In the mid-90s when I was a 19-year-old undergraduate I did work experience at the now defunct The Face magazine. They put me in what they called the fashion cupboard. Looking back on it now, I recall I spent a hot fortnight in August either hoiking large volumes of clothing around London for various photoshoots or listening, usually at close quarters, to homosexual men – fashionistas, darling – discussing their sex lives in great detail over the telephone. I wasn’t terribly worldly and I found the whole thing fascinating.

Far more sophisticated than me was the other work experience boy, Lance, a skinny 17-year-old who was, as they say, as gay as Christmas. He worked in the post room and I remember talking to him in there one lunchtime when a member of the senior editorial team, a man in his mid-forties, brushed past him to check his pigeonhole.

‘Don’t you dare touch me,’ Lance hissed at him furiously, and suddenly everything seemed to stop. Then in a blur of movement Lance was perched on the counter with his legs crossed, both hands resting on his knee, chin lowered and eyes wide. ‘Well, if you’re going to touch me, at least tell me a story first.’ He said it with maximal coquettishness and both of them immediately burst into peals of riotous, camp laughter. I was stunned – by the implication, mainly, but also by the familiarity.

I often wonder what happened to Lance, who was very bright and funny. I’ve thought about him a lot in the last few days as the revelations about Phillip Schofield and his unnamed lover on the ITV payroll have become increasingly shrill. I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if Lance had ended up working in daytime TV. You didn’t have to know him for long to know he’d have been a perfect fit. There’s a lot of Lances in light entertainment, after all.

But isn’t that kind of the point of light entertainment – that behind the scenes it’s a finishing school for young gay men? I’d always assumed it was. When President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously claimed in 2007 there were no homosexuals in Iran, I remember the jokes – made by the gay community – about who then made the TV there, or did the interior design, or cut the hair? The jokes were funny because they were true. There are professions that very evidently seem to exert a strong gravitational pull on gay men.

I mention all this only by way of saying that I’m finding it difficult to remain terribly excited about the Schofield scandal, the implication of which seems always to be that some sort of terrible criminality has occurred, without any evidence yet of terrible criminality. As things stand, as far as I can see the story seems to be older gay man has consensual sex with younger gay man. Yes, Schofield first met him at 15, but there is no evidence yet that they had any sort of illegal relationship.

I don’t feel sorry particularly for Schofield, but that’s only because I find him immensely irritating to watch on the telly – which he’s been on since I was a child. Clearly, he has many powerful enemies in his former workplace and perhaps there’s a good reason for that. But watching the scramble as former colleagues race to stick the knife in on primetime is both unedifying and dull, because without evidence of actual lawbreaking, it’s still just sour grapes – the airing of the kind of grievances that can build up in any workplace (‘he didn’t know the names of underlings!’) that, while all-consuming to those employed there, are of vanishingly little interest to the rest of us.

Besides, who is naive enough to believe the reality of working on This Morning is the same as the vision of harmony that is daily broadcast into the nation’s sitting rooms between 10am and 12:30pm? Television more than any other industry operates on a lords and peasants model – the lords being the so-called onscreen talent, the peasants being everyone else. The peasants, it goes without saying, are utterly expendable, which is why generally they are paid so little. Who can blame them, then, for griping about their immeasurably better paid and better-looking colleagues?

If Schofield has done something illegal, then please let us know. Yes, he lied to his wife – but surely the real lie there was the one he told her about being, errr, a heterosexual. And, yes, he lied to his colleagues, who very clearly on current evidence would have thrown a party on his professional grave at the first opportunity had he let on.

And, yes, he lied to his dear viewers too – but perhaps they are a little complicit in that one, if we’re being honest, for being so quick to believe in the image and personal branding daytime television foists on you? These people aren’t your friends – and they don’t care about you. Deep down, we all know that.

Perhaps there’s more coming – revelations of such luridness that in a few days not only will this column seem absolutely absurd, but the loss at a stroke of Schofield’s entire career will seem entirely justified. But if that’s the case, please put us out of our misery and tell us what they are.