You might have seen a different side to Andrew Collins of late. If, as Denis Norden might have said, you're one of those people who think that the 100 Greatest TV Somethings are themselves among the best televisual moments of the past couple of years, then you've probably witnessed Andrew (along with contemporaries Stuart Maconie and David Quantick) banging on about The Goodies, or Olde English Spangles, or Major Matt Mason, or any of the pop-culture artifacts of the past thirty years that might be forgotten if only Channel 4 would let it bloody lie.

But there's far more to Andrew than wistful reminiscences about how The A Team made cabbage firing tanks from household garbage. From an inconspicuous start in the layout department of NME, he's gone on to become the editor of both Q and Empire magazine and a scriptwriter for EastEnders and Family Affairs. He co-wrote the sitcom Grass, and has written and presented a fistful of TV and radio shows covering music, cinema, and things that used to be big but aren't around anymore. As if that wasn't enough. he's also the Radio Times film editor and hosts a regular slot on BBC Radio 6.

Andrew has started to document his memoirs of a somewhat charmed life. The first volume, Where Did It All Go Right? (WDIAGR?) was published in 2003 and called "mostalgic, warm and funny" by the Daily Mail (although that may have been a misprint). The sequel, Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now, came a year later and covered Andrew's student 80s. He tells us a third volume is planned, covering his adventures in 90s mass media.

We caught up with Andrew as he got ready for his evening slot, and quizzed him about his writing approach and his probable appearance in "The 100 Greatest 100 Greatest... Shows" with Jimmy Carr. We made that last bit up.

Great Writing: So what's with the rise in all these TV punditry shows? I wish I could get paid a million pounds for remembering obscure 70s chocolate bars.

Andrew Collins: The clips show is a symptom of the turn of the Millennium, I think. As the 20th century started to draw to a close we in the West came over all nostalgic for a past that was about to slip away from us. Look at all the World War Two films and documentaries that came out. On a more light hearted note, TV began to recycle itself. You must go back to TV Heaven, which was BBC2's first big nostalgic clips show, followed by TV Hell. Because the century was about to become last century, old clips suddenly took on a kind of socio-political-historical sheen. This wasn't just old telly, it was a social document, a time capsule, even if it was only the 1970s or 80s. TOTP2 proved as popular as TOTP among a certain age group. I Love... and Top Tens came next, and their success led to imitations. A new breed of pundit was born - "cultural commentators", to aggrandise them unnecessarily ie. 'People who had watched telly in their youth'. With a couple of hours to pad, the net was cast very wide and picked up quite a few journalists and comedians who became serial talking heads. My friend Stuart Maconie was among them. He gave good head, as it were, and found himself ubiquitous by dint of simply being edited in rather than out. I came to the genre late. I wasn't on I Love The 70s, but was on I Love The 80s. Once you've done one and made the final edit, you're asked to do the next. Stuart stopped doing them. I didn't. I still do them.

Repetition has set in, and Channel 4's decision to give Jimmy Carr the job of hosting all of their 100 Greatest... has helped only in making audiences groan at the latest one. However, you have to admit, they are compulsively entertaining. I have never been paid a million pounds. More like £150 and that's often for two hours' continuous talking. I won't call it work, but it does take effort - and time. The downside is that you have no idea what, if any, will be seen. I gave them gold dust for I Love The Muppets and wasn't on once!

GW: Why do you think we're so nostalgic for the recent past?

AC: Because we're asked to be. Also, because modern life really is increasingly rubbish. I really believe that. Shared experiences are now reduced to occasional international football matches and reality TV shows. You only have to go back to the 80s to find TV shows that united the nation, or about half of it.

Before satellite, computer games, the Internet and mobile phone technology, popular culture really did glue together the nation. It's fun to reminisce the recent past because it's so unlike the present. I'm sure people in the 30s reminisced about the 20s. And people in the 1770s reminisced about the 1760s. I bet.

GW: Given that you're perhaps more known for other things, do you feel accepted as an author?

AC: Thanks to the success of Where Did It All Go Right?, probably, yes. I'm still thought of as a music journalist even though I rarely write about music any more. I like being captioned on clips shows as "writer and broadcaster", and many people who've read my books also used to watch me in the middle of the night on Collins & Maconie's Movie Club, or listen to me now on 6 Music, so there are links. Having said that, I don't think people bought WDIAGR? because of my general "celebrity". Mainly because it's not about that. I have yet to write a book about the media. I think the success of WDIAGR? is down to the appeal of the idea: a 70s childhood in which nothing bad happens. I still think it's an original idea. Even Adrian Mole went through divorce and death!

GW: How do you go from NME layout artist to professional writer? Had you always done a bit of writing on the side?

