A version of the following correction is published in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Thursday 13 May 2010 The column below referred to the "psychotic personality of a long-range military sniper". The Guardian's style guide states that terms such as psychotic should be used only in a medical context.

So the other day I had to appear on live television several times throughout the evening, as the polls closed and the votes were counted and my guts turned to cold cream. Not because of the exit poll (although that was pretty depressing), but because appearing on live television is so profoundly scary.

Since most of my contributions were prerecorded, I didn't have to do much except turn up, state my name and introduce some VTs – but nevertheless the fact remains that you, sir, are on LIVE TELEVISION.

And this does very strange things to your brain. Having lived through the experience, I can now only assume that every single one of the nation's favourite live telly faces has the ice-blooded, psychotic personality of a long-range military sniper. That nice Christine Bleakley? Bet she could emotionlessly blast a hole through your forehead while linking to a report on wind farms.

On the morning itself, I was fine. I'd been up until 5am in an edit suite, where we were cutting one of the VT packages I'd written (to make two of them, totalling just over eight minutes, took roughly 40 hours; viewers, of course, are blissfully unaware of the slog involved, and often assume it takes as long to create something as it does to watch it). Therefore I was too knackered to really think about the LIVE aspect of the LIVE show that I was taking part in.

It was only during a cautionary pre-broadcast talk from the lawyer that it began to sink in. The lawyer's job is to remind you not to say anything libellous or illegal while the camera's pointing at you, because, y'know, it's live. As he ran through an exhaustive list of things that could potentially go wrong, my mind began to cry.

Five minutes before the broadcast, I suddenly realised I couldn't see properly. Or rather, I could see perfectly well – objects and surfaces and people and all that – but nothing I looked at made sense. At one point, I stared at my shoe and wondered if it was real. Just as a spider in a bathtub will repeatedly run up the sides yet inexorably slide back to the same spot, my brain pounced in all sorts of oblique directions but always returned to the same thought: you are about to die.

All of which means that, by the time you walk out in front of an audience, in front of a camera, you aren't really "you" any more, but a vaguely human-shaped cloud of screaming nerves. This is actually quite a useful state of mind: you essentially become someone else. And since whatever's happening is no longer happening to you, an eerie calm descends.

Not for long, though. As the countdown begins, a comprehensive list of fears spools through your head. Your primary concerns, in order of repulsion: 1 You might vomit with sheer terror while everyone's looking.

2 You might snap and start bellowing obscenities or gibberish or violent threats against named individuals until a cameraman has to physically wrestle you to the floor. Trust me, given the addled mindstate you work yourself into, this is not as unlikely as it appears on paper.

3 There might be a technical hitch that forces you to fill in, live, without a script. (Later, backstage, Armando Iannucci told me that halfway through the 1997 Election Night Armistice – which has to rank as one of the best live TV comedy events of all time – he looked at the camera to discover his autocue was completely blank. "The VT's gone down," said a producer in his ear. "Just talk for two minutes." So he did. Because he had no choice. "It's amazing what comes out," he told me.

In the event, I got through my first weeny link without a hitch. But moments before doing my second link, much later in the night, something completely unexpected happened. I did a piss.

Only a little one – a mere eighth of a teaspoon at most – but nevertheless: I did a piss. Not backstage either, but right there on the set, nanoseconds before I was due to start speaking. Fortunately, I was wearing black trousers and sitting down so I got away with it, but inside my head it was pure nuclear war. You see, by that point I'd largely managed to convince myself that the nervous energy I was experiencing was actually just excitement in disguise. The micropiddle was my body's way of reminding me that, even if my head deluded itself, the rest of me was still petrified.

Do rookie news anchors piss their pants on day one? Did Phillip Schofield launch his career by soiling the broom cupboard chair? If you'd asked me a week ago, I'd have said no. Now I'm not so sure.

It didn't end there. Later, I had to take part in a brief roundtable discussion during which I realised my hands were now urinating.

Well, kind of: they were virtually pissing sweat. And although my vision had sorted itself out, my hearing was now proving troublesome (everything everyone said sounded like an incomprehensible jumble of vowels). It really is amazing how the human brain responds to high-stress situations. Specifically, it's amazing how it conspires to mess you up.

What with all that self-indulgent terror coursing through my veins, I hardly had time to digest the outcome of the election itself, which started out depressing before turning deeply weird. So weird, in fact, that I'm becoming convinced I actually died of a heart attack during my first live piece to camera, and am dreaming all of this on my way to the afterlife.

Cameron suggesting a Lib Dem coalition? Naaah. That's the Twilight Zone.