WE’RE at a cocktail party.

We’re at a big, expensive house on Windmill Lane in Appleton. It’s the early 1970s.

Sunlight streams through the open french doors that are opened invitingly on to the back lawn.

The women wear flowery dresses, the men suits, collars and ties.

A young woman is sipping the last of her glass of wine. She asks the shy young man she’s talking to if she may have another.

He blushes, coughs and giggles in a high-pitched manner, then explains he’s not the wine waiter.

Actually, he’s a university friend of Richard’s, whose father owns the big house in Appleton.

‘My name’s Rowan,’ says the awkward young man, ‘Rowan Atkinson.’ Ok, so I might have elaborated things a little. And I might have allowed the anecdote to stray into cliche. I might have painted the picture a little too Abigail’s Party.

But this really happened, I’m reliably informed. And in my mind I picture it like a sequence from Mike Leigh’s 70s classic.

It is true that Rowan Atkinson stayed at the big house on Windmill Lane in the 70s. His friend, Richard, was none other than screenwriter Richard Curtis, whose family lived at the big house, Merricourt, then.

Richard’s father was a top executive at Unilever. Wikipedia says Richard attended Appleton Grammar School, now Bridgewater High. Local sources tell me he didn’t, although his brother and sister did. Can anyone confirm this?

Anyway, Richard Curtis met Rowan when they were students at Oxford.

When I last wrote a column about Richard years ago I was contacted by the man who was Mr Curtis senior’s driver at Unilever.

He confirmed that on a number of occasions he escorted the future scriptwriter and comedian friends to the house in Appleton.

The pair worked together first on Not the Nine O’Clock News before they gave the world Blackadder and then Mr Bean.

In the early days of their partnership, Richard acted as Rowan’s straight man on stage.

Being the butt of Atkinson’s jokes – which he had written – must have seemed like an act of masochism for Curtis, particularly as Atkinson took all the laughs.

By his own admission, the naturally shy Curtis soon returned to his natural habitat – behind the scenes writing comedy scripts.

The experience however provided Curtis with material for his first feature film script, The Tall Guy. In it, Atkinson played the comedian while Jeff Goldblum took the role Curtis had occupied in real life.

It’s interesting to think that perhaps the seeds of the laughter Curtis and Atkinson later generated were sowed in that house in Appleton.