Actually, up until The Tube, I’d never realised, properly, that bands could sound different to the way they did on record. Duran Duran were ropey, to say the least. Terence Trent D’Arby was stunning. Madonna performing Holiday at The Hacienda (just up the road!) was ace, though the reaction of the Mancunian crowd was typically snotty. Still, if I was honest, it was the interviews I looked forward to. Jools Holland and Paula Yates were gifted presenters, in an unselfconscious way you rarely see any more. They weren’t styled (Holland always looked terrible), they weren’t clever-clever, they were themselves. Jittery and caustic in the case of Holland, intelligent and disarming from Yates. With them at the helm The Tube couldn’t fail, no matter how hard some bands tried.

The other big show from the early Channel 4, for me, was Brookside. I’ve never got involved in another soap, before or since, but Brookside was different. For one major reason: it had the Grants. Bobby and Sheila, plus children scally Barry, stroppy Karen and kid Damon. I liked Karen the best: a Scouse version of Trisha from Grange Hill, big hair, big eyes (narrowed), big attitude. But they were all brilliant, the Grants, every one of them a flawed but likeable character, people who weren’t so far from yourself and dealt with similar problems. Though Brookside, these days, is mostly recalled for the high drama of the body under the patio, the lesbian kiss, the siege, it was all about the Grants for me. I even watched Damon and Debbie, the spin-off series where Damon eloped with his posh diabetic girlfriend to wind up stabbed in a hotel room in York. Moral? When working class and middle class meet, it’s not the bourgeois that end up suffering. Common People before Pulp.

Anyway, with The Tube, Brookside, The Comic Strip and Max Headroom’s pop-video show, Channel 4 was my channel, in a way that none of the other three were. I wasn’t particularly aware of the media furore around its output – ‘Channel Swore’ passed me by – but I could sense C4’s underlying ethos of mischief, snippiness and enthusiasm that chimed so well with my own teenage sensibility. In fact, I identified with Channel 4 so strongly that, up until writing this article, I was convinced that it was Channel 4, rather than ITV, that first broadcast throughout the night; and C4, rather than ITV, that gave us 24-hour telly people the joy of Night Network and the madness that was American Gladiators. (Grown men fighting with giant cotton buds! Alright!)