It’s the same every year – and has been since at least 1990: the exam results come out, huge numbers of teenagers it appears are even more intelligent than those the year before, and employers and academics alike argue it’s because exams are getting easier.

Well you know what? I have no idea if that’s true or not. All I am certain of is that teenagers are astonishingly more confident, more mature and more interesting than they ever were when I was one.

But for what’s it worth, I do think they have it harder nowadays, but only because they have to focus, discipline and navigate themselves through an entire alphabet of distractions that simply never existed back when I was studying GCSEs.

When I was swotting up on the biology of the bee (Biology), the Cuban Missile Crisis (History) and river bed attrition (Geography), my only diversions were the three terrestrial television channels (BBC1, BBC2 and ITV) and girls.

And as I had absolutely no luck with the latter, my big indulgences were Top of The Pops (Thursday, 7.30pm), Play For Today (Tuesdays – and only because it always had nudity in it) and Blue Peter (I fancied its presenter Lesley Judd).

That was the sum total of all my avenues for escape. So the choice between studying and just doing nothing was fairly straightforward.

However, if I were 14 today, I hate to think how stupid – academically – I’d be.

Pleasure – and its pursuit – has been a cornerstone of my life since my early 30s, when I realised that all my hard work, my devotion to dotting the right ‘i’s’ and ‘t’s’ and an unshakeable belief in the charity of employers promised little more than one of those Reader’s Digest letters delivered in the post that claim you have won a prize of £1m.

Therefore, if I were a teenager now, chances are I’d be seduced by everything – the Internet, computer games, satellite channels; the list, as you know, goes on and on and on.

Back then, if I wanted to see what a woman looked like without any clothes on, I’d have to wait outside my local newsagents until everyone had left, then rush in, lower my voice an octave or two, reach up to the top shelf and wait, with sweat dripping off me, while the sales assistant looked me up and down before saying: “Hello Jeremy, I thought it was you. How’s your mum?”

Today I’d just click a button.

And as for games, it was either Monopoly or Cluedo. With my parents.

I played Super Mario Bros the other evening at a friend’s house (she told me it was ‘very retro’) and I LOVED it!

Indeed, it took a couple of Bacardi and Cokes just to prise my fingers away from the controls.

As for voicing my opinion, and standing up for a belief, the most I’d venture would be a rather considered: “I think poverty’s bad...”

So if were lucky enough to turn back the clock and once again find myself in the classroom, you can take it from me – I’d fail everything.