Between my appointment in 1991 and my departure in 1999 I was involved in all the activities shared by other members of the Board: attending Board meetings and conferences, speaking to local or national media about our affairs, and taking part in public meetings not just in my own ‘patch’ of Northern Ireland but around the country. It was important, I concluded, for a National Governor not to be classified as a ‘special interest’ person, harping on endlessly about the problems and opportunities of his own base.

Public meetings were highly informative and sometimes diverting. I was intrigued to be asked to sit on a panel in Darlington, because many years before it had been the venue for one of the many conferences about the future of Northern Ireland under the chairmanship of the admirable William Whitelaw. We heard a great deal that evening, I remember, about an area called Swaledale which had not previously entered my geographical consciousness. There were problems, it seemed, about reception in that area; and indeed public meetings generally revealed that few things more agitated our licence-payers than an inability to receive a decent quality of sound and/or vision.

Often, to give a thrill to the audience, the subfusc Governors and senior managers on such panels would be chaired by some well-known and instantly recognisable television personality. In Derry, on my own home ground, the charming and courteous moderator of the evening would later transform herself into the fearsome dominatrix of The Weakest Link.