For my tenth birthday I was bought the script book of the first series and I’m fairly certain it was a revelation that people on television weren’t just making it up as they went along. A decade ago I took a play to the Edinburgh festival involving two blokes sat on a sofa talking nonsense and it was the beginnings of a career as a professional writer. It would not be overstating the case to suggest that, were it not for that gift, I wouldn’t be writing this now.

Bottom seems to take place in a kind of post-apocalyptic universe where literally everyone is awful. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king and somehow Richie and Eddie seem positively lovable in the face of the horrors they are subjected to from the outside world.

If the world of the show seems divorced from reality, so does the television landscape of the early 1990s when viewed from a quarter of a century on. There is such a thing as the tyranny of too much choice and there are days when I feel nostalgic for the limiting qualities of just four channels. At that time, Friday night was Bottom night and it was that simple.