He delivered a baby in the park, put lipstick on a corpse and threw away a Picasso ... honest!

ON A trek to the North Pole, he punched a polar bear on the nose to scare it away from his tent.

During an expedition to the Venezuelan rainforest, he survived a plane crash after his light aircraft was forced to ditch. And he still harbours dreams of going to Mars, after training as a cosmonaut with the Russian Space programme.

But these aren’t the most improbable boasts of 83-year-old Brian Blessed ... not by a long way.

■ PICASSO gave the 13-year-old Brian a signed drawing of a dove, when the artist was appearing at a congress in Sheffield in 1950. Young Brian was unimpressed. ‘That’s not

a dove,’ he said, and dropped the priceless squiggle on the floor. It was rescued and now hangs in an art gallery.

■ A KEEN amateur actor in his teens, he financed his studies as an undertaker’s assistant at 35 shillings (£1.75) a week. His actor’s make-up came in handy when one corpse turned green: ‘I applied a layer of No.9 to his face and some lipstick, and made him look rather lovely.’

■ HE HELPED to deliver a baby in London’s Richmond Park in 1963, biting through the umbilical cord. ‘My shirt was covered in blood, I was saying “It’s all right, darling” and I was licking the baby’s face.’

■ HE WAS approached by the BBC in 1966 to replace William Hartnell in Doctor Who. Busy with other roles, Brian turned it down, and Patrick Troughton was eventually cast as the Second Doctor.

■ AGED 78, he collapsed on stage while playing King Lear. After a cup of sweet tea and a brief rest, he resumed the play — and was rushed to hospital after the curtain call to have a pacemaker fitted.

■ THE Dalai Lama promised him that his brother Alan Blessed, who was dying from leukaemia, would be reborn as a fisherman. Ten years later, Brian was filming in Canada, where he met a family whose son was the living image of Alan as a child. The boy’s father was a fisherman.

■ HIS boyhood hero was the mountaineer George Mallory, and Brian has tried three times to climb Everest as Mallory did, without oxygen. He has never made the peak but in 1993, aged 67, he got within 900 ft of the summit before turning back to save another climber’s life.

■ IN 1958, he and Agatha Christie became friends while he was rehearsing for her play Spider’s Web. She invited him to call her Clarissa. ‘Her knowledge of poisons made me laugh,’ he says.

NB: The source for all these stories is Mr Blessed. No claims are made as to their veracity.