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Here’s Dolly Parton, busy running “The Best little whorehouse in Texas.” An adaptation of the 1978 Broadway musical of the same name and featuring an ensemble cast that included Burt Reynolds, the film dates from a period in her life when country music’s biggest selling star was forging a concurrent movie career.

Now in her 70th year, Miss Parton is noticeably slimmer these days and facially unrecognizable to me as a result of all those nips and tucks. A great shame, because she had the sweetest of faces, but such are the regrettable demands of public scrutiny and the need to maintain a youthful, energetic stage persona,

A songwriter of some considerable note, it appears ridiculous – at least to me – that she should continue enduring crippling back pain onstage, a complaint caused by decades of hauling around her weighty breast implants. She admits her first crush was for a Tennessee hooker, explaining: “I thought she was beautiful. She had more hair, more colour, more everything.”

I last saw her in performance on the BBC at Glastonbury in 2014. There again, was the inescapable thought that her outgoing and effervescent personality was merely a mask behind which hides a childless woman dogged by controversy over aspects of her private life.

All rather sad really…………………………