I’ve realised that my martyrdom in Marigolds is self-inflicted

They are a common phenomenon, the Odd Couple. The beautiful woman who dotes on a chap with the looks of a Jerusalem artichoke, half a head shorter than herself; the kind, charismatic man who radiates love for his plump, plainish, rather bossy wife. “What are those two doing together?” we wonder fretfully, as though, in a righteous world, the beautiful should love only each other, while the less well-favoured loiter together in a ghetto of ordinariness.

The alchemy of opposites is a subject considered by Griff Rhys Jones in his current solo stand-up show, in which he discusses his 30-year relationship with his comedy partner, Mel Smith. Known to their BBC colleagues as “Grumpy and Fatty”, they were an oddly assorted pair – Smith expansive in physique and temperament, a heroic drinker and gambler, while Rhys Jones, teetotal and inclined to solitude, was inevitably cast as the straight man.

In comedy, of course, a straight man is an indispensable element of a partnership – where would Pete have been without Dud, or Frasier without Eddie the dog? As in comedy, so in everyday life, where almost every successful bilateral relationship, from lovers to siblings to work colleagues, relies to some extent on a contrast of temperaments.

All this may sound tremendously reasonable in theory (especially when you consider the high attrition rate of relationships between two equally starry partners, of which Brangelina is only the most recent example). In practice, though, who would want to be the sensible one?

As children, we see ourselves as future princesses and superheroes. No one really starts out with ambitions to be the designated driver, or the one who makes sure that the whites wash doesn’t contain an errant pair of non-colourfast scarlet scanties. When I was little, I particularly detested the Bible story in which Jesus pops in to visit Martha and her sister, Mary. While Mary settles down at the Lord’s feet to hear his word, Martha bustles about, “cumbered with much serving”.

Eventually she gets fed up and has a little moan: “Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? Bid her therefore that she help me.” But instead of urging Mary to get cracking and pick up a tea-towel, Jesus tells Martha off for being “careful and troubled about many things”.

I think I felt the unfairness of this story so keenly because I already sensed that I was destined to be a Martha, my signature garment a pair of bright yellow Marigolds, while my more spiritual contemporaries dwelt on a higher plane, rising above such banalities as cooking and washing-up.

Then again, the great thing about mundane tasks is that they leave the mind free for contemplation, and after giving the matter a good deal of thought (while doing the ironing), it struck me that I wasn’t actually obliged to be the mechanic of the domestic engine. I do it because I’m good at it – but if I didn’t, we wouldn’t starve, and if we ran out of clean plates, we’d probably just go out to dinner.

As revelations go, it’s not exactly a thunderbolt. Still, if hubris is charisma’s toxin, martyrdom is the secret venom that lurks in self-sacrifice. Both are fatal to happiness whose secret, it strikes me, lies in the careful analysis – as performed with such grace by Griff Rhys Jones – of the alchemy of opposites.