There was a time when Stock, Aitken and Waterman mogul Pete Waterman was – in a television sense – like s**t in a cow field; you simply couldn’t avoid him, no matter what channel you tuned in to.

He had pivotal roles in Popstars: The Rivals, The Hit Man and Her – with Michaela Strachan as his co-host – and Pop Idol, but it seems his decision to suddenly quit reality TV came when Spice Girl Geri Halliwell brought her dog on to the set of Popstars, prompting Pete to ask himself, “When she came in and put the dog on her lap, I thought: ‘What am I actually doing here?’”

Adding that he felt reality TV had become “a pantomime” and in particular, of Popstars, Pete went on to say, “In our contract with ITV, there were all these rules about what you could and could not do on screen…

“One of them, I always thought, was that no animals were allowed. So all the TV executives were freaking out about there being a dog in the studio.”

It seems that since he eschewed all things reality TV based, Pete’s been inundated with offers to tempt him back, including, he says, approaches from The X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent and American Idol.

Of turning them all down, Pete told the Daily Mail, “I used to think, ‘I’m in this for the music, I’m not in it for TV producers stabbing each other in the back and lying to people and deliberately causing arguments on television. I’m trying to be honest to the public, but you’re fixing things that I’m having to live with, so I’m out of here’.”

But on the upside for Pete, his absence from the reality TV circuit means he gets to spend a lot of time on his favourite hobby – train spotting.

Fun stuff.