That's you, that is... comedy legend Rob Newman

As the former Mary Whitehouse Experience star returns with a brilliant new novel about military intelligence (or lack thereof), he talks tour buses, The Cure and escaping to the ‘relative tranquility’ of the Second World War

- By Matt Nixson

ON NOVEMBER 20, 1944, a US P-47 Thunderbolt nicknamed Peggy III was hit by flak while returning from a dive-bombing mission over the German city of Bonn. Its 25-year-old pilot, Captain Robert J Bradford, was killed attempting to escape his burning aircraft, which subsequently crashed near the village of Liblar.

The young US Eighth Air Force pilot, a member of the 56th Fighter Group, 63rd Fighter Squadron, had grown up in Dallam County, Texas, and trained as an architect before learning to fly and travelling halfway across the world to fight the Nazis.

Fellow airman Randel L Murphy Jr recalled: "The last time I saw him was at approximately 11:20 hours and it looked as though he had broken for the deck from which there was a lot of light flak and 40mm.

I called him and there was no reply." Aside from the obvious family tragedy represented by Bradford's loss, you might wonder about the relevance.

After all, some 26,000 members of the Mighty Eighth were killed in the European campaign during the Second World War.

But intriguingly, the Texan airman, whose remains were eventually interred at the Ardennes American Cemetery in Belgium, was the grandfather of British comedy legend and author Robert Newman.

Having dated a young divorcee while posted to RAF Boxted outside Colchester in Essex, he left her pregnant, almost certainly without knowing it, when his aircraft fell from the sky in flames.

"It's an incredible story," Newman marvels today. "I've thought a lot about my grandfather over the years. A young man who came to Europe and never left..." Neither does the remarkable tale end there. Newman's mother was subsequently adopted and her own child, the comedian himself, was also put up for adoption after being born in Hackney, East London, in 1964. Out of respect for their family, he doesn't name his mother or his grandmother.