I’m keen on a Plan B. My father, Norman the Knicker King, reared us in trembling terror of ending up ‘on Carey Street’ (erstwhile home of the bankruptcy court). So when Channel 5’s sparkling Vanessa succumbed to the noxious pestilence imperilling terrestrial TV, I blithely announced a rapid renaissance. I would simply launch a spanking-new show, At Home with Vanessa, on YouTube – a territory already staked out by telly titans Piers Morgan, Ant and Dec and Holly Willoughby. Speedily, I whisked up the notion of converting my living room into a studio, marshalling the punchiest TV peeps I know into a team, conjuring a format from thin air and plunging in.

Cousin Beverley recommended the crack building squad whose arcane arts imbued her Mill Hill semi with a Rotherhithe warehouse vibe. Igor and I shook hands. His chaps took pickaxes to my ceiling. I stood, Aeneas-like, among the rubble wondering if I should have said ‘Yes’ to I’m A Celebrity?

For nearly six and a half decades I’ve stifled entrepreneurial urges. Watching my dad keening over boxes of unsold peach nylon baby-doll nighties annihilated any desire to risk a penny of my own hard-earned dosh. I’ve always been a piece worker. I present. I get paid. I don’t have to worry about broken cameras, green-room comestibles, insurance or carpark spaces. Suddenly, I was shelling out for edit suites, sound technicians, hundreds of bottles of water, a VANESSA sign that flashes cerulean, magenta and jaundice at the flick of a proverbial, canned cocktails, printers, make-up artists, tripods, accountants, chocolate digestives (to calm my nerves) and all the stuff the bosses at assorted alma maters – ITV, BBC, Channel 4 – funded while I exchanged carefree aperçus on the congestion charge.

I’ve formed a company: Lady V Productions is kosher and registered. Who do I think I am? Lew Grade? Louis B. Mayer? Louis Walsh? I am pillaging the Feltz Fortune. Might the punchline be chopping the Chippendale up for firewood and sending the grandchildren up the chimney? Visions of the Marshalsea throb through my dreams, interrupted with hot flushes so tropical that the Hades heatwave feels chilly.

What do you do when you booked a family holiday in 2025, before your metamorphosis into YouTube mogul was even mooted? If you cancel, your adored descendants will be disconsolate. If you don’t, you’ll be tethered to technology, ordering loo roll, texting heated debate topics from a sand dune and touching down at City airport a mere 24 hours before kickoff on your first ever filming day.

Naturally, we wended our merry way – daughters, sons-in-law and my four genius Boucher-esque putti aged 12, ten, seven and three – to Valle dell’Erica, a resort so assiduously understated it nestles imperceptibly into the craggy landscape invisible to the untrained eye. We feasted on green figs and crackling pane carasau. Our calves were sharply nibbled by shoals of saddled seabream. We were snapped into shape at ‘postural wellness’ classes. I apologise for having jolted recumbent sun worshippers awake, yelling: ‘Have we booked Calum Best?’, ‘Janet Street-Porter is a bed not a bagel’ and ‘No, we can’t provide gluten-free granola.’

Filming Day One was a blast. Oscar winner Christine Lahti, Janet Street-Porter, Danniella Westbrook, Kaye Adams and the gentleman from Hunsnet (280,000 Instagram followers) reclined upon my bona fide bed in my bona fide bedroom centimetres from my Marie Antoinette wallpaper. Umpiring the Big Bagel Challenge – build yourself in bagel form – alongside Nick of Pumpernick’s Kosher Bakery evoked more moist-eyed emotion than Proust squeezed from his desiccated madeleine. The green room – conservatory in real life – fizzed with cocktail party chatter. One intrepid cameraman rugby-tackled a paparazzo. I had to exhume the un-scenic toaster I’d carefully concealed behind the sieve. ‘Guess Who’s in the Bath?’ generated unexpected porcelain-based pathos when the comedian James Barr hauntingly described the love, hope and fear that immured him in what he called ‘a relationship of dommy V’ (domestic violence). If host is going to weep all over guest, tiles make perfect sense.

Empathy erupted in my soul for the beleaguered villagers of Bourton-on-the-Water. So genteel are these denizens of the Cotswolds’ most decorative village that they protested against the unbearable onslaught of marauding tourists at dawn to minimise inconvenience. I live mere yards from Abbey Road Studios, which is fine because I don’t have to pay the fellow who nightly paints over garish squiggles of fresh international graffiti. Think about it and you’ll work out I also live agonisingly near that zebra crossing – the one to which fans make a pilgrimage to be photographed with chums traversing the stripes in John, Paul, George and Ringo formation. To them, it’s the Taj Mahal and traffic must halt as their grandma snaps the vista. To me, it’s a working bit of road and they should be at the British Museum gawping at the goddamn Rosetta Stone. (N.B: Sir Paul is a neighbour and once said, ‘Hello Vanessa’ as I dined with chums at Café Med in Loudoun Road. Grateful thanks to the Almighty for providing witnesses.)