I went to the Central St Martin’s graduate show last night and my picture got taken, then Madonna rocks up and I’m like, ‘Oh, gosh, people must be thinking I’m still very relevant,’ but that’s just my ego. “I do embrace my insecurities, and I get a bit of a dopamine rush from certain things. “Ohhh, they probably know nothing about me!” he says, as if it’s an absurd idea.
Two decades on, now 42, does Young, who experienced such an outpouring of love from teenagers of the day, ever worry about what Gen Z think of him? “It was naive in a great way,” he says, “and people feel like they discovered the show, because it started with a few hundred thousand viewers, and ended up with 14 million.” Young, who won the ITV reality show as a 22-year-old politics graduate with 8.7 million public votes, talks about the series with real warmth.