At the end of Before Sunset – I don’t believe I’m giving anything away – there are shots of all the locations we’ve seen during the film. Except we saw them at night, we saw them with people, and now they’re empty and it’s morning daylight. I don’t know why, but I gasped at that. Maybe it was like seeing the empty canvas. It was definitely like coming home after a long time away so that everything was the same and everything was different.

And I felt the same thing earlier this week when I made a short appearance on BBC Breakfast. I’ve been to that show before — I was on it ten years ago so clearly I’m now a regular — and while the studio has changed in that time, the building hasn’t. I don’t know BBC Salford remotely well enough to recognise it all or even find my way around, but I remembered little details and most of all I recognised the feel of the place.

Only, I recognised the BBC’s Salford studios from all the other BBC buildings I’ve been in. Television Centre, Pebble Mill, Bush House, Broadcasting House, White City, Woodlands, East Tower, Threshold House, Centre House, BBC Cardiff, BBC New York, I recognised them all there. With the exception of BBC Cardiff which so clearly must have been designed by the same architect who did Pebble Mill that I stumbled at the doorway, I was that overcome with nostalgia, I know the recognition is not specific to a building type. It’s specific to what is being done there.

To say I was a cog on BBC Breakfast last Tuesday is overstating it, but even the bits on the end of cogs move and they move against other cogs, and for a delicious short time I felt part of a BBC News show again. The job is to be there when needed, do what you’re there for and then get out of the way, but even that felt good and right.

I don’t think I saw more than a dozen people in the hour or so I was there, but they were a dozen people all working to the same aim. There is something special about a studio, something special about a show, definitely something special about the BBC.

Just before BBC Woodlands was demolished, I walked around the whole building very early one day, taking photographs of what was then such a familiar place and now is only a bit of a memory. If I can find those shots, I might take a wander around them again, looking at the empty canvas in the morning light.