AC: I'd always enjoyed writing stories in English as a kid, and after Art, English was my favourite subject at school (it was my fallback A-level in my parents' eyes, just in case this insane desire to be an artist came to nothing!). I wrote sketches for the 6th form revue. I wrote diaries from the age of seven, which became huge projects in the 80s, full of drawings and photos and clippings but also crammed with writing. Much of the artwork I produced at art school had annotation or writing as part of it. My big final-year degree project was a vast comic strip telling the tale of my three years at Chelsea School of Art - it was a narrative project. When I worked for a year as a soulless freelance illustrator I turned my diary into a writing project, writing in great detail about my life. It was a fanzine I wrote and designed that caught the eye of NME's features editor - he had me in to talk to me about maybe doing a bit of writing, but there was also a job going in the art room, so I applied for that and got it. Being Design Assistant for three days a week was my way in. Once there, I badgered the section editors until they caved in a gave me tryout reviews to write. That's how I made the transition.

Once I had enough writing work to sustain me, I quit the layout room.
 
GW: How useful is journalistic experience when writing a book? Is the creative process different?

AC: Very different. Interestingly, when I started writing my first book (the official biography of Billy Bragg), I began it with what read like a Q feature. It was all wrong. I had to "unlearn" a lot of my music journalist's ticks before it started to read like a book. A cover story on Q or NME is about 3,000 to 5,000 words long. A book is 100,000 words long. You can't just write 20 cover stories, it has to be planned as a complete narrative and takes a lot of structuring. I've written cover stories that just sort of start, keep going and end. ("End on a quote!" we always used to joke at the NME, as this was the laziest way of ending in the world.)

Having said all that, writing a rock biography is certainly a close cousin of writing rock features for a magazine.

The two memoirs have been a different kettle of fish. As a journalist, you try and get in as much information as possible. Writing a memoir, it's sometimes what you take out that matters. The drama - and that's your goal - can come from a single, evocative sentence, or something that leaves the reader hanging in the air. You don't have to explain everything in a memoir, especially not a novelistic one. Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now (HKIMN) was written in a totally different way to WDIAGR?, as it doesn't rely on intermittent diary entries or footnotes, and reads much more like fiction. This was deliberate - more dialogue, more evocation of time and place. It was so much harder than just listing the food we ate in the 70s. My editor at Ebury - who's very good at his job and worked on both my memoirs - advised me to take out loads of detail in the first draft of HKIMN, to strip it back to the more general stuff about college and lose much of the stuff about art school. This was to make it more inclusive, but it also made it more dramatic. He knew which stuff to lose and which stuff to keep. I bow down to him.

GW: With all the things you're involved in, you must write disparate bits and pieces every day. Is that something you find helps your creativity, or would you prefer to stay focused?

AC: This morning I wrote a 280-word review of Finding Neverland on DVD for Radio Times and a 500-word radio diary for the Guardian. Both have to be delivered tomorrow but I know for a fact that I won't have much time in the morning as I am filming a clips show about Dr Who, so I made sure I finished them today. I have to be incredibly well organised with so many fingers in so many pies, unless I want to turn into the sort of writer who misses deadlines or hands in substandard copy. I operate under no illusions of great writing talent - if I have anything to offer it's copy that's written to length and delivered on time, spell-checked and read back a few times. Having been an editor, I know how important this is, and when I went freelance again in 1997 I vowed never to be the kind of writer that editors hate. I certainly enjoy having lots of different stuff on. Some days are dominated by journalism, others by talking in to a microphone. That keeps me creative on both sides. The talking makes me want to write, and the writing makes me want to talk. I sort of hope I never decide what I actually want to do with my life! Also, deadlines make me creative.
 
GW: What would be a typical writing day?

AC: Because of my afternoon radio show, I am more likely to have a typical morning! In which case: get up early, around 7am, clean my teeth and have a shave, turn on the computer, check emails, get my head around what needs doing first, have a shower with a clear idea of what I'll be writing first so I can start composing sentences in my head, then eat breakfast (unless I'm so inspired I have to get my fingers on the keys straight away!) Sometimes I can tap away all morning and not get anywhere. If it's going badly, I'll often read something I've written already and had published to remind me that I can write! It's frustrating to have to stop by midday so that I can get out of the house and onto the train (I live in Surrey and commute in to London), but that's my lot in life. I'm actually about to switch from weekdays to weekends on 6 Music, and I can't wait to have full writing days again. I wrote the whole of HKIMN before lunch. And Grass.

It's amazing what you can do if you have no choice. I'm not saying I can turn it on like a tap, but I really do find that necessity is the mother of invention. I never write at night unless there's no other way of meeting a deadline. When I get home at 8.30pm I reserve the rest of the evening for being with my wife, eating and watching TV or DVDs. The same with weekends if I can help it. Weekends are for doing nothing. I've never been the kind of writer who writes through the night.

GW. Did your prior exposure guarantee publication of your memoirs?

