“You can’t be anything else,” said Steve. “I present T4 52 weeks a year. If I were to put on an act, it’d be draining. Never, ever try to base yourself on another presenter.”

“If it wasn’t true we would have told Alan Carr to get his teeth fixed and Justin Lee Collins to cut his air,” said Andy, who brought together TV’s oddest duo to front The Friday Night Project. “On an individual level both were great performers. We had no idea they would have the chemistry they do but we did think they would serve different roles in a show: Alan is a stand-up comic and very good at one-liners; Justin is a great enthusiast who drives the show forwards.”

Paul asked Fearne about the potential pitfalls of presenting as a double act; she had fronted ITV1’s Holly & Fearne Go Dating with her friend, Holly Willoughby. “It’s really important that you’ve got some natural chemistry and a real friendship,” she opined. “If you try and establish your role, rather than both trying to do the same job, that makes it a lot easier and more fun.”

“I’m never going to please everyone; there ‘s always someone who won’t like me on TV or who will text into my radio show and tell me I’m a ‘knob’,” she added, “but you have to be yourself or people will see through you.”

Francis said he was searching for new presenters who were “unlike anyone else. The reality is that you can’t be the new Davina McCall because Davina already exists.”

Steve revealed that he had recently turned down work in the States because it would have involved not “being himself”: “I was having a meeting with a production company and they asked If I could present in an American accent, to which I replied, ‘Could you kiss my arse?’”

The second rule of presenting, explained Jackson, could be summarised as: “When an opportunity comes, take it.”

Steve's break came on HTV Wales show The Pop Factory. When he moved to London, he auditioned for Five’s challenge show, 99 Things To Do Before You Die, which illustrated how flexible a presenter has to be.  He was asked to  “neck as many pretty girls as you can find”, but confounded the production company by choosing a 75-year-old woman as his victim and landed the job. ‘If you get an opportunity, you’ve got to pounce on it,” he said.

Fearne recalled an incident from CBBC show Record Breakers, in which she agreed to abseil down Canary Wharf. “It’s always good to challenge yourself,” she said. “Having that fear is a really good thing to see on camera and I was quite visibly ******** myself on that piece of film.”

Francis, however, pointed out that there was little point in putting presenters into a position in which they were not going to be convincing. “We all know it’s not as simple as ‘you’re only as good as your last show’, but it’s never the producers who get blamed,” he said. “But, if someone is a good broadcaster, ultimately they should be able to cover all areas as long as they have some kind of interest and understanding.”

“Increasingly, genres are being mixed in television,” argued Auerbach. “Is The F Word an entertainment show or a cooking show; it’s sort of somewhere weirdly in between. As genres get blurred so too do presenting talents.”

Steve, though, admitted to “a vague annoyance with musicians and footballers presenting. Do you see me releasing a hit album or playing for Arsenal? No, piss off. Let’s employ good people.”

Paul told the audience that becoming a presenter would involve “hard, hard work. You’ve got to graft and nobody ever owes you anything.”

“You get disappointed so many times when you’re first starting out,” said Fearne, who admitted auditioning for show after show before getting her break on ITV’s Disney Club at the age of 15. But even after gaining screen experience, it still took Fearne three attempts to land a presenting job on BBC kids’ series, The Saturday Show. Initially, rejection hurts, she said, “but as you get older and wiser it [becomes] water off a duck’s back and you know that you’re not right for that specific job.”

Steve’s advice was to bone up on the subject of any programme you want to work for: “You wouldn’t believe how many people we have coming to T4 for researcher positions who say, ‘I don’t really watch the show’.”

The presenter’s biggest tip, though, was to “be nice. If you get two presenters up for a six-week reality show in the Caribbean and one’s a talented ******** and the other, although not as talented, is a lovely person, that lovely person will get the job every single time. Nobody wants to be stranded on an island with a dickhead.”

Fearne added that presenters had to respect their crew: “Just because you’re on TV doesn’t mean you’re any different to anyone else in that production team — everyone is integral to that TV show.”

“Do your homework,” added Francis. “The smart people look into who somebody is. If I was going to write to Paul for a job in TV I might say that The Young Ones was my favourite programme. It might grab his attention for 30 seconds.”