I’m keen on a Plan B. My father, Norman the Knicker King, reared us in trembling terror of ending up ‘on Carey Street’ (erstwhile home of the bankruptcy court). So when Channel 5’s sparkling Vanessa succumbed to the noxious pestilence imperilling terrestrial TV, I blithely announced a rapid renaissance. I would simply launch a spanking-new show, At Home with Vanessa, on YouTube – a territory already staked out by telly titans Piers Morgan, Ant and Dec and Holly Willoughby. Speedily, I whisked up the notion of converting my living room into a studio, marshalling the punchiest TV peeps I know into a team, conjuring a format from thin air and plunging in.

Cousin Beverley recommended the crack building squad whose arcane arts imbued her Mill Hill semi with a Rotherhithe warehouse vibe. Igor and I shook hands. His chaps took pickaxes to my ceiling. I stood, Aeneas-like, among the rubble wondering if I should have said ‘Yes’ to I’m A Celebrity?

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For nearly six and a half decades I’ve stifled entrepreneurial urges. Watching my dad keening over boxes of unsold peach nylon baby-doll nighties annihilated any desire to risk a........

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