Aside from the creative decisions, there are also budgets to stick to and legal difficulties to swerve.

At an RTS Northern Ireland online event last month, “Clearing music for TV and film: the lowdown”, music consultant and supervisor Catherine Grimes and Juliette Squair, co-founder of music library The Nerve, offered advice based on more than 30 years of experience each in music and TV.

“Allow plenty of time to clear music,” advised Squair. Grimes had an instructive story from working on Romesh Ranganathan’s BBC One comedy Avoidance: “Romesh is a hip-hop fan, and one of the tracks he had scripted was Nelly’s Hot in Herre. It took us five months to clear that – there were seven music publishers involved,” she recalled.

Occasionally, approval can be almost instant. BBC One’s Belfast police drama Blue Lights used Dolly Parton’s Light of a Clear Blue Morning recorded by local band Dea Matrona, which was cleared in just two days. “That’s as quick as it gets – it was almost miraculous,” said Grimes.

The complications and vagaries of securing rights – and for the right price – mean that using a specialist is almost always the right decision. “If you’re working on a production with challenging music requirements, it’s always worth hiring the services of a music supervisor,” said Squair.

Grimes added: “I know from experience that publishers and labels will take advantage of people who don’t seem to know what they’re asking for and just throw a figure out in the air. Knowing the value of music is important.” TV producers don’t always need to pay huge fees for well-known tracks, she said. “When the music is so in the background that you know pop music is playing but you can’t hear what it is, there’s no point in wasting tens of thousands of pounds on a piece of Adele music when there’s library music that gives you the same flavour.”