Former St Albans School student Professor Stephen Hawking was the surprise guest at the BAFTA awards ceremony in London last night.

He joined Felicity Jones, who starred as his wife Jane in the film The Theory of Everything, as a presenter at the awards held in the Royal Opera House.

And despite the fact that he uses a speech generating device after being diagnosed with a form of motor neurone disease when he was a young man, he still managed to crack a joke aimed at presenter Stephen Fry.

Professor Hawking, who wrote A Brief History of Time, met his first wife Jane, a pupil of St Albans High School, through his sister with whom she was a friend. The couple, on whose story The Theory of Everything is based, married in 1965.