The moment I remember most clearly is sitting in a tiny office in BBC TV Centre, Wood Lane, when I realised from the sudden widening of the producer’s eyes that there was no going back.

In October 1988, at the suggestion of my agent Linda Seifert, I had submitted an outline for a six-part supernatural serial to a BBC drama producer, Ruth Baumgarten. It was called Ghostwatch. The idea was about a TV journalist (a female Roger Cook, but thinner) teaming up with a scruffy but trendy psychical researcher to investigate a contemporary London haunted council house. It was to be a scary, gritty film drama in the style of the then-recent success, Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge of Darkness.