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When Phil came back from the newsagents with his Sunday paper, he had a somewhat smug look on his face. He gave me an enquiring glance as he placed the paper on the kitchen table and took off his coat. “Where are the girls?” he asked.

“In there,” I told him, pointing to the living room, “Maddie’s helping Lissie choose her options for next year.”

Our youngest daughter will be moving into Year 9 next September, starting to work towards her GCSEs. The current Year 8s have been tasked with choosing their options for next year, over the Easter holidays. When she’d asked for some advice, Lissie had got next-to-no help from her useless form tutor, who had simply pointed her in the direction of the GCSE Options page of the school website. This contained a complicated-looking set of tables that outlined the provisional subject plans for Year 9, which she was expected to use to choose her options. With Maddie having already been through this process a few years ago, Lissie had called upon her big sister’s knowledge and experience to help her out.

Phil nodded and went to hang his coat on one of the hooks by the front door. He returned for his paper, then went into the living room. I knew something was about to happen, so I followed him in, intrigued. The girls were on the sofa; Lissie had her laptop open and Maddie was busy moving her finger around its touchpad.

Their father unfolded his paper, before plopping it down on the sofa next to Maddie. “There you are,” he said, triumphantly, “what did I tell you?!”

They looked up at him, only to find him directing their attention to the newspaper. I could just make out the headline from where I was standing: ‘Channel 4 plumbs new depths’ it screamed, before adding, in slightly smaller print, ‘Outrage at offensive ‘dare’’.

The girls read the headline, then looked back at their Dad, waiting for the rant that they (and I) were fully expecting to spew forth. Remarkably, it didn’t arrive!

“Well, after last night, you know what it’ll say,” he told them, calmly, “I just thought I’d show you, so you know it wasn’t just me and your Mam over-reacting!”

“We never thought it was!” Maddie told him. “We know you aren’t uptight and prudish like some people, so if you think something’s offensive, then we know it almost certainly is!”

“Oh,” Phil replied, caught off-guard by his eldest daughter’s candidness, “thank-you, Maddie!”

“You’re welcome!” she smiled. “Just because I’m a teenager, doesn’t mean I don’t respect you and Mam, and agree with a lot of what you think and say. In fact, when I have kids of my own, I want to be as good a parent to them as you two are to us!”

I felt myself welling up, and, looking at Phil, I could see Maddie had hit an emotional nerve in him, too.

“Come here and let me give you a big hug!” he told Maddie, who readily complied. Lissie looked at me. Her expression told me, loud and clear, that she didn’t want to be left out of this family moment, so I opened my arms wide and invited her to me. She pushed her laptop off her lap and bounded over, pressing herself tightly against me, as I wrapped my arms around her.

The following day, Britain’s Most Daring was all over the news, with more and more people publicly taking umbrage at the tasteless paintballing dare. Both BBC and ITV had features on it during their breakfast shows, with various commentators and public figures invited in to express their disgust. A little later, This Morning’s Eamonn Holmes looked distinctly uncomfortable whilst interviewing one of Britain’s Most Daring’s producers, who refused to apologise and actually tried to defend the dare and the showing of it on national TV. It was “a sign,” he told his stunned interviewer, “of how far society in Northern Ireland has moved on, that the dare has been so well-received.” Needless to say, that well-known home of self-restraint, Twitter, went into outraged meltdown in no time at all.

Maddie spent the day at Stacie’s on Wednesday, and was told all about Stacie’s day at the studio last Saturday watching her sister, Gemma, take part in Britain’s Most Daring. But, despite persistent questioning, Stacie wouldn’t say much about what happens next. The one thing she did reveal was that Gemma had been filmed at work during the week.

“I expect she’s been told not to let people know too much, otherwise the programme would be spoiled by people going on Facebook or Twitter or whatever and telling everyone what is going to happen on the show,” I told Maddie, when she griped about Stacie not telling her. “You’ll just have to wait till Saturday to find out. Remember what you told Lissie about not wanting to spoil the surprise? Well, it’s the same thing!”

Maddie was bright enough to realise that, however much she wanted to know what Gemma was up to, she would rather watch the show and be surprised like the programme’s producers intended their viewers to be.

Wednesday was also the day that the professional outrage reached its zenith. During a visit to a factory, somewhere or other, the Prime Minister was dragged into the debate. Theresa May was asked whether she thought that “Channel 4 should publicly apologise to the people of Northern Ireland for the tasteless and offensive nature of the programme, and pull Britain’s Most Daring from its schedule.” As is so often the case, the Prime Minister dodged the question, simply saying that it was for individual broadcasters to judge the suitability of the material they show to the public.

For their part, Channel 4 issued a statement that took a lot of words to not really say anything, in the way that PR people are so talented at: ‘Channel 4 would like to apologise if any viewers felt that there were scenes in the recent Britain’s Most Daring programme that might be construed to have pushed the boundaries of the public’s perception of the appropriate broadcasting standards, with regard to material that some viewers may have found to be more challenging than they were expecting on a show whose title gives an indication of what might be reasonably considered that it may contain; it was not the intention of either Channel 4 or the makers of Britain’s Most Daring that any viewers should consider the programme material to be in any way likely to cause anyone watching to be offended by elements within the show, which is primarily a light-hearted entertainment show that can be enjoyed by all the family.’ There, that told ’em!

By the time Saturday had come around again, the notoriety that Britain’s Most Daring had gained as a result of the ongoing furore, meant that the viewing figures for the second show were guaranteed to be a lot higher than those for the first show had been. As the old adage goes, there’s no such thing as bad publicity!