Steve Rosenberg

I got a call saying, would you like to go on Russian TV's premiere comedy show?

It's called The White Parrot Club.

Basically, it involved various Russian celebrities sitting around every week telling each other jokes.

I present to you all...

Steve Rosenberg.

And this was a special edition devoted to British humour.

Very often, the white parrot club was filmed in a pub.

And there was a white parrot, I think, called Arkasha in a cage.

And apparently, I've heard that they used to let Arkasha out from time to time.

And he used to fly around the pub or the bar, landing on alcohol and drinking some of these drinks.

So the symbol of Russia is the double-headed eagle.

But my first experience of a bird in Russia was a tipsy parrot called Arkasha in the white parrot club.

Yeah.

Anyway, so we're sitting around in this Moscow bar and the president of the White Parrot Club, who was a huge star called Yuri Nikulin.

He was a famous clown in the Soviet Union.

He ran the Moscow Circus, a big film star.

He told the story of his World War II adventures and how Britain and the Soviet Union had been on the same side.

And it really felt as if we were on the same side, right?

And we were going to walk off into the sunset together, the West and Russia, and be friends forevermore.

And they asked me to sing a song.