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I don’t let it keep me awake at night.

Not that anyone has ever asked me to write Star Wars.

On the night of the answerphone message, I was thirty-three years old, married but temporarily living alone in our small flat in East London, and in dire need of a shave and some natural sunlight. I’d published one book seven years earlier, written two more that nobody wanted, and thereby managed to pull off the impressive feat of having a failed literary career in my mid-twenties.

And, you know, that is what it is.

I had written new adventures for Thunderbirds, Stingray, Doctor Who, Sapphire and Steel, He-Man, The Tripods, Thundercats. . . I took these projects seriously, and though I wasn’t the best writer in the field, and I certainly wasn’t the quickest, I was quietly proud of several of the audio plays I’d helped to create. By and large, I enjoyed the work, and the fans of the old shows generally liked my stories more than they hated them – which is a bigger deal than you might perhaps imagine.