Not being Mr Biffo turned out to be a good thing. It was the psychological equivalent of decluttering. Without having to carry around all that Digitiser baggage, my life became more streamlined... ish.

The next few years would be packed with tumult. New domestic arrangements, new relationships, somehow acquiring three step-daughters, while the last of my own three kids strode into adulthood, leaving me with a bad case of empty nest syndrome. No longer living on the side of an active volcano, however, meant I was better equipped to deal with it all.  

I still craved that long sought after job stability, though. For a year or two I toyed with becoming a teacher, but would've needed to get a degree first. Instead, I applied for various proper jobs - including, just for shits and giggles, speechwriter to then-Idiot Mayor of London Boris Johnson. I got turned down thank God. As I did for every other job I applied for, without even being invited for an interview. My weird CV, age, and lack of any actual qualifications, seemingly disqualified me for any conventional role. 

That sobering wake-up call was partly why I ended up training to be a psychotherapist; I foolishly thought there might actually be a job at the end of it. What I hadn't realised at that point is that most psychotherapists are out of work, or work voluntarily, or have second jobs, and mostly just have other psychotherapists, or trainee psychotherapists, as their clients. 

Also, that most psychotherapists are terrible at their jobs, and shouldn't ever have received a qualification, And that the entire industry seems mostly set up to facilitate the training of other psychotherapists.

To say I became disillusioned by would be a grotesque understatement. With hindsight, I'm astonished I managed to make it through my two-and-a-bit years - just long enough to receive my Fitness to Practice certificate - without throwing a chair at somebody.

After turning my back on anything to do with Mr Biffo, I'd gone to the police.

I'd reported a lot of what had been happening to me online, and - having done some detective work on my own - given names, addresses, IP addresses, Internet service provider details, and places of employment for the people I suspected were most responsible. It wasn't difficult to find out who they were. Not least because at least one of them I'd once known quite well, and all of the others had been members of the Board of Biffo. Several of them I'd even bought a drink for. 

I had a case number, I had an officer in charge of that case... but then I asked myself... what was the point of all this? Revenge? Would it make me feel more secure? Wouldn't it just be dragging out what had become something close to a living Heck for my family and I? I needed to move on - if not for my sake, then for the sake of my daughters.

As vulnerable as I felt, I'd realised that I had to take responsibility for my part in turning these people against me, to the point that they wanted to further ruin my already ruined life. I hadn't been wholly innocent. I'd made some bad decisions, I'd upset people, hurt people, hadn't always been unfailingly pleasant and polite. Hurting me was helping them feel better. They felt betrayed, and I got that they were angry at me.

Or, at least, angry at Mr Biffo, who I was now blaming for every mistake I'd ever made in my life. Realising that we were one and the same would take me a little longer.

I'd already made the decision that I'd never use that name again, but this moment of revelation cemented it for me. I'd just... let it go. All of it.

​I told the police I didn't want to pursue matters, and asked them to drop the investigation. 

I admit that when I was asked to write the pilot for Dani's House - pitched to me as a hybrid of sketch show and sitcom - it was just another job, like every other job I'd done. By this point, I'd written so many pilots, developed so many shows which hadn't gone anywhere, that I started to see un-produced development as the job.

It was hard to get excited about any new project, after so much disappointment. I felt, objectively, that Too Much Too Young, Now The Weather, and Biffovision all had the potential to become great shows. Not flawless, but that was the point of pilots, surely - to iron out the kinks?

Getting so close, and losing them, was hard. Admittedly, I never told myself it was hard, but I can look back now and recognise that every time I got a knock-back, I should've let myself grieve for what could've been. Instead of facing up to that, instead of embracing the grieving process, I did what I always did; I pushed it down, and told myself I was fine.

Same as I did when it came to Digitiser. Same as I did when it came to my marriage; instead of walking away when I ought to have done, I let myself be pushed back into it. The message I received from those around me was that my feelings didn't matter as much as other people's, that it didn't matter how hurt and broken I was... I had to suck it up and carry on.

In the wake of the highs offered by my trio of comedy pilots, everything felt like a comedown.

Though I finally got to achieve the dream of writing for a BBC kids' show, the series in question - an adaptation of Eoin Colfer's 'Half Moon Investigations' - turned out to be a bit of a damp squib. It only lasted one series. 

The middle of 2007 required me to spend three or four months locked in a room with Lenny Henry and David Quantick. Our task? Come up with some jokes for a BBC1 light entertainment show called 'Lenny Henry.tv', which was comprised of allegedly funny Internet clips.

I'll be the first to admit that harmless gag-laden light entertainment show links aren't my forte. This primetime shiny floor jamboree was well out of my comfort zone - but it was money, and I needed it. Also, y'know... who wouldn't be curious about working with Delbert Wilkins?

I got on well with Lenny, but he's far more intense than you might expect. I'd anticipated that he'd be constantly "on" - always showing off, always performing - but he wasn't like that at all. He was thoughtful and driven, and frequently quite grumpy. Only occasionally would he drop into a Theophilus P. Wildebeeste voice, and only once did he do a "Gwapple me gwapenuts" David Bellamy impression.

