The story goes that one day Denis Compton handed his friend, the legendary sports journalist Reg Hayter, a suitcase full of unopened mail he could not bear to deal with. When Hayter opened them, he found a letter from the News of the World, offering Compton the handsome sum of £2,000 a year to write a column. Later in the same stack was another, curter letter from the same newspaper, explaining that some time had passed without a reply, and so the offer was being withdrawn.

“Denis,” Hayter told him, “you want looking after.”

How much of this tale was genuine, and how much confected? It’s hard to know for sure. But the ideological subtext of what goes into the Compton myth – and what stays out – is hard to ignore. When he died in 1997, the obituarists justifiably waxed on about the dashing batsman, the absent-minded genius, the bon viveur. Most, however, failed to mention his frequent statements in support of apartheid South Africa, a cause he pursued long beyond the point where it was fashionable or even acceptable. As the sports historian Professor Jeffrey Hill puts it: “The Compton legend was a comforting, reassuring image of what Britain could achieve by reasserting essentially conservative values.”

The Compton we remember today is thus essentially a palimpsest, a collage of various evocative pictures and memories, many of which have been placed in our eyeline for that specific purpose. And as we survey the current breed of stage-managed cricketing celebrities, with their PR strategies, premature autobiographies and fistfuls of endorsements, we can observe that in this respect, too, Compton was well ahead of his time.