I’ve been contributing to a Royal Television Society project in the Midlands where schoolkids are asked to pitch ideas to a TV company. (It’s for real, too, this isn’t some paper exercise. I love that the RTS arranges this.) I think I’ve popped in to perhaps five schools, I think the RTS has worked something like ten.

The groups of school kids vary quite widely in number; I went to one that had 150, yesterday I was at one where there were 30. So yesterday’s one had fewer kids and it is quite late on in the process, if I’m right about there having been ten schools in total, I think this was number nine or maybe even number ten. So there have been a lot of schools, a lot of kids, a lot of ideas.

But there was a new one yesterday.

A new idea I hadn’t heard from any of the other schools, a new idea that the RTS told me they hadn’t heard anywhere they’d gone.

There were a lot of good teams in this school and there was one I was rooting for very early on because I thought they were working together very smartly, very professionally. But when I heard this one new idea, I was sold.

The teams had to devise this idea and the perform a pitch. The pitch matters. By the time they get to that stage in the day, I and everyone else has been around every team and every table, we know all the ideas. So I suppose we could huddle in a corner and I could lob in my thruppence. But we sit there like proper judges at the end, watching the kids present their pitches.

There are always some that are good and some that are very poor. Yesterday’s was perhaps a better than average run in that the presentations tended to be good. But a good presentation coupled to a new idea, that is a killer.

The team presenting this new idea had an unfair advantage: the idea was so new that they would have had to really mess up the presentation not to win.

They’ll now be going on to a final contest with that idea next month and it’s then that I’ll hear whether they’re going to get on the telly. But the reason I’m telling you this today is just that one about the idea giving them an advantage. After eight or nine other schools and certainly hundreds, maybe a thousand pupils before them, one team came up with something genuinely new.

I tell you, I was inspired. And as soon as I can tell you their idea, I will.