My story doesn’t begin especially well, it has to be said. I failed to re-sit my O Levels with any great distinction, departed school without troubling the sixth form, and the question of university never really arose. One sets the bar early.

After a brief and entirely forgettable spell at NatWest Bank in Blackley, I crossed the road — quite literally — to ICI in the Organic Chemicals Division. A proper job, as my grandparents might have said. But music had always been the real draw, and for that I have John Edwards to thank. In his class, we were given the unlikely gift of forming a group as an actual school project. Along with Mike Adamson and Dave Arnold, I found myself playing 1950s rock ‘n’ roll — ostensibly for fun, and then, gradually, with rather more conviction. We started playing local clubs and pubs around Bury, which felt enormously glamorous at the time.

The three of us from BGS, with two additional musicians, eventually became Ricky and the Spitfires. We turned professional, toured Europe and Scandinavia, and achieved what I can only describe as a certain niche success. One does not dwell on the size of the niche.

I subsequently formed a new band, d Notes, performing original material around Manchester — headlining at the legendary Haçienda and Band on the Wall, with radio appearances including a session for Janice Long on Radio One. Things, as they say, were looking up.

Then I changed course entirely and moved to Geneva. I’d had a Swiss girlfriend and had made some good friends there, which struck me at the time as sufficient justification. On paper, the move was not obviously sensible: six O Levels, no money, no work permit. What could possibly go wrong?

As it turned out, not a great deal. I found work on building sites, cash in hand — it transpires that having a father who was a bricklayer does come in useful eventually, though perhaps not quite in the way he’d imagined.

Before long, I was spotted by a local recording studio owner who, aware of my musical background, invited me to take part in sessions he was organising with the local art college. The studio also had a video department, which I took to immediately — a natural extension of sound engineering, really, only with considerably more knobs & switches.

Through the studio, I got to know the producer of the only rock music programme on the national TV station RTS, and was asked to do a presenting slot, commenting on the latest British New Wave releases. In French. On live national television. If only Mr Hately, my French teacher, could have seen me — I imagine he would have been either extremely proud or extremely surprised, given that I was a fairly unremarkable student of his language. Possibly both.

I moved on from light entertainment after serving as a jury member for the Golden Rose of Montreux and, rather improbably, as a member of the Swiss jury at the Eurovision Song Contest. I then became a TV director, specialising in live talk shows and whatever electronic trickery the mixing desk demanded, before studying for my journalist exams and moving into current affairs.

The story ends well enough: I became co-producer of the flagship current affairs programme at RTS — the show with the highest ratings on the channel, broadcast after the main news bulletin.

Not bad for someone who couldn’t get his O Levels the first time round.

So: thank you, Messrs Edwards and Hately. More than you knew.