Her first forays into TV presenting were on some obscure digital channels, including L!ve TV, and on programmes without much staying power. Who remembers God’s Gift, the short-lived ITV dating show she took over from Davina McCall? Or the late-night interview programme Pyjama Party? Or Talking Telephone Numbers, the game show that she presented with Phillip Schofield? They are all noticeably absent from her Who’s Who entry, which picks up her TV career from hosting Fanorama, an E4 quiz show that featured David Mitchell as a team captain, in 2001. It was on this show that she presented a contestant with that bagged-up flatulence as a consolation prize.

Winkleman can never be accused of not putting in the hard work. Reflecting on making Trading Up, a car-based game show that she helmed for Channel 4 in 1999, she once said: “If I tell you that while I was actually filming it, I had a small nap, does that give you an idea of how interesting it was? I don’t even like cars. I can’t even drive a car. I can’t spell car.”

And when she introduced a pre-recorded valedictory interview she did with four members of the band S Club 7 on Liquid News in 2003, which their PR representative angrily disrupted after Winkleman asked about their finances, she deadpanned: “The foursome’s send-off ran into some difficulty.”

Winkleman grew up in a media family. She is the daughter of journalist Eve Pollard and book publisher Barry Winkleman, and her step-father, Sir Nicholas Lloyd, edited newspapers including the News of the World and the Daily Express. She credits her upbringing with giving her an insatiable curiosity in people – celebrity or otherwise – that has made her such a relatable screen presence and accomplished interviewer. A semi-official family motto was: “Don’t worry about being interesting; be interested.”

She studied art history at New Hall, Cambridge, and got her first job in a gallery, but was so bored that she only lasted four days. Winkleman has admitted that she “shocked” her parents by ditching the high-brow art world for some pretty low-rent TV.