The latest in a string of high profile visitors to the city so far this year gave a very entertaining talk in Liverpool last night.
I almost didn't make it to the Sir Jonathan Miller lecture at Liverpool Uni.
The traffic was bad, the weather was worse, and the parking arrangements were less than clear to say the least.
I have to admit there was a point - rather damp and annoyed - when I almost gave up.
Luckily though I didn't.
It wasn't quite as brain-achingly cerebral as the Archbishop of Canterbury, but within seconds of him starting talking it was obvious we were in the presence of a massive and searching intellect.
Miller's talk was titled "under the influence".
I suspect most of the huge audience in the lecture theatre had come wanting to hear stories about his time Beyond the Fringe and in the world of theatre and opera.
But much of the evening was actually spent listening to his bubbling enthusiasm for all things medical and scientific.
When someone asked if he could have all the money he ever wanted to direct a play or opera, which one would it be, he pooh poohed the idea and said what he'd really like to do was take a job at University College looking at brain damage. For no salary.
His father was one of the pioneering founders of British child psychiatry, and gently encouraged the young Jonathan into the sciences by the judicious dropping of books on biology into his bedroom.
At school the young Miller was apparently fascinated with animals that had a front and rear end and a forward motion, along with the central nervous system, while his friend Oliver Sachs was obsessed with octopi!
When he switched from the classics to sciences aged 14, his headmaster pointed out he may discover a new illness but he'd never be able to name it.
Sir Jonathan was all set for a career in medicine when in his words, "a person from Porlock" (a la Samuel Taylor Coleridge), arrived in the form of John Bassett and suggested the idea of Beyond the Fringe.
And the rest is history.
Miller was distracted from medicine by the Edinburgh Festival, then a long run in London, then the lure of Broadway.
And he never went back.
He says he used a lot of what he learned in medicine, especially with regards to human behaviour, in his directing over the years.
But he admitted he never goes to the theatre or opera himself.
He's also a voraceous reader of philosophy, particularly that which seeks the truth through humour, although he prefers Wittgenstein and J L Austin to what he dismisses as the "impenetrable gibberish" of French philosophising.
But it wasn't all bookish expounding.
He also told the story of how he first saw Peter Cook, doing a sketch about the Titanic, which impressed him enormously.
And there was a hilarious impersonation of Sir Laurence Olivier with whom he worked on the Merchant of Venice, and whom told the Jewish Miller: "We must at all costs avoid offending the Hebrews, I do love them so."
Olivier was persuaded out of the prosthetic nose, but not out of the £1,000 of fake dental work he had done.
As Miller said: "I didn't have the courage to say 'Larry, drop the teeth.'"
Next up in these Liverpool Uni lectures is (Miller's words not mine!) "born again atheist" Richard Dawkins.
Apparently so many people have applied for tickets they are going to have to hold the lecture in the Philharmonic Hall.
As Miller quipped, "Why not the cathedral?"
A priceless free night out.
