Well, almost over … I was driving back to Holyhead the next day when the mobile phone rang. It was a message from the Globe asking me to ring the Richard and Judy show. They were interested in doing a piece on OP. Was I in London? Well no, actually, Hilary told the researcher. We are on theM6 heading north-west. Could we be in London tomorrow? Not possible … meetings at home already planned. What about Wednesday?

Richard and Judy is a UK television chat-show that has made something of a mark for itself in recent times – an hour-long programme airing daily at 5 o'clock in the afternoon. It is produced in London by Cactus TV for Channel 4, and in 2004 was attracting an audience approaching 3 million. It has a reputation for dealing with serious topics in an intelligent way. If I wanted the OP project to come to the attention of a large number of people, this was a proposal I could hardly ignore! And I was impressed that a popular programme like this should have shown an interest.

That is why I found myself on a train from Holyhead to London on the Wednesday morning. Not the best day to be in London, as it happened. There was a 24-hour tube strike. But if anything, the traffic was lighter between Euston and the CactusTV studios, just round the corner from the Oval cricket ground on the South Bank, and I arrived in good time.

The day before I had had a couple of conversations with Anne Stone, the researcher assigned to the item, and we had worked out how to proceed. They were going to film Kananu and Tom doing a piece of the dialogue for the balcony scene, and they were proposing to show this in contrast with an extract from the same scene from Shakespeare in Love, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes. It was a brilliant idea. Seeing the two versions side by side made the contrast between RP and OP stand out more clearly than any amount of linguistic description could have achieved.