YOU can tell a Yorkshireman, but you can’t tell him much, except when he’s a fellow Yorkshireman. Then he just might listen, especially when Geoffrey Boycott is pontificating on Yorkshire’s national sport of creekit on a Friday night in Harrogate.

Metronomic England batsman turned pugilistic radio and TV pundit, Sir Geoffrey has long sat atop his high horse, but now we know why he’s so high.

BBC cricket correspondent/sparring partner/lion tamer Jonathan Agnew had taken to the Royal Hall stage already with that slightly apologetic air he has for such a tall man, when he let the grouchy lion out of his cage.

Boycott entered with what looked like a briefcase but turned out to be a particularly high cushion.

Sir Geoffrey doesn’t deal in comfort, however. He deals in the discomfort of others, and nothing has been more uncomfortable this winter than England’s Ashes debacle. Boycott duly ran through captain Cook’s hapless side, much like Mitchell Johnson had done before him.

He has so many stock phrases now – often involving his mother and sticks of rhubarb – that last Friday’s audience was invited to play Boycott Bingo, dabber at the ready for each Boycottism.

Yet Boycott is never predictable beyond those default chunters; he is an original thinker, outspoken, but often mischievously so, bluntly witty and, yes, invariably right. Perish the thought, he is even showing signs of humility in his seventies to counter the self-righteousness.

Regrets? He’s had a few, he said, especially how he wishes he had never become Yorkshire captain. Others might well agree with him.

The Test Match Special relationship that works so well on the airwaves is better still as a live double act; inquisitor Aggers playing both headmaster and school tease to the bullish Boycott if he over-steps the PC boundary, as he did on a couple of occasions.

The partnership has so much give-and-take humour that it was a bizarre decision to add southern comedian/cricket fan Andy Parsons for the second half’s question-and-answer session.

A village green medium-pace plodder, Parsons was an unnecessary, unfunny distraction from Boycott and Aggers’ combative chemistry.