At dinner a couple of weeks ago, I was sitting next to one of the most powerful women ever to have worked in British television. We hadn’t met before (being so powerful, she had men to protect her from people like me) but got along famously, chatting and drinking and bitching about all the incompetent clowns we have worked with over the years, when talk turned to future projects and I described to her a new series which had been pitched to me that day and supposedly green-lit by a major terrestrial channel, in which I and another bloke . . .

She laughed.

She laughed and laughed and laughed.

And I didn’t have to ask why. I knew why. And so do you. Two