Someone once asked me to describe my job badly. Without hesitation, I replied: “I pretend to be other people.” It’s true for what I do as a ghostwriter; people tell me their life stories, which I go and write up as if I were them. But it’s also true of another job of mine: working as an extra– no, a supporting artist – in films and television shows.

I’ve been an American senator in a series Uma Thurman starred in but nobody watched. I volunteered in a refugee camp when Earth was invaded by aliens. I’ve lost count of all the streets I’ve walked up and down in varying degrees of sobriety. I’m usually hardly noticed, but that changed when I was summoned to Buckingham Palace. It was in the final episode of Netflix’s The Crown, in a scene in which the Queen invited some senior Anglican bishops to the palace to discuss whether Charles and Camilla could have a church wedding.  

We shot over two days at Lancaster House, not far from Buckingham Palace and just weeks before the real King Charles’s coronation. There were ten of us altogether: eight extras plus the actors Richard Heap(playing the Archbishop of Canterbury) and Julian Wadham (as the Bishop of Salisbury). On Day One, we shot our grand entry into the palace; on Day Two, the exchange between Her Majesty and her Lord Bishops. The brief for Day One sounded quite easy – but that was before we discovered what a potentially lethal combination long clerical robes and tall flights of stairs are.

My social media inboxes went wild when the episode dropped. The oddest response was from someone who thought I was playing Desmond Tutu. A few friends have taken to calling me “Bishop” ever since. My fondest memory is Imelda Staunton joking that we should enter the Eurovision Song Contest together. Now that would have been something: The Queen and the Bishops –hopefully scoring more than Nul Points.