By Mike Costello BBC Radio 5live boxing correspondent

Hatton takes on Mayweather in Las Vegas on 8 December

Like their homes, their personalities are an ocean apart.

And by the time their five-city promotional tour hit London, Ricky Hatton knew most of Floyd Mayweather's script.

Mayweather sauntered into the cinema within the O2 Arena draped in a Union flag and $2m worth of diamonds, looking like the Bling Magazine's Fighter of the Year.

He declared that his British fans had persuaded him to cut short the retirement that never was. Are there really that many Brits called Dollar?

The self-styled "Pretty Boy" said he respects Hatton as a man but not as a fighter. "He's gotta earn my respect," he told me, "everyone he's fought has been over the hill."

Hatton's first salvo had come in the form of a short film shown on the huge screen behind the stage.

In the skit, Hatton is seen being given a dancing lesson at his gym in Denton, to howls of laughter from trainer Billy Graham and others leaning on the ropes.

I always said I wanted to go over there, have two or three fights to get used to it and then take on Mayweather. And now I'm being true to my word Ricky Hatton

As his tutor minces towards him, Hatton asks to be taught to dance going forwards, "because my opponent always goes backwards".

These are men unbeaten in 81 fights between them and their differences extend to the approach to training.

Mayweather says he never watches tapes of opponents, whereas Hatton has made it his business to monitor Mayweather's world title fights, "because he's been at the top for so long".

Talking to 5live, Hatton was candid in admitting he'd had the chance to take on Mayweather in the past but turned it down because it would have meant facing him first time out in the United States.

"I always said I wanted to go over there, have two or three fights to get used to it and then take on Mayweather," said Hatton. "And now I'm being true to my word."

The two camps were flown around on the same private jet and Graham told me how Mayweather, who's only part bad-boy despite his reputation, had joined him at the back of the plane for long chin-wags about boxing and the universe.

Graham echoes the feeling that too many observers regard Hatton's style as all-out, manic aggression sourced from the heart and not the head. As Hatton says: "A lot of fighters realise after they've been in with me that there's a bit of method to the madness."

For me, Mayweather has also been misjudged, dismissed as flashy, silky and showy but incapable of delivering excitement. Maybe he belongs in another era, when such skills were better recognised.

606: DEBATE This is a very intriguing fight and none of us will have an idea of how it's going to go until the fight is well on its way hurricane72

And maybe Hatton will drag from him an element we haven't seen, even if Mayweather welches on his promise to go toe-to-toe.

Tickets for the fight sold out within half an hour earlier this week. Already, 10,000 seats have been sold for closed circuit screenings in theatres and cinemas around Vegas.

It was a similar story ahead of Mayweather against Oscar de la Hoya back in May. And once again, HBO will produce a reality show across four episodes, this time called "Mayweather-Hatton 24/7".

The aim is clear: come fight time, there will be nobody in Britain or the US who doesn't know the fight is happening.

In a fight of such magnitude, Hatton has an opportunity to produce one of the great British victories. And there are parallels with Lloyd Honeyghan's upset win against Donald Curry in 1986, also at welterweight.

Curry, like Mayweather, was widely regarded as the world's best. He shared the Ring Magazine's Fighter of the Year award with Marvelous Marvin Hagler in 1985 - and the two were being lined up for a super fight.

Unlike Curry, Mayweather does not have a history of weight problems. And he's been campaigning at or above the welterweight division for two years.