Biffovision was the easiest commission I ever had. Myself, Tim and Mark Freeland went in to pitch it to the BBC's head of comedy Cheryl Taylor, off the back of an outline covering a single side of A4. There wasn't much in there beyond us wanting to do a spoof kids TV show, and something about a "Bum farm" - which never made it to the finished episode.

We'd called it Biffovision as a placeholder - it was also the title of my column in Edge - but I never wanted the final thing to be called that, as I felt it suggested it was mine, rather than mine and Tim's. I was overruled in the end, when we couldn't come up with a better alternative.

We also told Cheryl that we wanted half the audience to hate the show, and the other half to love it. 

"That's exactly the sort of thing we should be making here!" Cheryl enthused.

She gave us a pilot commission there and then. Only one problem: we had to have it finished and on air by the end of the financial year, in four months. At this stage, we didn't even have a script. 

We would later learn that there was never a massive amount of enthusiasm for Biffovision. BBC Comedy basically had a bunch of money left over at the end of the financial year, and needed to spend it to ensure they'd be given a similarly healthy budget the following year.

​Biffovision was the TV equivalent of those "essential" council roadworks which spring up around March/April.

The day after the studio recording of Too Much Too Young I was up before dawn, and straight onto the train to London. Adrenaline just about kept the hangover and exhaustion at bay.

Now The Weather - the other pilot I'd been developing concurrently with Too Much Too Young - had been scheduled for a week-long shoot at an office building near Richmond.

Producer was Mark Freeland, one of the two people, along with Robert Popper, who'd first shown interest in me, right back at the start of my career. Mark had also commissioned North of Watford when he'd been head of development at Sky.

He was now working for Hartswood Films - the company founded by the legend that is Beryl Vertue, former agent to Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes, Galton and Simpson, and Dalek creator Terry Nation. Her daughter, Sue, was our executive producer. She was, and still is, married to current Doctor Who boss Steven Moffat. 

Mark called me in and asked what I wanted to write. Too Much Too Young being given the green light to go to pilot had awarded me currency in TV comedy circles. Suddenly, I was flavour of the month.

I told Mark that I really wanted to write a sketch show. He had a better idea - one which had been suggested to him by Robert Popper: the other person who gave me my first break. And that idea was this idea: a sitcom starring Mark Heap as a weatherman.

2006 was meant to be the year everything changed. It felt as if, suddenly, I was a hot commodity in TV circles. My career had reached a tipping point, and - seemingly - everyone wanted to work with me. My allotted 15 minutes had arrived.

It was the year I released a book, and had a relatively unprecendented three comedy pilots all go into production, one after another. It was also the year I reunited with Tim - we'd floated the idea of us working together again, and been accepted onto the writing team for The Armstrong & Miller Show (in the end, only one of our sketches was used).

I was also asked by Peter Serafinowicz to submit ideas to his forthcoming sketch show (they got rejected for being too dark - although a couple of them ended up being used in Biffovision).

I had few ambitions when it came to my career. It had happened without any great degree of planning or forethought. I did, however, want to work for the BBC, and that - ideally - I'd write a primetime BBC1 sitcom for them. What I didn't know, is that nobody ever wants to write a primetime BBC1 sitcom, because a) They're virtually impossible to do well, and b) They're about as high-profile a gig as it's possible to get, and your career will probably never recover once it flops, as it inevitably will.

For me, the BBC1 sitcom was the holy grail. I was never much interested in being cool, or edgy, or the next Chris Morris. I'd never had much in the way of credibility, so cosy domesticity was far more comfortable. Or that's how it feels to me.

​Therefore, for all my lack of ambition, I did like the idea of writing something that was popular with a mass audience. Something which united people, Only Fools And Horses-style. That could be watched by the entire family.

As seemingly the only person in the entire industry who felt this way, any idea I had to this effect was a shoe-in.

And so it was for Too Much Too Young.

2003 bled into 2004, dragging my miserable arse with it.

Midway through the year I felt I'd started to claw back some degree of stability. For the time being, my marriage appeared whole again, but it wasn't going to last.

Nothing had really been addressed - the on-off-on-off-on madness of the previous 18 months had if anything made us more unstable. Nonetheless, a mixture of guilt, wanting to be there for the kids, and just needing a breather from the endless drama, was the mortar holding together the bricks of the family home. I wasn't to know it, but the second it rained, it was all going to wash away again.

Despite knowing this on some level, I kept myself distracted with work for the next couple of years. More My Parents Are Aliens, a couple of episodes of a new CITV show called Barking - about a talking dog, no less - and yet more development work that I knew would probably go nowhere.

I remember the day I stopped writing Digitiser. I remember the last thing I wrote. I remember my surreal leaving party. I don't remember what I did the following day, but I do remember how I felt. 

In a word: terrified. And then: furious. Also: telling myself I didn't feel either of those things, and everything was fiiiiiine.