AC: I'm not famous enough to get a novel or book published on that basis alone.

I've never read it, so it might be brilliant, but Jo Brand's current novel will have been initially commissioned off the back of her fame. Why not? She's a woman of words - it's a natural step to write books if you deal in words for a living. That said, I was established enough as a journalist and occasional radio/TV performer to have an agent, and that acts as a magnet for prospective employers, including publishers. I was involved in the Edinburgh show Lloyd Cole Knew My Father in 2000, which Stuart Maconie, David Quantick and I were lucky enough to transfer to London and then onto Radio 2. My aforementioned editor approached my agent asking if any of us had a book in them. As luck would have it, I had already written four sample chapters of what became WDIAGR? (at that stage it was called All Fields), so my agent set up a meeting. In that sense, being established in the media helped get me the meeting, but no publisher would have published a book by me at that time on the strength of me having been the editor of Q and written EastEnders.

GW. You've written the biography of Billy Bragg. How did writing about someone else's life compare to writing about your own?

AC: In many ways I preferred writing about Billy's life, in that there is no pressure on you. People bought that book because of Billy, not me. I hope I did a good job - Billy wanted humour rather than po-faced political hagiography and that's what I tried to give him. I loved retracing his steps because he's such a genial and generous subject. I have no interest in writing the biography of anyone else - I have been spoiled by the experience of doing Billy. We spent a good six months in and out of each others' pockets and enjoyed every minute of it. It was a journalistic job, in that it was packed with detail (the sort fans love, but also as a way of getting to the heart of the man and the times). It was written with love, and yet it wasn't about what I thought of Billy. It was funny doing a book signing with him, as none of his fans wanted my signature but they got it anyway!

GW. You've also written for EastEnders and Grass. How does writing for the screen compare with writing for the page?

AC: I learned all this on EastEnders: you are writing dialogue, telling a story through what the characters say and how they say it. You must inhabit the character and write as they would speak, even a minor character. That is, if you want it to be real.

The same was true of Grass, which was an ambitious project - but then we never wanted to write a straightforward sitcom. It was a serial in eight parts, and what I brought to the party was structure. Don't start a scene with hello and end it with goodbye; come in later and get out earlier. That's drama. It was a major thrill seeing the words we had written coming out of the telly. You'll never know how a line will work until the actor is saying it out loud. Often, it doesn't. Then it will be changed. So your job is never done until the director says it's a take!

GW. Working on NME, Q, and Empire at a transitional time in British popular culture, it could be said that you've played your part in propagating the muso-and-film-oriented-new-laddist culture which in turn led to the rise of the lad-lit genre in which your books now reside. Are you conscious of a contribution to cultural change, and do you think lad-lit has a lot of mileage left?

AC: My contribution, if any, was to help popularise Britpop at Select magazine, along with the team there: Andrew Harrison, Steve Lamacq, Stuart Maconie, David Cavanagh. We gave what was already happening (a reaction to the US grunge hegemony) a shape when we put Brett Anderson on the cover over a Union Jack, a sort of parody of the Sun's SUPPORT OUR BOYS cover during the Gulf War. We did not invent Britpop, and we certainly didn't invent Suede or Blur or Pulp, but we got behind British music as a kind of manifesto, something glossy monthlies didn't do. We also put Kurt Cobain on the cover a few times after that, let us not forget! It was a transitional time, but I was the right person at the right time as much as a facilitator. I arrived at Q in 1994 and put Blur on the cover for Parklife. This was seen a big risk (I know, hard to believe now), but it paid off. Then it was Oasis and then the tide changed: old people bought young music, young people bought the Beatles. The generation gap healed up and we were at the centre of this paradigm shift, I think. My time at Empire coincided with Trainspotting, so that was lucky too - it was all about confidence in ourselves, in what Britain could produce. It couldn't last.

Even though some of the bands were laddish and Ewan McGregor played a junkie, we didn't cover it in a laddish way. So I don't know if we had much to do with New Laddism - that was happening in parallel at the mens' mags. You might make some links between the sort of urbane, witty, self-deprecating writer who thrived at Q and Select in the mid-90s and went on to colonise Radio 1 with some sort of cultural takeover, but that's as much to do with radio looking for new voices and looking to a thriving magazine sector instead of at DJs.

GW: What's next for Andrew Collins the writer?

AC: My next work will be part three of my memoirs. I'd like to write a novel after that, but there is a demand for me to finish my story, so I'm bowing to pressure. I worry that it will lack the "universal truths" of the first two books, but I'll try and get some humour out of my zigzag through the various branches of the media in the 90s. People are interested in this sort of stuff, as long as it doesn't sound like you're showing off, which I would rather die than do. I owe much of my career to good fortune and being in the right place.

Both volumes of Andrew Collins' memoirs, Where Did It All Go Right? and Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now are available from all good stockists. Andrew's website about the books is here.