Most artistic careers end in failure. Why does no one talk about this?

It is a standard narrative in all showbiz reporting, and one that arts hacks seem to be duty-bound to abide by. It is the fairy tale of ‘Making It’; the story of a star whose career took time to get off the ground but, thanks to perseverance and self-belief, went stratospheric. It goes like this: ‘I was a nobody, and I was turned down from everything. And I nearly didn’t go to that final audition, but whaddya know? I turned up and… Shazam! Oscars raining down and a mini-series on Netflix.’

There is an encyclopaedia of stars who toughed it out before making it big. Type ‘stars who were failures’ into Google and you will find winning tales from Oprah Winfrey, fired from her first job; Steven Spielberg, turned down from film school, and David Essex, who nearly became a lorry driver. Harrison Ford was a carpenter. Until he had to create a door for Francis Ford Coppola, of course. The rest is not silence, but very noisy superstardom and, for Essex, a leading role in Godspell.

The overarching backstory beyond the hardscrabble start is always that weaker souls would have given up. Be determined and talent will out. Try, try, try again. I fell for the tale myself, finding an unfancied stand-up performer one year at Edinburgh, who went by the unlikely name of Charlie Cheese. I interviewed him on the Today programme, and then, over the following years, watched his trajectory as he got two Bafta nominations and became a Hollywood star. His real name? Mackenzie Crook.