Last week I attended the ceremonial destruction of BBC TV Centre, which was enthusiastically blown to pieces in a controlled nuclear explosion by a delighted David Cameron. With one hand on the detonator and the other jiggling in his pocket, David Cameron was flanked by representatives of the principal faith groups, as well as leading commercial broadcasters, free-market economists, wealthy pornographers, and a child who had won a hopping competition. The prime minister triumphantly flobbed a final Green Ernie into the crater, before it was filled with a celebratory cocktail of toxic waste, liquid concrete and dogs’ messes.

A Red Arrows flypast drowned out the band of the Coldstream Guards, playing a rousing rendition of Phyllis Dillon’s Don’t Touch Me Tomato, a personal favourite of the reggae-loving prime minister and his family. The fading sun bounced one final time off the smooth golden buttock of TB Huxley-Jones’s naked three-metre statue of the former head of entertainment David Liddiment. The media memories of an ungrateful nation sank into a radioactive quagmire of history and animal faeces.

We can all remember where we were when BBC TV Centre was finally erased from the tabula rasa of human consciousness. I was being driven through a Paris underpass, watching a documentary about 9/11 on my iPad, and wearing nothing but a rubber JFK mask. But can we remember where we were when we first became aware of TV Centre’s existence? Former BBC director general George Entwistle, for example, claims the first he heard of the building was in a memo in November 2012, despite having already worked there daily for two months.

My own BBC TV Centre awareness began in 1981, during Roy Castle’s BBC children’s television show Record Breakers. The fact maven Norris McWhirter was, unusually, standing outside the studio in the distinctive concrete doughnut of TV Centre, acknowledging the applause of thousands of members of his centre-right pressure group the Freedom Association. The concerned libertarians were showing their opposition to sporting sanctions on apartheid-era South Africa by dressing up as Zulus and doing a mass hokey cokey to Booker T and the MG’s Soul Limbo, the theme for the BBC’s cricket coverage. Norris McWhirter’s record-breaking dream was to choreograph the largest centre-right dance that had ever been seen in the Shepherd’s Bush area. And he realised it spectacularly.

But what stayed with me that day was not Norris McWhirter’s freedom dance itself, but the fact that Norris McWhirter’s non-partisan followers were cavorting in blackface through an identifiably existent environment, the actual BBC TV Centre itself. At that moment it struck me – the Dream Factory was a real place. And like many a light entertainer before and after me, I realised that one day I, too, had to go there and fashion a few dreams of my own.

It was almost 25 years later, in 1993, when I finally set my two feet firmly in BBC TV Centre for the first time. I was recording a television pilot of the youth-oriented Radio 4 comedy series I appeared in, Doolally Delight, and was to tape a further 12 individual Doolallys in TV Centre over the next five years, my contributions gradually deteriorating in commitment, focus and quality, to the embarrassment of my fellow performers, until the cup of suffering was at last taken forcibly from my lips. But TV Centre itself was every bit as exciting as I’d hoped it would be when I first saw Norris McWhirter’s democratically provocative conga line weave through its concrete columns.

When I was a tiny child, my mother had begrudgingly made good on her promise to take me to Disneyland, even though it turned out my fatal brain illness had been misdiagnosed. Thrillingly, a Goofy had waved at me through the Florida haze as it emerged sniffing from a staff toilet cubicle. Goofys, it appeared, were real. But BBC TV Centre knocked Disneyland into a cocked hat in the physical avatar manifestation stakes.

Scurrying around the doughnut daily I soon saw, just going about their business like ordinary people, Alan Yentob, Sue Barker, Barbara Woodhouse and Rory McGrath, to name but four. These real, modern day media Goofys were far more exciting than Disney’s ill-defined dog-man hybrid, though Goofy’s John Coltrane documentary was more insightful than Alan Yentob’s. Sometimes I shared the super-Goofys’ canteen, trying discreetly to sit as near as I could to Andrew Graham-Dixon, Lizo Mzimba, Rabbi Lionel Blue or Richard Stilgoe, in the hope of absorbing some of their mysterious powers.

When trying to record comedy shows in front of studio audiences, at BBC TV Centre, the counter-intuitive genius that characterised the building soon became apparent. Three hundred or so disappointed people, who had actually applied for tickets to see Bruce Forsyth’s Play Your Cards Right and had already been kept queuing for two hours in the rain with nowhere to get food or drink, were invited in weekly by the Ticket Unit throughout the 90s to sit on plastic pop-up chairs in an aesthetically hostile space and show their audible indifference to anything unfamiliar. It seems to me that TV comedy studio recordings favour dead-eyed autocue gobbling monologists, indifferent to the reality of the room, and penalise proper live performers who are the best really. But the grand old duchess of Shepherd’s Bush took me in her dying hand and gently fed me something I had previously never tasted. And that something was called Humility, my friends. And for that alone I will always love her.

It may seem absurd to you that such an instantly recognisable and effortlessly iconic building as BBC TV Centre should be obliterated, as if the optimistic postwar vision of educating, informing and entertaining that it embodied stands for nothing in the modern world. It would perhaps be most fitting if the charred remains of TV Centre were buried under the retail parks, tanning salons and luxury housing developments of the 21st century as quickly as possible. Last weekend, the BBC hosted a whole evening of dreary sentimentalists and weeping salary men crying about TV Centre’s collapse, but as the deafening explosion signifying its destruction echoed around west London it spoke to me of a brave new tomorrow, where service providers compete to offer streamlined facilities to a broader range of production outlets, each triangulated towards specifically targeted demographics as outlined in the revised broadcasting remit documentation, at both national and regional level, within a very real virtual thinkspace.

Stewart Lee has curated The Alternative Comedy Experience for Comedy Central, Tuesdays, at 11pm. For new live dates, see stewartlee.co.uk