Laurel and Hardy looked on. No one was playing the organ, but someone was playing the xylophone and someone else was on vibes. And a lot of people were taking in the “retro” air.

While diners ate in the orchestra pit, up in the circle, barman Jamie Campbell was dishing out the Zombies, Old Cubans and Tuxedos.

The Daffodil in Suffolk Parade is a cultural landmark in Cheltenham and Gloucestershire.

It is a bar and restaurant in a 1922 picture palace. You have your aperitifs (or “curtain-raisers”) in the leather tub chairs of the circle balcony bar where barman Jamie, half-Scottish by blood and an old Cuban lookalike by bearded appearance, tempts you with his Silver Screen Sparklers and Cliffhangers.

“A Tuxedo cocktail was invented in 1889 at the New York club where I believe a certain gent called Griswald Lorillard first wore the tailless dinner jacket,” he said, putting his wrists to good use.

“A Tux is made from gin, dry vermouth and absinthe,” he rattled on.

“The Widow’s Kiss – elegant, attractive but dangerous – came from Manhattan’s Holland House Hotel.

“It combines apple brandy with Chartreuse and Benedictine.”

On a good day you can see the finishing line of Prestbury Park racecourse

Before my Double Gloucester souffle and monkfish and mussel curry, I went for an Oliver Reed.

Jamie shook up some vodka and Manzanilla sherry and added Tabasco, house spice mix, Worcester sauce and tomato juice.

For the second reel and the finale I had chef Tom Gains’s Popcorn Pannacotta with a Charlie Chaplin sloe gin and apple brandy digestif, which made me contract a bout of ‘the talkies’ and waddle for a while like a little tramp.

The first film shown in the town cinema in its antique shop Montpelier district was the now lost Thunderclap with Mary Carr. In its heyday, the ladies’ powder room had machines dispensing spritzer perfumes.

The Art Deco cinema closed in 1953 with a screening of Cape Fear starring Gregory Peck.

It became a bingo hall and then an antique furniture emporium before re-opening as a “fine dining option”, complete with backstage kitchen, original projectionist room equipment and, in the terrazzo mosaic foyer, the UK’s first – and therefore oldest – arm-restless cinema ‘kissing seats’.

The Daffodil has weekly Saturday lunchtime jazz sessions and, during the Cheltenham Arts Festival (which lasts until March 30), has evening jazz concerts.

Chippenham’s very own Jamie Callum played on of his first professional gigs at the converted cinema.

Walking tours of the famous Regency West Country spa town start every Saturday at 11am from the “Wilson” (art gallery and museum) and take in the 1902 Town Hall, built to commemorate the coronation of Edward VII and now staging regular stand-up comedy, concerts, clairvoyance eveningsand tea dances.

The tour takes you past the Ladies’ College, the cricket ground that hosts a July festival, the town crescents and park, and its oldest Tudor building, in Cudnall Street, Charlton Kings.

Cheltenham became the place to go after King George III visited in 1788.

The Cotswolds (from “sheep pens” and “rolling hills”) stretches 790 square miles, has three national nature reserves, 3,000 miles of public footpaths, the 102-mile Cotwolds Way, the medieval “wool churches” of Northleach and Chipping Campden amd the world’s tallest gravity-fed fountain at Stanway House.

It has historic houses like Owlpen Manor, Sudeley Castle near Winchcombe, the National Trust’s Chastleton House, the Roman villa at Northleach, the wildflower grasslands at Cleeve Common, your fill of hill forts and long barrows and, of course, 6,437 kilometres of dry stone walls.

The person who measured them all must have needed to down a double Oliver Reed after that ordeal.

As well as the Italianate gardens of the 18th century Bicot Park estate, which boasts Rembrandt and Burne-Jones in its art collection, there are other famous gardens such as Kiftsgate, Hidcote Manor and Painswick Rococo.

Poet John Betjeman thought Cheltenham ‘lovely’ and ‘romantic in the extreme’

The best viewpoints are from Tog Hill, Broadway Tower folly and the bath of the Istabraq suite of the five-star Ellenborough Park Hotel, just outside Cheltenham.

On a good day and with a good pair of binoculars , you can lie in your free-standing rolltop and from your own area of not very outstanding beauty, see the finishing line of Prestbury Park racecourse. The hotel suites are named after horsey legends like Arkle and Kauto Star.

Jonjo O’Neill’s nearby stables at Jackdaw Castle in Temple Guiting offers tours during which you can rub shoulders with jockeys and watch the horses in their washdown bays and solariums. They have three. Ellenborough Park only has a small Jacuzzi.

But, with its classic/contemporary mix, oriel windows, turrets and towers, Great Hall, Indian marble, oak panelling and David Kelman’s Beaufort Restaurant, the former residence of a governor-general of India is the best place to be based for the festival, as well before and after it.

During the world-famous Cheltenham racing festival (held from March 10 to 13 this year) the grounds become one of the busiest helipads in the world. A quarry had to be reopened to provide stone for the refurbishment of the hotel four years ago.

Prestbury Park is a mile away, set in a natural amphitheatre under Cleeve Hill, the tallest peak in the Cotswolds.

Originally the Gold Cup was run over the flat before jumps in 1924. It is the richest non-handicap race on the calendar and this year will be held on March 13. Tickets are already sold out.

The area boasts other great manor house hotels like Buckland, Lucknam Place, Whatley and Greenway.

There are wonderful old pubs like the Lamb Inn at Great Rossington, Ship Inn on the Stroudwater Cabal, Old Swan at Lechlade, the Bathurst Arms on the Churn river at Lower Cerney and gastro-pubs such as The Swan at Southrop, which has a skittle alley and whose menu boasts crayfish from the local gravel pits.

But Cheltenham should be your base.

The poet John Betjeman thought it “ lovely” and “romantic in the extreme”.

The birthplace of composer Gustav (The Planets) Holst, the Poet Laureate viewed Cheltenham Spa as the place where “links with the Empire held fast”.

Although these days, visitors come more for the craic and the film-star cocktails than the sodium sulphate saline.

They’d rather tuck in to their Tuxedos than take the waters.

www.escapetothecotswolds.org.uk

www.visitcheltenham.com