My Christmas and New Year were fine, thank you, and – ah, actually, I can’t tell you any more about that because a streaming platform has just bought the commercial rights to it. You’ll have to wait a year and a half for production to end to learn about my holidays. Episode three will be quite dramatic – I bought two pork pies from a famous pork pie shop in Yorkshire but I only ate one on the day, then kept the other in my backpack overnight before remembering to put it in the fridge, then I had a real back-and-forth with myself about whether it would still be OK to eat. They’ll probably have to introduce a semi-threatening frenemy character for me to bounce all the pork pie stuff off so an audience can understand it. “Would you eat that? It’s been in my bag for 26 hours,” the actor playing me will say, and the business partner will look at him (me), pause dramatically, and say: “I can’t do this any more!” Somehow there will be seven more hours of this.

What I suppose I am saying in a very roundabout way (I ate it) is: some stories simply do not need to be eight hours long. This has been proven very effectively by Welcome to Chippendales, the new show (Disney+, from Wednesday) starring Kumail Nanjiani, which – and this is one of the kindest things I can say about it – is eight hours long. This is a fairly simple problem to diagnose: there are too many streaming platforms now, every one wants their own award-bait miniseries, every big film actor wants to do a gripping shift on TV, there are not enough eight-hour-long stories to feed the appetite for eight-hour-long series. But eight hours is a lot of hours to stretch out, at best, two hours of anything happening. Welcome to Chippendales is a particularly egregious example of eight-hourness, but it is not the first one and it certainly won’t be the last.