MY TIP for ITN didn’t go down very well: the one about Saddam Hussein escaping on a racing stallion through a network of secret tunnels underneath his bunker and then flying to North Korea to have tea with Osama bin Laden.

That, of course, was after I had nearly nailed the tyrant with a sniper’s rifle, my aim spoiled by someone getting in the way.

Meanwhile, my psychiatrist was politely saying that I should stop advertising my thoughts or risk damaging my credibility, especially with organisations such as ITN which had enough stories to chase without dealing with eccentric insights from me.

In reality, I was in the grip of bipolar affective disorder, the new name for manic depression. I was quite ill, even if there were times when I enjoyed the madness. Had I gone insane? I went to see my doctor in the slippers I had taken to wearing for short trips around the neighbourhood. He was away and a female colleague was standing in.

“You are very beautiful,” I said to her with all sincerity — which I might naturally have thought but not normally said. She looked at my unshaven face and wild eyes and said: “Stress.”

Starting in April this year, my thoughts began to race and delusions of superhuman abilities began to appear, well-known symptoms of bipolarity. I became convinced that by concentration alone I could change channels on the television without touching the set or the remote control.

Time seemed to take on a new dimension and distances and memories crowded together as I sped over the mental landscape like a low-flying cruise missile. The rate of change was like a speeded-up TV commercial — about three shots a second — and I wonder now whether the power of television to inject messages into the brain can actually be subversive.

I decided to infiltrate the internet and serve God. It was time for the Second Coming and I became a disciple, whipping up support for the faith wherever I could find it.

The most efficient way, I concluded, was to use the interference on my television set electronically to agitate the world wide web, subscribers to which would pass on the good word, particularly in England where people would be drawn back to church with magnetic force. I would become a major figure in a miraculous Christian revival.

All this was bewildering yet, in a strange way, enjoyable. I was as high as a kite on mango juice and mugs of tea. The only trouble was the background music. As I whizzed around the universe I had fleeting encounters with Oscar Peterson and the Berlin Philharmonic but I could not stop my head constantly playing Waterloo by Abba. This was to become irritating.

I was not sleeping — another symptom of bipolarity — and stayed awake and alert for days and nights on end. But certain reflexes were not working. Despite many attempts, I could not complete the simple sequence of keystrokes needed to start my computer, something I would normally do without thinking.

I was wearing odd socks. I forgot where I had put objects, such as pens and keys, minutes after putting them down. I could, with some difficulty, use the phone and took advantage of this to phone my wife and son to tell them about Saddam’s escape. I also said they would wake up the following morning to find £100 in an envelope at their bedside. They laughed uneasily and decided it was time to do something.

It was during the evening after this imagined largesse that a psychiatrist buzzed at the door. He looked concerned as he carried out an assessment. When I answered his questions I was aware of speaking but not voicing my own thoughts.