Now I like to think the channel really began in 1989, when TVOntario commissioned me to investigate how a book show might fly in Canada.

I phoned around. I asked several authors how they felt about being on the box. The early results of this poll told me that TV appearances are more taxing for writers than for ordinary people. Martin Amis said he’d always hated it: "It’s the fear of disgracing yourself. I used to want to smoke to calm my nerves, but I’d end up pinching my cigarette between my knees because I didn’t dare hold up my shaking hands in front of the camera. Then one day my interviewer said, 'Excuse me, Mr. Amis, for interrupting, but your trousers are on fire.’" Ian McEwan revealed, with characteristic spleen, “I always feel a pot of tea is halfway down my cock.”

John Irving recalled for me his time on the Dick Cavett Show. Cavett’s reliance on research cards for questions and factoids so enraged him he demanded whether the host had actually read his book. Well, no, said Cavett, actually, not yet. (Irving digressed at this point to describe the other guest on that episode, Blondie’s Debbie Harry, who’d fallen asleep on his shoulder, her face, he said, the ectoplasmic green of a bottle of Chardonnay when you look at it through the heel. I relate this to make the point that rock stars get nervous on TV too, but have fewer compunctions than most authors about resorting to drugs for relief.) Irving walked off the set. "If the ignorant, pretentious prick had admitted to it before the show began," he told me, "I would have understood – you can’t be expected to read everything – but putting on that blithe, sophisticate act of his really made me want to puke."

John Updike, meanwhile, called appearing on TV “a truly raffish experience – to be in the same hospitality suite on Good Morning America as Mel Tormé and the woman who has given birth to sextuplets! I like it and I do it once a year.”

Nonetheless, getting books on the air – not to mention their authors – was evidently going to be rough.

I happened to be taking a European holiday that summer and looked up Bernard Pivot in Paris. His world-famous programme, Apostrophes, was in its second decade and so successful it commanded a special “Books of the Week” table in almost every bookstore in France; it was accessible in quiz and encyclopaedia form on the country’s Minitel database network; and it fuelled a European literary magazine called Lire. Its enduring success in French Canada, meanwhile, was a tweak on the noses of Anglophones here who professed to have a literary culture of their own. Yes, I presented myself as an innocent holidaymaker, but was in fact on a poaching mission.