So what attracted you to that powerful man?

Somewhere towards the end of the 1980s I was suddenly promoted three grades upwards in my job at the BBC; a bit like going from the middle of the old fourth division to the top of the Championship. Yay. The immediate consequences were more money, more power and almost endless opportunities for sexual intercourse. Women who had hitherto been averagely amiable work colleagues became much friendlier — and in a very different way. It was as if I’d been transformed overnight from Marty Feldman into Orlando Bloom. What a delightful period of my life that was.

I was happily reminded of it when the actor Martin Clunes stepped into the current sexual harassment debate, perhaps unwisely, suggesting that actresses flirted with producers in a most unseemly manner, which he likened to prostitution. Perhaps he is right, although I don’t think so. I think a less contentious reading would be that women are hard-wired to be attracted to powerful men. Or perhaps they have been schooled to be so by the inequalities in our society — although I doubt that. It seems to me utterly intrinsic. Back at the BBC, the average gap in grades between men and women who were ‘in a relationship’, or shagging one another, was about three. And the male was always in the senior position. Female presenters did not do the cute researcher, even if he was the same age as them or older. Male presenters did the cute female researcher. And so on, all the way up the food chain.

I’m not sure what light this sheds on the current situation, except to suggest gently that there might, in some cases, be two sides to the story. This is a dangerous thing to suggest, because it leaves one open to the accusation of ‘victim shaming’ — indeed, so absolutist is the screeching and the furore that any attempted caveat, any nervously muttered ‘Um, but on the other hand…’ will incur a vilification every bit as extreme as if one had committed these acts of harassment oneself.