Why Andrew Sachs is grateful to Ross and Brand

Andrew Sachs is best known for playing a waiter from Barcelona – but there is nothing Spanish about him. The actor was in fact born in Germany, to a Jewish father and a gentile mother. Hitler had come to power when he was three, and as far as the young Sachs was concerned, the Nazi dictator was a fine man and an inspirational leader.

Then Sachs saw a Charlie Chaplin film and, as he told Simon Hattenstone in the Guardian, immediately "switched allegiances. I thought, 'This man's funny. I never see Hitler laugh. He doesn't make any jokes.'"

In 1938, Sachs witnessed Kristallnacht; his father was briefly arrested by the SS, and the family fled to London. Having been through all that, it's unsurprising that Sachs, despite reports to the contrary, wasn't particularly perturbed by 'Sachsgate' – when Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand left a series of lewd comments about his granddaughter, Georgina, on his answering machine.

The truth was, Sachs wasn't close to his granddaughter, and had a fairly good idea of the sort of life she was leading. The real shock was finding himself at the centre of a media storm - and that, he says, has worked to his advantage. "I came out of it very well. My profile's up. Great! They did me good. Thank you very much!" ·