Actor Oliver Reed suffered a fatal heart attack while filming Gladiator in Malta and, following Rob Crouch’s remarkable one-man exploration of Reed’s life on Sunday, the question lodges in the mind, how did he manage to live so long?

Reed, famous from his appearances in Oliver!, Women in Love and dozens of other films, was a legendary hellraiser but you don’t really know what that means until you have seen Mr Crouch, as Reed, downing gallons of beer, whisky and champagne. He gets progressively more inebriated and, paradoxically, more rational.

Reed was the illegitimate grandson of Sir William Beerbohm-Tree and, allegedly, a descendant of Russian czar Peter the Great. His uncle was film director Carol Reed, who gave him his big break as Bill Sykes in Oliver!

With the best will in the world, Reed cannot be described as a great English actor. He didn’t like his fellow actors and preferred to spend his time in pubs rather than on set. By his own admission, he could barely read and was hardly numerate.

But, if Mr Crouch’s version is to be believed, Reed’s great claim to fame was getting out of his head on alcohol and insulting people on chat shows.

Mr Crouch recruited members of the audience, including Steve Cook, managing director of Walter Rose & Sons butchers, who were sponsoring the show, to play the parts of US chat show host Johnny Carson and actress Shelley Winters to re-enact Reed’s appearance on the famous Tonight Show, culminating in Winters pouring water over him.

Reed was not a pleasant man to be with, unless you had as unquenchable a thirst as he did, and the overwhelming emotion at the end of the show is one of pity for a pretty young man who left nothing to the world but some fairly mediocre movies and a rather bad taste in the mouth.