"As a viewer, I don't want to feel the script has been written by the commercial marketing director. If Jim Royle gets out of his chair for a Kit Kat, I want to think, 'he fancies a Kit Kat' – not, 'Kit Kat my arse!' If I thought it was because someone has paid for him to eat one it would change the way I felt about the programme. I think there are some lines that we should not cross – one of which is that you can buy the space between the programmes on commercial channels, but not the space within them."

There’s the rub - will you be able to determine advertising from just general on screen reality? I would expect that companies who place products on our screens to be mentioned in a neutral fashion in the credits so people can determine how to view content.

The more I hear about the marching forward of such advertising on TV, the more protective I feel of the BBC.

Personally, the first time I ever noticed this sort of advertising was T2, when John Connor used an Atari laptop

Laptop? Laptop? That was an Atari Lynx handheld games console, I'll have you know.

Jon