After sensitively tackling the crisis of masculinity in How to Be a Man, Rylan is now asking his guests How to Be in the Spotlight. And despite our exposure to a lot of very public breakdowns, including Rylan’s own, it can be hard to empathise when the spotlight also brings with it such enviable perks: his first guest, the actor Daisy May Cooper, boasts: “You can get your Sofology delivery within a week when you normally wait 13 weeks.”

But I was soon snapped out of my cynicism by Rylan, who’s nothing if not sincere as he gently draws out his interviewees and elicits some candid conversations about the highs and lows of fame.

Cooper is hilariously frank and has an amazing story about the first time she was recognised in public. This involves her local pharmacist, her brother and This Country co-star, Charlie, and his unfortunate case of threadworms. But she goes on to reveal how surprisingly flat she felt when racking up the awards for their comedy, and her consequent alcoholism and depression. “It’s like scoring the goal and you go past the goalposts and there’s just fog.”

From overnight reality show stars to veteran TV chefs, there’s a great variety of guests in the 12-episode series, and they’ve all dealt with fame with varying degrees of success. I was glad to hear that Ainsley Harriott is happily adapting to life as an internet meme.

“I don’t feel embarrassed,” he says, “because it brings people joy.”

My favourite episode features Francis Bourgeois (aka TikTok’s “train guy”). Bourgeois, real name Luke Nicolson, has been accused of playing a trainspotting character for social media clout, based on nothing but hearsay and a few pictures from his time at secondary school.

But that already flimsy basis collapses under the weight of his testimony here, when he tells of how he was bullied into rebuilding his personality from the ground up, which inevitably involved burying his love of locomotives. With every TikTok post, he says, he is recapturing the joy he felt as a child that was stifled, as so many of our passions are, by the petty game of adolescent conformity.

Bourgeois’s redemption arc provides a nice happy ending to the series. But after all the cautionary tales told here, I’m left with the overwhelming impression that nobody actually knows how to be in the spotlight. Especially at a time when, because of the impact of social media, that spotlight never turns off.

In that sense, I agree with the actor and activist Jameela Jamil’s conclusion, from episode 4, that “no one can exist at the altitude of that pedestal, healthily. Apart from Emma Thompson.”