In his warm voice, Roberts, who has played with everyone from Pink Floyd to Billy Connolly and written TV and film scores, also performed a song from his first musical, Mind Your Head, written with Adrian Mitchell and premiered at the Everyman in the early-70s.

But it was still very much the Liverpool Poets’ night as they borrowed the audience’s imaginations and took them on a journey to the city’s docks, a night out in the Blue Angel club with Bob Dylan, into a geography teacher’s map- lined classroom and to the hospital bedside of Patten’s dying mother.

We eavesdropped on quarrelling lovers, sympathised with the husbands of famous women (Mr Blyton feeling for his wife in the dark and finding only Noddy’s blue coat), laughed and then gasped at the ill-fated gangster ordering “a double moussaka and two bottles of that retinsa muck” and wondered at the lack of soul by the Minister For Exams.

While McGough won mainly laughter, Patten’s words provoked deeper emotion as he painted pictures of supping wine with Henri’s ghost in a frosty garden and regretting that his mother had no fairy godmother to rescue her from years of toiling at housework.

The new Everyman could learn a lot from studying these modern-day troubadors – changed on the outside but, inside, still displaying the same heart.