He never got to find out because the man just tipped his hat to him and went on his way. But my bet is that the man was being honest.
He knew it was absurd, but still he would have loved to write Hamlet. For which of us does not harbour some unfulfillable fantasy?
Had the same presenter thrust a mike into my face at the age of, say, 7, I would have been unhesitating in my response. "I want to be Nick Hudson," I would have said.
For one thing, Nick Hudson was skinny, blond and brave, while I was a fat, red-headed coward. But for another, and every bit as importantly, he was left-handed. I longed to be left-handed. It had such cachet. It still does.
It's partly rarity, of course. One person in 10 is left-handed, and who doesn't want to be one in 10? (My only claim to one-in-10-ness is in the swimming pool.)
On a PE course with nine other white blokes many years ago, we were taught that nine out of 10 white males, if they lie inert in water, float. The 10th sinks.
Then we jumped into the deep end. When I opened my eyes it was to behold nine blokes dangling from the ceiling.
There were practical reasons to envy left-handers, one of which was cricket.
Left-handed slow bowlers naturally spin the ball away from right-handed batsmen. Better even than that, there is an elegance to a slow left-armer that the right-hander can only whistle at. The Indian leftie Bishan Bedi made bowling look like meditation.
Left-handed batsmen, too, have a casual ease I coveted. Their epitome was David Gower, an English cherub in flannels, an angel of the greensward. Sweaty, try-hard, right-handed, Australian fast bowlers swore at him and hurled the ball at his curls and he just stroked them to the fence without apparent effort. It was a form of magic.
And it's that last quality that is the essence of leftiness, the magic, the supernaturalness of leftism. Lefties have suffered prejudice because of it. All societies tend to shun the unusual, to repress it.
The Latin word for left is sinister, and it's also the Latin for unlucky. In English the word has gone further still: sinister in English means forebodingly evil. Beware the lefties. They are freaks with special powers.
Contrast the right. Right in Latin is dexter, giving us dexterity, a term of approval, a virtue. The French for right is droit, which gives us adroitness, also positive. But the English word right is the most potent of them all.
It means not only the flank that isn't left, but also the political right - smug, conservative, unimaginative defenders of the status quo.
Add to that right meaning correct, and right meaning some assumed privilege, and you can't fail to see a word that oozes self-confidence, smugness, a certainty of its own worth, like a television presenter.
Left meanwhile is revolutionary, seditious of good order, ambiguous, disconcerting to the conventional, everything the Hamlet-invoking man in the street embodied, and also, as far as I was concerned, Nick Hudson.
When I started smoking at 16 or so, I made a point of always holding the cigarette in the left hand. It felt fitting to leave the right out of it. It would not have approved.
Aged 10 or so, I made a brief effort to teach myself to write with the left hand. I thought if I could manage that then everything else would follow. No good of course. The letters looked huge and kindergartenish, hopeless.
It was like trying to write Hamlet. I soon relinquished the effort. But never the dream.
