I REMEMBER it as if it was yesterday – in that vague, hazy and self-deceiving way we remember our yesterdays. It was the day Mike Baldwin bought me a pint in the Rovers, the culmination of a Granada Studios Tour which ended up at the Taj Mahal of Weatherfield, The Rovers Return.

The conceit was simple. You walked into the bar, took a spot directly in front of the bar, and a concealed video camera recorded your image. Betty Turpin’s voice called out “What’ll it be ... the usual, chuck?” Before you had a chance to answer, Mike Baldwin’s voice shouted out: “This one’s on me, Betty.’’ When the studio tour ended, a cut-away was spliced into a pre-packaged video and you were sent away with a tape featuring your drink at the Rovers with horrendous jump-cuts, a squinting eye-line and the hope that Mike Baldwin had picked up the tab.

Back then, the notion of theme parks with artificial intelligence, 3D computer animation and ambient sound was the stuff of science fiction. The technology was primitive and life felt like it was unfolding in black and white. You walked on to a jerry-built studio lot with a Newton and Ridley brewery sign hanging above the door and re-emerged as a star in Britain’s greatest soap.

I am instinctively sceptical about theme parks, about mediated entertainment experiences and what the industry loves to refer to as “exciting brand extensions”. Last week my trauma deepened as ITV Studios entered into an agreement to licence Coronation Street to a new theme park in north Kent, a business which some analysts fear will not attract enough visitors to break even.

Back when Mike Baldwin bought me a pint, Granada was one of the drivers of British television. It was an era when decision-making was more devolved and major regional television centres had commissioning and production power. ITV’s biggest show was produced in the North West, Liverpool hosted Channel 4’s top soap Brookside and Scotland innovated in games entertainment with the global brand Grand Theft Auto.

But none of the successes of the north could halt the inexorable flow of power and creative decision-making to London. With each new round of regulation the pressure to centralise grew.

A myth was cultivated inside television that scale, innovation and the power to decide was London’s by right and that Scotland was little more than a creative backwater.

This inexorable centralisation was fuelled by Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia and more recently by the Tories performing public fellatio on the financial services sector. The influx of new wealth into London from the Middle East and Russian oligarchs has created a flow of inward investment and spiked a property market that now defies economic logic.

London has become not just a place but a fantasy.

It may be a great city but London is in danger of being over-burdened with the hype that has been bestowed upon it. As the skyline of Canary Wharf rises up majestically to the east of the city and a thriving multi-culturalism gives London a unique character, too many of its high-profile projects have been hopelessly derailed and bailed out with a seemingly bottomless pit of public wealth.

The London Resort is the latest chapter in the fantasy. It is being trumpeted as a £3 billion theme park on the Swanscombe peninsular between Dartford and Gravesend. ITV have weighed in with key brands including Thunderbirds, I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here and Coronation Street.

ITV Studio bosses have confirmed that some of the attractions will be based on children’s shows Thunderbirds Are Go and Robozuna and, to chill my bones, there is almost certainly going to be a Coronation Street entertainment experience. Who buys the round this time is far from clear.

ITV’s involvement has air-brushed the fact that other major licensing companies have already pulled out of the project. They include Paramount, who dropped out of the project in 2017 and after delays and accusations of managerial confusion. Aardman Animation, the makers of Wallace And Gromit and Shaun The Sheep, have also withdrawn.

Despite London’s global bragging rights, the city has many failures to hide.

Most would agree that the 2012 Olympics, from its game-changing opening ceremony to its widespread popular support, was an outstanding success.

But much of what surrounded it was not. The disposal of Olympic Park to the preferred bidders West Ham United and Newham Council was mired in controversy. The Crossrail project is nothing short of a national scandal. The latest update is unsurprisingly another delay to the launch date and estimates of £1 billion in lost revenues with a further £1.4m being earmarked for compensation.

It is now an open secret that Crossrail will wreck Transport For London, the local government body whose operating budget is at perilous risk. The final delivery costs and any further defaults will be met principally from local taxpayers in the London region – but not from there alone. The Department for Transport and budgets secured from taxpayers across the UK are likely to be further exposed.

The beleaguered transport minister Chris Grayling – aka #FailingGrayling – has been lambasted by the Public Accounts Committee for “continual shortcomings” by his department, not least the recent farrago of hiring companies with no ferry-boats to save Britain from the catastrophe of a no-deal Brexit.

We know from our own painful experiences with the Edinburgh trams that public transport projects are notoriously difficult to manage, but the list of Fantasy London projects that have floundered or overspent easily dwarfs Edinburgh’s tales of woe.

The well-meaning Garden Bridge idea, to build a bridge of flora and fauna over the River Thames with 270 trees and 2000 shrubs, was first mooted by actress Joanna Lumley. It was a fatal combination of celebrity, glamour and public realm, compromised from the start by canapé culture and a lavish launch party.

In October 2016, the National Audit Office revealed that David Cameron had ignored advice from his own civil servants not to provide the troubled project further taxpayer funds. Accounts filed with Companies House subsequently showed a £56m shortfall in the project’s accounts. As much as £43m of the fantasy project came from public funds.

The politician at the heart of the Garden Bridge fiasco was one of London’s chief fantasists, the former mayor Boris Johnson, who was also the architect the Thames Hub Airport – a proposal for a four-runway hub airport to be located on the Isle of Grain in Kent.

Fortunately – or not, depending on the level of your cynicism – the idea was moth-balled when Heathrow’s third runway was approved. That remains locked in an unwinnable war of attrition with environmentalists and local residents’ groups. The only thing guaranteed to become airborne are costs.

So here’s a tip for those of you who are scunnered with London’s spending euphoria. Keep your eye on the London Resort project, which promises to be a complex with state-of-the-art fairground rides, a Coronation Street theme park, 3500 hotel rooms and events space stretching over 535 acres of Kent.

In what has now become a familiar story, the London Resort is already delayed by two years and key content partners have withdrawn – but, comfortingly, the project managers claim they are on “an epic journey”.

One final word of reassurance: the holding company that is driving this adventure playground is none other than Steven Norris, the former Conservative transport minister whose chequered career in infrastructure precedes him.

We should all be eternally grateful that we are led by their brilliance.