LIB Dem stalwart Neil Timberlake normally writes in to tick me off about my rubbish anti-green transport comments.

But in true Clegg-style, he’s formed a coalition with Backchat this week to tell me of his most embarrassing experience.

Neil, from High Wycombe, loved last week’s piece about Jim Tanner turning up at the wrong funeral and sent me his own awful anecdote ‘just to prove I can laugh at myself’.

It happened when he was working for a bus firm in Brighton in the mid 1980s. One of his tasks was representing the company on a live phone-in programme on BBC Radio Sussex every six weeks.

One week his slot on the show coincided with a national awards ceremony, where his company had won a prize and the MD had been presented with it by a well-known TV actor.

So he had a golden opportunity to give his firm a glorious plug by dropping this news into his show.

Before the end of the hour-long programme he got his chance – and launched into the planned bit of spin. “I found myself drawn into delivering a sentence which would involve me NAMING this well-known TV actor. Part way through I realised that I had forgotten his name!,” Neil recalls.

“Beginning to panic inwardly, I nevertheless ploughed on, reasoning that the name would come to me at any moment. It didn’t, and as I stalled for time my sentence got progressively longer and more convoluted, almost seeming to build-up the tension towards the final dramatic denouement.”

In the end, Neil had to concede defeat and admit – live on air, and having built the story up to a big climax – that he couldn't remember the name. I wanted a big hole to open up in the studio floor and swallow me!” This lapse didn’t go down too well with his colleagues back at base, but luckily Timbers was invited back to do the show again six weeks later.

However, he confessed: “Even 25 years later, the memory of that day still makes me blush and cringe but I still can’t remember the actor’s name!”