So the prankster who spent all of his life winding other people up has now passed on. I was never that much of a fan to be honest, but can’t help but notice that twenty years ago, whenever the TV news was ready to announce that “somebody famous has died”, that for the most part I’d never heard of them, they meant nothing to me, and I could get on with life without even noticing they’d gone.

But no longer: no, now it’s people who were part of the furniture during my life. I tended to think of Jeremy Beadle the way I thought of Yuppies: an integral part of the 1980s, fun to laugh at now and again, but you wouldn’t want to spend an extended period of time with them…

Although I’d guess that Jeremy “offstage” was a different person and a thoroughly nice chap, and possibly not the sort of person I imagine to have electric hand-buzzers, buckets of water over the front door and so on.

But I still can’t help but wonder… is he really dead, or is this just another wind-up?