I still watch T4. Not every week, and I try not to text in as much as I used to. But now, aged 24, I will watch that damned show openly and proudly, like the mother defiantly breastfeeding her six-year-old in Waitrose.

What changed it for me, what made it suddenly OK, was Miquita Oliver. More specifically, discovering that Miquita Oliver and I are the same age. Seriously, we were born within days of each other, we were gestating together, if only we’d known it. We might have passed each other on trollies in the maternity wing, her on the way to a life of pop-tastic, sun-kissed ebullient fabulousness, me on my way to school, then university, then work, then boredom, then death (for such are the options open to those who lack the gift of telly). Knowing this, seeing my precise contemporary on screen being a bit flirty with Tony Blair, turned T4 from a yoof-tastic guilty pleasure of a magazine show into something more genuinely, solidly aspirational. If Miquita can enjoy life that much, then so can I.

The T4 team portray early adulthood as a sort of childhood-plus (adolescence need never come into it). We can still frolic and roll and hug like puppies, but oh, look, there’s an innuendo, there’s a surprisingly insightful reference to the Young Conservatives, and there’s an episode of Friends we’d long since forgotten. We’re growing up without losing the primary coloured innocence of a ten-year-old, we’re paying taxes with a wink and a smile, to the sound of Gwen Stefani’s latest. My dream night out involves me and the T4 gang, who will always have the same company spirit, no matter how the cast changes. We’ll romp in a ball pond for a while, then get tipsy at Nando’s and make some prank calls to members of the Shadow Cabinet. It’s adulthood, but not as we’re forced to know it.

If T4 eased me into adulthood with a cheery backwards glance, then it was another show which made me happy to be a grown-up, happy in a ‘yes, it’s a good world, I can really do something with this’ sort of a way. It was the most serious, least flashy show I’ve ever truly loved – Operatunity. From the winning clumsiness of the title-pun to that final, triumphant night at the Coliseum, Operatunity showed the warmth, compassion and genuine hope with which reality television can be made, and so seldom is. The format rang alarm bells, of course – untrained singers do opera on telly, judges give feedback, There Can Only Be One Winner, leave your dignity at the door and let your dreams be pounded to pieces before the altar of light entertainment. But that wasn’t Operatunity’s style. Only the truly gifted were invited to audition, the feedback was kind, and we were privileged to see hearts and voices expand before us under the passionate, professional tutelage of some real opera folk. It was a fabulous shock to see a camera cut tastefully away from a tear-stained face – a far cry from the common tactic of shoving the lens right in there like a snout, as Kate Thornton pricks the weeper with a pin and holds up photos of dead puppies. And then the finale – God, the finale. That hour of air-punching, sofa-smashing, joyful-howling transcendence when our winners, Denise and Jane, shared the role of Gilda in Rigoletto. We didn’t really care who they were. Their supermarket jobs and young families and disabilities and very British struggles weren’t even the point, they’d just done their new jobs as singers, and done them as well as we’d all hoped.