Riding the Midnight Express with Billy Hayes

Billy Hayes: former hashish smuggler, runaway convict and thespian to the core. Famous for spending seven years in a Turkish jail on drugs smuggling charges, escaping and making his way across stormy seas and inhospitable countryside to Greece and freedom. Now he performs his own story.

It's a cracking yarn, and one that has been told twice before: once by Billy Hayes himself in his 1976 memoir, Riding the Midnight Express, and once in a 1978 film adaptation with a script by Oliver Stone. The film version, however, as Hayes makes abundantly clear, shares only a passing resemblance to his own story. The Turks were much nicer – he never made an anti-Turkish courtroom speech. There was a romance, but with a man.

And crucially, his flight was far more thrilling, involving running through woods, dodgy disguises and pretty much everything that's ever featured in a boys own adventure story, including a night-time row in a dinghy. Hayes is particularly put out about the omission of the dinghy: "It was in that little boat," he says, somewhat evangelically, "I felt a man again, with my life in my own hands."

Hayes is a terrific raconteur. Do stay for the question and answer session. If you're lucky, you'll find out some fascinating cultural titbits about the Turkish jail system.

Truth, they say, is stranger than fiction. And when film budgets don't stretch to escape sequences, it can be a darn sight more exciting too.