Rick Wakeman getting (faux) grumpy at Christmas is becoming as regular an occurrence as train strikes and an annual shortage of turkeys – and is all the more welcome for it.

The former Yes man is a great storyteller but this special festive edition of Rick's Piano Show didn’t really feature hilarious tales from the topographic oceans of his long music career.

Instead, we had a series of stories about his home life, his six children and 13 grandchildren (he hates Christmas for this very reason, he joked) and a few one-liners about, among other things, the menopause, playing Father Christmas, life’s mysteries (why do kamikaze pilots wear helmets?), children’s views on marriage and, from lexicographer Susie Dent via Countdown, anagrams with the same meaning (mother-in-law = Hitler’s woman, anyone?).

But mostly, the audience had come for the music, and this, to all intents and purposes, was an old-fashioned piano recital – but not billed as such as I suspect the audience may have been smaller.

Wakeman shuffled on stage in an oversized dress suit, tee shirt and trainers with news that tour preparations had been disrupted when he lost a front tooth days before it commenced. Luckily, there was no singing.

He began with Amazing Grace and Morning Has Broken, the latter being his amazing arrangement of the Cat Stevens song which he claims he has never written down in case someone nicks it.

There were a couple of tracks from his latest album A Gallery Of The Imagination – Just A Memory and The Creek – and he explained it was based on the view of his oft-mentioned piano teacher Mrs Symes who said he should paint pictures with his music.

That’s all very well, if you’re in the know and can ‘see’ the image, but, for instance, the two tracks he performed from his old concept album The Six Wives of Henry VIII – Jane Seymour and Catherine Howard – could easily have been swapped and I’d have been none the wiser. The same goes for Merlin The Magician from King Arthur.

However, Wakeman is, of course, an amazing player – switching between grand and keyboards with ease and, such was the speed and dexterity of his art, it made me want to count his fingers to make sure he has the usual number.

It’s not bad for an old codger of 73 with arthritis – and anyone who orders a curry and eats it on stage in Manchester during one of Yes’s interminable instrumental breaks as some kind of protest is certainly ok by me.

Wakeman segued Wondrous Stories into a couple of carols, paid homage to the great rock organ legends Jon Lord and Keith Emerson with the old piano piece Gone But Not Forgotten and slung in a tune called Sea Horses.

He then notched things up a level with Bowie’s Space Oddity and Life On Mars (both of which originals he played on) before performing The Beatles’ Help in the style of French composer Saint-Saëns and channelling Prokofiev in Eleanor Rigby.

An encore of Silent Night ended proceedings. He’s a good egg, old Rick, and the build-up to Christmas just wouldn’t be the same without him. But I could have done with him mining that veritable goldmine of anecdotes a bit more twixt songs.