The story of Digitiser had a perfect three-act structure, and I'd walked away as the victorious hero. That's the version of my life I wanted to believe. In reality, what they don't show you after the credits roll on, say, the average action movie, is the characters struggling to return to their regular lives, or dealing with post-traumatic shock.

Life is rarely as cut and dried as cinema would have us believe. If lives are stories, we're all the main character in our own personal tragedy. As depressing as it might be to consider, there's no point pretending that the heroes in our own individual movies don't always ends up kicking the bucket, and there's little use kidding ourselves that we get to control the narrative up to that point.  

I was brought back onto Sooty as lead writer for my second year on the show. I ended up doing something, at the behest of the script editor, which I have never done since: I rewrote the other writers, to ensure that the series had one voice. To wit: my voice.

I know it upset the rest of the team, including my friend Nathan. I was still a new writer, and they probably thought I'd vastly overstepped the mark. 

Thing is, I was inexperienced, and just figured this was the lead writer's role. I was being guided by others who assured me it was fine. I didn't know better. 

I now have very different views about it - having been rewritten myself. It almost always grates, and on the few occasions since, when I've been brought in to work on a script started by another writer, I've always tried to be respectful, and retain as much as possible of their work.

The only time it hasn't bothered me is if the rewriting improves upon what I did, and makes me look even more excellent.

​As was usually the case with My Parents Are Aliens.

It was never really my intention to write kids TV. I mean, when Tim and I first decided to have a crack at scriptwriting, we gravitated towards sitcom. Even that, though, just seemed logical, rather than anything borne from passion.

​We didn't really have a plan, but because we'd had a little success right off the bat, that's the direction I continued in. I knew I enjoyed writing scripts, and I had people who saw something in what I was doing, but looking back now I can see how raw and unfocused I was. I was feeling my way in the dark, and frequently bumping my head against the furniture.

Sooty changed all that.

I got a call out of the blue from a producer called Jo Jordan. She was, she told me, a friend of Robert Popper. As mentioned already, Robert was determined to get my career off the ground one way or another, and recommending me to Jo - the producer of Sooty - was his latest attempt.

By this point, I'd drifted away from writing spec sitcoms. Knife & Wife was happening, but I was also finding it hard to please either myself or other people with it (and in the process pleasing nobody). Had it not been for Robert, I wouldn't even have still been writing scripts. I'd had no contact from my then-agent for several years, and when I called her to mention Knife & Wife, she barely even remembered me.

She'd gone by the time Sooty landed in my lap, replaced by a new agent, Faye Webber. Faye would continue to guide me for the next ten years. By contrast, she loved my work, and saw potential in me. I grew to love her to bits, and genuinely wept when she told me she was leaving to become a writer herself. 

​Unlike some friends at the time, Faye believed that Sooty might be just what I needed. She was right.

1998 was not a good year. In early February, David Green rang to deliver the news that my services were no longer required on North of Watford. I couldn't have cared less.

My marriage was weathering the first storm of many which would ultimately consume it. For the next 18 months I barely had the strength to keep myself upright, let alone write another draft of a movie script. The life I thought I had the measure of turned out to be something very different, and the only things which kept me afloat were my children and Digitiser. Things I could rely on that would, surely, always be there.

When I finally started to pull myself out of the nosedive, I launched my first website - Bubblegun - with my old schoolfriend, and fellow Teletext graphics guru, Steve Horsley. In fact, it was probably Bubblegun which got me back on my feet. I threw myself into it body and soul - an all-consuming attitude towards work, which would help paper over the cracks of some harsh realities for the next few years.

My mornings would be taken up with Digitiser. Afternoons were for Bubblegun. I wrote an astonishing amount of material. Even more than I do for Digitiser2000. Not to mention graphics and cartoons. I worked myself back into some loose semblance of a functioning human being. Not necessarily a healthy strategy, but my family had never encouraged wallowing.

I'd given up. Stopped writing scripts. The constant rejections were wearying. The optimism which I'd felt in the wake of We Two Vets had all but evaporated.

Besides, I had Digitiser and freelance games writing to keep me occupied. Plus, my friend Steve and I had started working on a website that was intended as a sort of general pop culture version of Digitiser - Bubblegun. That was taking up most of my free time.

Regardless, We Two Vets continued its attempts to drag me backwards into the bleaker fringes of TV. Robert Popper remained a champion, and out of nowhere I got a call from a colleague of his, who was producing an upcoming Channel 4 topical comedy show.

I went and met with her. Putting it mildly, we didn't exactly click. I had no TV credits to my name, and was only there because of Robert's recommendation. Maybe I was all too aware of my lack of experience, but it felt as if she'd met with me only as a favour to Robert. 

I pride myself on being easy to work with, and choosing my battles carefully. I can do a good job of getting along with almost anyone - or at least pretending I do, to the point of being a pushover. But just occasionally I meet someone who jars with me on a visceral, chemical, level. This was one of those times.

​Or maybe that's just how I remember it, because of what happened next.