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As a programme-maker, I spend my time persuading people to put themselves into the hands of the BBC. I don't often experience the process from the other end, but I did this weekend:

A friendly sounding woman calls me and says "we'd love to have you on breakfast television tomorrow morning to talk about your documentary about Facebook." Great.

It's Sunday morning. The alarm goes off at 5.40am. Twenty minutes later I'm in the car and, after telling the man on security the pass number I've been texted, drive into Television Centre, feeling important.

I hang around in reception, and am asked by several minicab drivers if I'm someone I'm not. As there is no receptionist, I call the number I wrote in my diary and am told that someone will come to get me.

After a while, another friendly woman finds me. It turns out I'm at the wrong reception area. I am whizzed into make-up, with slightly anxious noises that I'm supposed to be on ahead of people who are already hanging around in the small, windowless Green Room that I'm shown but don't have time to sit down in.

About 60 minutes after my alarm had gone off, I am in the studio next to the two breakfast presenters.

They are friendly, and we chat. Suddenly they turn and start talking to the cameras, introducing a clip from my film. I wonder if I had shut up in time not to have been heard on TV.

The clip ends and they ask me what Mark Zuckerberg was really like.

I have lots to say, but know I shouldn't talk for too long. I want to sound like an expert but I also want to keep it simple. I want to give personal insights but I don't want to be indiscreet. And I want to talk in sentences.

I can hear what I'm about to say in my head before I speak, in a strange way that doesn't happen in ordinary life. Very soon it is over. They give a plug for the programme, and I am ushered out. They seem OK about it and say they'll see me later.

Ah, yes. That was another thing the woman on the phone had said: that if I come in early they'd want me to do it again at 8.40am. "You mean just say the same thing again?" I asked. "Yes," she replied, "Because nobody watching at 6.40am will still be watching at 8.40am, will they?" Well, no, I suppose not.

My wife calls. I ask if I looked nervous. Not really, she says, "but I could tell you were because you didn't smile."

Before my next TV appearance, 5 Live want to do an interview.

But there's time to fill, so I go back to the Green Room where I join a chess grandmaster, a mother with twin eight-year-old girl chess champs, a man from the building trade, and the head of a housing charity. Everyone gets on well despite the cramped conditions. Once in a while someone comes and asks if we'd like more tea or coffee. A small plate with four Danish pastries is on offer. I eat more than my share.

Soon I am sitting with headphones on, looking at a webcam shot of a studio in Manchester.  A voice asks me to confirm that I'm who 5 Live is expecting me to be. The housing minister over-runs. I get two questions and that's it. It is all very sudden and I am a bit flustered. Was that really on the radio?

Then I am back in the TV studio, feeling like an old hand but trying to smile. Somehow it isn't as smooth as the first time. Maybe I've got complacent. Maybe we are all trying not to say what we'd said the first time.

My wife says I smiled more but it wasn't as good.

I am thanked and told how to get out.

The whole experience reminded me of something, but I couldn't remember what until later. That was it: taking my mother to the NHS hospital in Basingstoke for a cataract operation.

We had the same anxiety about arriving on time and parking arrangements. There was the same stretched infrastructure - drab, institutional corridors and anonymous rooms in which thousands of strangers have sat. And those white polystyrene cups. The same tired, friendly people trying to do a good job under pressure. The same division of labour in the name of efficiency as my mother was passed between people with slightly different functions on her way to the surgeon. The same speed and clinical efficiency of the operation itself. And then the slight surprise at finding ourselves suddenly finished and on our way home.

It was good to experience the life of a programme contributor. I don't have any complaints: just a feeling that the system cannot be made any leaner or more efficient - or the Danish pastries any smaller or fewer - without contributors feeling distinctly undervalued.

Charles Miller writes about making Mark Zuckerberg: Inside Facebook here. And there is an extended interview with Zuckerberg here.