One morning 50 years ago I was walking down the Strand in London, after scraping through my bar exams, when I bumped into a former BBC floor manager I’d met at university.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“I’m a barrister,” I replied grandly.

“Well,” he said, “we’re starting commercial television next week. Why don’t you join us?” It was as easy as that. I was offered a job as a producer by ATV on £900 a year, twice what most of my contemporaries were being offered. The problem now is that when schoolchildren ask how you can get into television I can’t very well advise them to walk down the Strand and hope they meet a man.

I joined Tonight, an early evening BBC programme whose reporters were characterful, idiosyncratic men including Fyfe Robertson, Trevor Philpott, Chris Brasher and Alan Whicker. It premiered on February 18, 1957 — my 26th birthday.

Tonight loved animals. An item on Lawrence of Arabia was jazzed up with a camel, which became fascinated by the pineapple-shaped microphone that swung over its head towards Magnus Magnusson, the interviewer. The camel’s large tongue came out to investigate, soon followed by a crunching noise over the sound system.

On another occasion a cockerel and a pig that had just made appearances were held for collection in the deep-carpeted room borrowed from Panorama. All went well until a motorbike backfired outside the window. The cockerel flew at the pig. The pig panicked and opened its bowels. The room was out of action for days and Panorama did not easily forgive.

During an electricians’ strike, we transmitted an entire show from the fire escape outside the studio, then moved to the roof of Television Centre where Marcel Marceau produced one of his snappiest demonstrations of the art of mime when a gust of wind parted his toupee from his head. Another night Cliff Michelmore was trapped in a lift and introduced the programme through the bars of its door.

That Was The Week That Was grew directly out of Tonight. I wanted John Bird as my linkman for the show. I told him that I was trying to make a programme for 10.30 on Saturday night, when the week was nearly over. John adapted the Shell advertising slogan “That Was Shell That Was”, murmuring, “a sort of That Was The Week That Was”. It leapt at me as the perfect title.

On Saturday November 24, 1962, TW3 took to the air before a studio audience primed with mulled claret served by girls in black fishnet stockings.

Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall supplied a brilliant party political broadcast for Roy Kinnear as a squaddie taking advantage of a new provision allowing soldiers to stand as parliamentary candidates. It was about as politically incorrect as it was possible to be.

David Frost’s debut was extraordinary. His curious, classless accent, sloppy charcoal suit and overambitious haircut concealed a man who had come into his kingdom at a bound.

Hugh Carlton-Greene, the director-general, sent immediate congratulations. Reginald Bevins, the postmaster general, did not share his enthusiasm and reassured the prime minister that he would take steps to stop the show. Harold Macmillan replied: “I hope you will not, repeat not, take any action about That Was The Week That Was without consulting me. It is a good thing to be laughed over — it is better than to be ignored.”