The bouncing racket isn’t what it used to be. I know a prince among doormen whose scrupulously buffed size 12s once deposited gangland toughs and belted earls alike onto the pavements of Soho. Ted Westfallen, an ex-con, rescued Francis Bacon from a mugging outside Ted’s gaming joint in the 1960s. Bacon repaid the favour by treating Ted to a slap-up fish dinner and introducing him to the finer things in life. Ted is one of only half a dozen people still alive who were painted by Bacon, though he knew nothing about it. It was only after Ted’s son – in the muscle business himself – handled security at a big fight weigh-in in Trafalgar Square and noticed a Bacon exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery on his way from the Tube that the full extent of Ted’s role in Bacon’s life and oeuvre came to light.

Ted, eighty-three, can remember every scrap he’s been in: how he fetched ‘my little truncheon’ to sort out Bacon’s attackers; how he had enough of Bacon’s leech-like muse George Dyer and gave him a seeing-to behind the bins at Wheeler’s, among the empties and the fish heads. The security game has none of that éclat any more, none of that dignity. 

Now every pub in every market town seems to have a bloke in an overcoat on the door on Friday and Saturday nights. Sure enough, What the Bouncer Saw features a provincial Wetherspoons. But it is glimpsed only in passing, as a crocodile of university lecturers process to a graduation