Things stepped up a gear when I was invited to review TV for The Times. Simon Jenkins was editor; Richard Morrison (terrific music critic and arts editor) was the chap who invited me. I took over from Sheridan Morley, and at first appeared just once a week on the arts pages (Friday). Over time this changed to Saturday, then became three times a week at the top of the listings page, with Matthew Bond doing the other two weekdays.

Television in the 1990s was of course largely confined to four terrestrial channels, but I can attest that there was an enormous amount of high quality, and I still recall stand-out dramas and documentaries from those years. This was the heyday of in-house BBC documentary-making, with the 40 Minutes strand, as well as Horizon and Inside Story. I also witnessed the exciting return of costume drama to the BBC (with Pride and Prejudice), after the head of drama had for some years actually – and astonishingly – banned it.

A couple of years into my working for The Times came a redesign of the paper so that on weekdays it fell into several sections. One of these was for features, and five columnists were hired for the front page of this section on different days of the week. John Diamond (Monday) wrote “Private Life”; Libby Purves (Wednesday) did “Working Life”. I was Tuesday. My column was “Single Life”, and I had more fun writing that column than was quite decent. I revelled in it. Having recently come out of a relationship, I had much to say about single life – from the earthy practicalities to the more existential issues.

When the section inevitably died, I survived on the OpEd page for quite a while until a new OpEd editor quite reasonably demanded the precious space for more serious pieces. I actually wept when editor Peter Stothard broke the news – but looking back I’m amazed that anyone tolerated me there for so long.

In the early days of the internet, can you believe there were people who just didn’t have a clue what was being talked about? Luckily for me, when The Times launched Interface, its weekly section on internet stuff, they decided to reflect the know-nothing sector of its readership by having me write a column called “Logged Off”, which was a record of my ongoing struggle – mostly just to get online at all, but then also to find anything of merit when I got there.

This was before Google, you understand. You had to buy printed website directories from W.H. Smith’s. When emails arrived there was a cock crow. I re-read these columns recently (a great aide-memoire) and I still laughed at the advice I was given from a reader about wrapping the telephone wire around a bookcase on the landing to improve my chances of making a connection – which sounded like patent nonsense but actually worked.

In 1996 the European Championships (football) were held in England, and a bright spark from the Sports department asked me to write about them from a non-sports-expert point of view. Having no knowledge of a subject, but writing about it anyway, has always been an attractive proposition for me: I love passing on incredibly well-known facts that are new to me. I appreciate the comic potential.

As it happens, I’ve written a whole book about this period in my life (Get Her Off the Pitch), so I shan’t go into it here. Suffice to say here that my four-year stint as a sportswriter was a stand-out period in my life. And it was great, just for once, to be on a winning team on a newspaper. Sport sells papers! The people running the department – Keith Blackmore and David Chappell – were incredibly professional! People love reading about it! And for a while I was truly part of that, filing 900 words from Old Trafford “on the whistle” along with the rest of the guys.