I have a troubled relationship with Vernon Kay. Or at least I used to, when he was fronting T4. On our good days, he was a special-haired edifice of wicked good times, carved from a plasticine brick of Cool. He hurled himself out of the telly and into my arms, offering reassurance that this violent, seething, mendacious existence is nothing more or less than one big cheeky prank. When Vernon was treating me well, all would be resolved within the hour, each contestant in the benign gameshow of life would leave the stage with a good-sport smile, every band would get their five minutes, then it’d all be over; we’d get the bus to Bolton and have some chips. I was young, life was good, and the world was my soundstage.

Then came the shame. It would come in the night, when your well-behaved T4 viewer should be tucked up in their single bed, staring moonily but asexually at the Colin Farrell poster on the ceiling. I would dream of a twenty-foot Vernon stamping destructively through a post-apocalyptic world where all that survives is banter. I would join and leave Vernon-dedicated Facebook groups at lightning speed, terrified that the Youth Police were going to come round and take my hard drive. ‘Vernon Kay is a Twat.’ ‘Vernon Kay is the best thing on telly.’ ‘I want to have Vernon Kay’s babies.’ ‘Vernon Kay should have been sterilised at birth.’ I used to sit, whey-faced in front of a blank telly, imagining Vernon’s beautiful hair growing and growing and growing until his smile was concealed and he became a six foot four Cousin It, but a friendly one, who’d give big hairy hugs and leave you smelling of serum and shampoo and man.

This wild confusion was born of shame. Not just Vernon-shame, but T4-shame. At the height of mine and Vernon’s sado-masochistic broadcast relationship, I was nearly 21. I wasn’t hormonal, I was post-hormonal. I was at the stage of life where all endocrine processes should have been cancelled out by a surplus of mid-priced liquor, where ambition ruled and the future was a land of Finals and houses and tax. No, T4 – I can’t come to your beach party. I’m off to Courchevel for a drunken yet aspirational skiing holiday with a bunch of future-centred uni chums. But still I tuned in, Sunday mornings, Friends, Gwen Stefani, Vernon, June, and a pummelling sense of dangerously arrested personal development.