Carl Tanner is in danger of going hoarse. The 53-year-old opera singer has been racing to the end of an anecdote from his youth, about having a gun put to his head by a policeman who had mistaken him for a drug dealer – itself an adjunct to one involving him busting a crooked lawyer by burying himself undercover – when he runs out of breath.

“I know,” Tanner chuckles, holding his hands up. “Totally crazy. You really couldn’t have written my life.”

It’s true, even the most flagrant imagination would deem the arc of Tanner’s story improbable. For the past 25 years he has steadily risen to become one of America’s foremost dramatic tenors, appearing as leading man in productions around the world, including at the Bolshoi in Moscow, the Metropolitan Opera in New York and Milan’s La Scala. Before that, however, he made his living in an altogether less glamorous fashion: as a truck driver by day and bounty hunter by night. In the modern parlance of television talent shows, Tanner’s ‘journey’ is like none other.