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I have a feeling if you try to corner time, it’s just going to get more crazy. We did corner time – everything you see happened in two hours, 14 minutes. I can’t rationalise that. JR: As a long-take film, Victoria doesn’t come across like, say, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman [2014], which has amazing tricks of synchronisation, things happening in exactly the right spot at the right moment. You create more of a sense of chance and looseness. ’” Which I thought was so funny – for the first time in my life, there’s some conspiracy thing.

The reward for bowing down before the altar of Hollywood is made clear when Hobie Doyle goes on a night out with a Carmen Miranda type called Carlotta Valdez (an audacious piece of namecraft, straight out of Vertigo). It’s a studio-arranged date, the sort considered the enemy of true romance, designed to refine each star’s image and provide some innocent distraction for the gossip columns. In Hail, Caesar! those columns are written by a formidable pair of twins called Thora and Thessaly Thacker (played by Tilda Swinton): duelling journalists Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper distilled into a two-headed monster.

A similarly accessible television trio of Made in Britain (1982), Elephant (1988) and The Firm (1989) does at least show him at full creative tilt, but they still barely scratch the surface: the BFI’s upcoming box-set spans two full decades and 30 television works in total (20 running over an hour apiece), revealing not just a far wider range of subjects than the too easy caricature of Clarke as an ultra-masculine social realist might suggest, but also a confidence and consistency that dates from the dawn of his career.