Though, he adds, as with most such neat turns of phrase, nobody seems sure who said it first. One of the victors, presumably. Or perhaps it was one of the vanquished, only for a victor to overhear them and think, “I’m having that”.

On a similar tack, it also seems reasonable to conclude that advice is generally sought from, and delivered by, the successful. And that’s only logical really. You wouldn’t want your Ted talk on leadership and financial management to be delivered by Liz Truss.

But occasionally the discrepancy between the expertise of the adviser and the lack of expertise of the advised is so great as to be counterproductive. In the admittedly unlikely event that Lionel Messi decided to be my footballing mentor, naturally I’d be all ears.

Except the chasm between our relative skills and experience would be such that most of his guidance would be entirely wasted. In purely practical terms, I’d get way more out of a coaching session from a grizzled Lowland League centre half on how to nobble an opposing forward at a corner without the ref noticing.

It’s with that slightly shaky premise in mind that I take you through my experience of navigating the creative industries. Specifically, I can offer the perspective of someone whose achievements in said industries have been modest, infrequent and slow to arrive. In other words, the TV equivalent of a grizzled Lowland League centre half.

Here’s a quick summary of the story so far. I meandered my way through school and university, with reasonable success. I never had much idea of what I might do afterwards, though I always felt able to spot the things I didn’t want to do and cross them off an imaginary list. As there are a lot of different jobs in the world, this soon became quite a long imaginary list.

I meandered my way into a job, of a type that hadn’t yet made my imaginary list, and got promoted a couple of times. Without meaning to, I’d found my way into a vaguely responsible job that paid decent money. It was a pretty good place to work, all told, and I got on with most people. But for reasons I couldn’t fully pin down, it seemed to be edging its way ever closer to the imaginary list.

Off the back of the 2008 financial crash, our organisation committed to a programme of redundancies. Most people, sensibly enough, took fright at this and took steps to secure their positions. I took the view that whatever I wanted to do in the long term, it wasn’t this, so if someone was going to offer me a bit of cash to get on my bike, I’d be delighted to accept.

After all, I had no mortgage, no kids, no commitments. It didn’t really occur to me that I might end up with all those things at some point.

Gainfully unemployed, but with enough cash to get by for a while, I explored a few pipe dreams. I wrote a book; which people tell me is an achievement in itself. It’s not one that’s particularly straightforward to monetise though – especially if nobody publishes it.

Friends urged me to keep trying, usually citing the story of some author who had found a publisher after years of rejections and gone on to fame and fortune. But that all sounded exhausting and vaguely humiliating. And anyway, my book wasn’t very good. I stopped trying.

Slightly grumpy at the way that good things would stubbornly refuse to fall into my lap, I ended up in various bar and kitchen jobs, for which my enthusiasm usually exceeded my aptitude. I worked with a lot of people with degrees in drama or fine art. A specific episode of Spaced kept on coming to mind. I was pretty skint. Yet most of these jobs weren’t on – and still aren’t on – the imaginary list.

Come lockdown, a stroke of luck. While doomscrolling away, I meandered into an opportunity: a call for would-be question writers for a TV quiz show. I wrote a few sample questions, had a quick interview over Zoom, and suddenly I was writing for TV.

The strictures of writing creatively within largely inflexible quiz formats seem to suit my often flighty mind. It turns out I’m better at self-expression when the parameters are defined with absolute clarity by somebody else. This, I suspect, is why my questions are mostly good when my book was mostly not.

On occasion, I see people from my old work and allow myself a Sliding Doors moment, imagining what life might look like if I’d gritted my teeth, suppressed my instinct to escape and carried on working my way up the career ladder.

I’d have a bigger house, a generous pension and loads more suits. Was it worth giving all that up for years of late nights and low pay, just for the eventual (and infrequent) reward of seeing stuff I’ve written on prime time telly, or getting to meet Jeff Stelling?

Yes. Yes, it absolutely was. ■