I've had dealings with television executives on both sides of the Atlantic whose vision for a show differed from mine, but on each occasion it all came down to a simple choice. Do I prostitute my vision for a fast buck or do I stop the process and put my beloved script back in the drawer and wait for its time to come? As I write this, my bottom drawer is bulging with scripts that saw the light of day briefly and came under sustained attack before being rescued from the brink of whoredom. Why? Because I'm an artist, not a fucking arse licker.

During my time at EastEnders (1985), I wrote almost two hundred episodes. My chest still bulges with pride at every single one of them, reaching out to an audience of 20 million-plus in its heyday still gives me a hard on.