Recently, a friend bet me that I would never begin a newspaper column by suggesting that the musical score of Ondine, a little-known ballet, is virtually identical to side one of Works: Volume One, the Emerson, Lake and Palmer double album from 1977.

I don’t normally go to the ballet. I usually have better things to do than sit about watching men standing on one leg for two hours. But last weekend I was taken by my 10-year-old daughter to the Royal Opera House to see Ondine. And here goes: I couldn’t help noticing that the score is virtually identical to side one of Works: Volume One, the Emerson, Lake and Palmer double album from 1977.

Now, we know Keith Emerson was not averse to dropping a bit of classical pomp into his prog-rockery. For Brain Salad Surgery, he lifted chunks of Hubert Parry’s score for Jerusalem, and on Pictures at an Exhibition, Mussorgsky is credited as a co-writer.

I was always under the impression, though, that side one of Works, a towering classical achievement, was all Keith’s work. The album sleeve notes certainly suggest that. And yet there I was, in the ballet, not just recognising phrases and chords, but predicting precisely what would come next. Because I’d heard it all before.

It would be wrong, of course, to suggest that Keith, a talented songwriter and knifeman, thought to himself: “The music from Ondine, a little-known ballet, has not been used to advertise tyres or chocolate. And chances are, no one who goes to the ballet will ever listen to ELP. So I’ll nick it.”

That would be a moral and legal outrage.

So there must be another explanation. And there is. On a piano, there are only around 25 types of chord, each of which has 12 possible roots and can be inverted in a number of ways. Do the maths and it works out at around 8,400 possible combinations.

The simple fact of the matter, then, is that by about 1963, all those combinations and all the combinations of stringing them together had been used up. It is therefore inevitable that some pieces of music are going to sound pretty much identical to something that has gone before. And as a result of that, it is pointless for bands to record new music. We’ve heard it all before.

There is a similar problem with exploration. Obviously, every mountain has already been climbed, which is why, nowadays, you need to reach the top of Everest in the nude to make waves.

Sometimes, when I am up in the Scottish Highlands, or in the middle of Iceland, I wonder if any human has ever trodden on the same piece of earth that I’m treading on at that precise moment. It’s nice to think I’m the first. But, realistically, it is improbable.

In all forms of artistic endeavour, we see similar issues. Surely I am not the only person to have noticed that Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon is identical in every way to Rocky. Or that every modern bespoke, architect-designed house is the same as all the other modern bespoke, architect-designed houses. Or that every painting for sale on the walls of my local pub is identical to all the paintings for sale in your local pub. There are very few ways of painting a cow in a meadow. And they’ve all been done already.

It’s rather depressing to think that, no matter what you do or where you go, you will always be Scott of the Antarctic, the plucky chap who came in second. Or that you can spend years writing an epic, only to have some artistic dunderhead think: “You’ve stolen that from a ballet.”

However, there is one area in which every one of us breaks new ground every single day. We do it every time we speak.

Recently, while filming an episode for the new series of Top Gear, which starts again next Sunday, incidentally, I turned to Richard Hammond and said: “Oh no. I’ve just shoved this anarchy flag through my water lilo.” And I can be absolutely sure that no one has ever said such a thing before.

“My elephant has just exploded.” No one ever said that either. Or: “My word, Gordon Brown’s doing a good job.” Or: “Caroline Flint. Mmm. Tasty.”

Last week we learnt that there were now exactly 999,999 words in the English language. Actually, a spokesman for the Global Language Monitor claims there are a million, but since the millionth entry is “Web 2.0”, it must be discounted on the basis it is an existing word with a number tagged onto the end.

Then you have the Oxford English Dictionary, which claims there are in fact 616,000 “word forms” but only 171,000 that could be called current.

Whatever the true figure, I calculated recently that the BBC alone transmits around 87m words a day, all of which manage to offend the Daily Mail, and while I accept that most people only ever use a few hundred types of word in the course of a lifetime – unless they are estate agents, in which case it’s about a billion, none of which makes any sense – we cannot ignore the fact that there are 400m people in the world for whom English is the first language.

That’s 400m people saying, on average, 1,500 words a day. Week in, week out. You’d imagine, then, that every single combination would have been used up years ago, and yet we can be certain no one has ever said: “I name this ship HMS Vulnerable.” Or: “The thing I love most about my husband is his herpes.” Or: “Look at that maniac in that Saab.”

We can also be certain that making a whole newspaper column out of the similarities between Ondine and Emerson, Lake and Palmer has never been done before. Definitely not by anyone who could be £10 better off as a result. But then, I need the money because, according to the Daily Mail, all BBC presenter salaries are to be slashed. Interestingly, though, no one had ever said that either.

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