So this week I was nominated for an award and on the one hand, I intend to milk this incredibly from now until December 2, which is when there’s a gala awards dinner and I’ll need to use my “oh, very well done, you deserved it” face talking to the winner.

But that’s one hand and this is the other. Alan Plater once said about awards for writers that if you buy enough tickets, eventually you win the raffle. Mind you, he also said “don’t let the BAFTAs get you down.” I realise with a truly enormous shock that I’ve now had a writing career about as long as his was, and in comparison my haul of wins is really tiny.

It’s still a haul, though, so I would like to present you with an inspiring history of prizes, and will settle for presenting you with this.

In 1980 something or other that I wrote won me a screening of “The Empire Strikes Back” and its soundtrack album. Unsurprisingly, the album was the UK version and surprisingly it was exactly half the length of the version everyone else got. I’m not saying there was a message there, but chiefly because what now pops right back into my head is that a friend who did not win and who did not even enter, talked his way into the screening by claiming to write about it for the school newspaper. I don’t believe he ever did.

He’s a producer now.

Somewhat later, my writing won a theatre contest where the prize was to have your work staged. Actually there were two winners and I remember how at the first readthrough, an actor came in, said he would only do the good one, and meant mine. I should not have felt entirely as great about that as I did, since it was a bit pants of the man to say it in front of both me and the other writer, but there you go. I am horrible.

I got my reward for being horrible by having my reward for winning the contest fall apart. Neither play was ever produced.

Somewhere around then I won a BBC Writersroom thing where they offered me a place on a scheme and then first said it was slightly delayed, then that I had lied about winning it and there was no such thing, then after I showed them their own email, said well, we’ll get back to you. I’m still waiting nearly two decades on.

Tony Jordan’s Red Planet Prize was rather better organised and I got into the shortlist, but never managed to leverage that into anything. That’s happened a couple of times now with different things, although I liked getting commended once by an international screenwriting contest.

I also very much like that a short — I mean, staggeringly short, perhaps 20 seconds — script that I wrote and filmed won my wife an iPad.

But then look at that, she married me.

Tell me I’m not a winner.