“IT'S their loss.” That, says Tom Jones, is the correct response to receiving a knock-back, and the Welsh warbler should know, having been dropped in 2015 by the BBC as a judge from TV talent show The Voice.

Jones – who returned to the ITV version of the show last night – said last week that he'd been gratified that ratings for the show fell after the BBC dropped him.

It seems to have been "their loss" after all.

But no matter how many times I utter that phrase, I’m not sure I’ll ever convince myself of its veracity. There is no more shattering shock, no more singular stigma, no more shuddering shame than the receipt of a public knock-back”. At school, the knock-back (or KB as we shortened it, the phrase itself too harsh for our developing ears) was oft the stuff of greedy gossip and salacious scandal. Beyond the school gates, potential KBs were ever present.

It was 1987. I was cutting aboot the fashionable west end. I knew girls called Kerry and Gillsy. They were beyond cool, and they introduced me to many things; they introduced me to a new word: “clubbing”. I’d never heard the term before. In the Glasgow of the earlier 1980s we either went 1. To the dancing or 2. To a disco.

“Clubbing” was a whole new level of nocturnal nexus. I was ready for the challenge and had the chat tae match.

So there I was, 16 years old, swaggering with all the Glasgow gallus I could muster. I was as immature as I was immutable; I wandered into one of those former Clydeside warehouses: Fury, Sub, Jax … the names sent us to another place, another world. In this world we were all cool all good-looking, and we could all dance. And we all had the best chat-up lines ever.

The very concept of “chatting-up” feels profoundly dated these days. As if worthy women could be ensnared, inveigled, entwined with a handful of well practised, well chosen sentences. But it wasn’t about the words themselves; no. That chit chat was an attitudinal indicator, a way for the woman to sort the wheat from the chaff. I was hoping to be wheat. (Mostly because I never knew what chaff was.)

I was impeccably dressed. Knee-length shorts, knee-length stripey socks, blue-badged blazer and tie-dye T-shirt. I was so on-trend it hurt. I spied a couple of interesting looking females by the bar.

“Hey doll. Did anyone ever tell you, you’re one in a million?”

The brunette spins around. She looks me up and down. Then she replies …

“One in a million, son? Aye, like your chances ...”

As she returned to her chat her blonde buddy said something. I couldn’t hear her words over the sound of my crushing, crashing shame …

“It’s their loss ...”

It wisnae. It so wisnae. It was all mine. For the next three years I chatted up no-one. Even the thought brought back monstrous memories. I’d like to have thought that girl had made a mistake. But I couldn’t. Those shorts, those stripey socks, that blazer were never again worn. My pride hadn’t just been bruised; it spent an extended period in intensive care.

I was but a child then, and had none of Tom Jones's confidence. I haven't watched The Voice, don’t know the show but from what I can glean, the knock-back came out of nowhere.

"Whoever was responsible made a mistake," said the septuagenarian Welshman, of the decision to replace him with Boy George.

I can only admire Jones's confidence. I have spent a career defined by knock-backs. It’s impossible to survive this life without being able to sustain such rejection. Conversely, I draw some solace from Tom’s KB. If the BBC can reject a man of his standing, a man with a career than spans five decades, it puts my numerous KBs into some context.

And while I’ll seldom think rejection is “their loss”, if the public outcry about Jones being dropped by the Beeb is anything to go by, I’m heartened to think that maybe sometimes the powers that be make mistakes. The difference is that Big Tom disnae need the money ...