. Two members of the troupe were youngsters just starting out in the business, Londoner Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, a Lancashire lad. My granddad knew them both well because they would often go drinking together after the show. He was in awe of Charlie's gifts - he was already on his way to stardom - but found him a bit remote and standoffish. He loved Stan, though. Then appearing under his real name of Stan Jefferson, he was a fun-loving young man who liked a drink or two and had an eye for the girls, and he and Fred enjoyed some good times together around the pubs of Dudley, Fred's home town.

Karno's Army went to the States, Charlie and Stan didn't come back and the rest is movie history. Fred Elcock was called up to fight in the First World War, and when he returned to civilian life he didn't go back on the music halls. After what he'd seen, he didn't have the heart for it any more, my grannie told me.

Another great double-act - Fred and Stephen.

But he never forgot Stan, and when I knew Fred as an old man he'd get quite excited if a Laurel and Hardy movie came on TV, calling me over to watch and telling me stories about his long-lost pal. And it was Fred I was thinking about when I created this little tribute to the great double-act.

During Laurel and Hardy's Hollywood years Stan was a perfectionist and a workaholic, spending his spare time thinking up new gags and toiling through the night on their films in the studio editing suites. Oliver Hardy was a Southern gentleman from Georgia who was usually yearning to be out on the golf course by mid-afternoon. In the late 1940s it all started going wrong for the great comic duo. They were getting on in years and had been supplanted by Abbott and Costello as the top box-office double-act. Their film career was over so, accompanied by their wives, they embarked on a series of European music hall tours in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In May, 1952, they topped the bill at the Liverpool Empire. Together day and night during these tours, the elderly comedians got to know each other properly for the first time and, in the words of their biographer, "each found a cherished friend."