My two main trainers were John Dahmer and DJ Hyde. DJ Hyde mainly taught me how to be tough: I mean, the beatings that he used to give the students as far as wrestling initiations go were as tough as they come, and I'm thankful for it.

My education was paid for by the RAF Benevolent Fund, so a charity school, run like an orphanage, with uniforms and beatings. It was tough, but it got me to Cambridge - like being a chrysalis suddenly becoming a butterfly.

For a Catholic kid in parochial school the only way to survive the beatings - by classmates not the nuns - was to be the funny guy.

I wanted to be a great white hunter a prospector for gold or a slave trader. But then when I was eight my parents sent me to a boarding school in South Africa. It was the equivalent of a British public school with cold showers beatings and rotten food. But what it also had was a library full of books.