One minute it was working perfectly, the next it was broken, bust, conked-out. Kaput, as they might say in Germany. I’m talking about the iDrive, that fiendishly clever control centre that’s built into the dash of posh Beemers and which controls everything from the satnav to the in-car entertainment to the air con.

The latest-generation iDrive uses the same control-wheel and LCD screen as earlier versions, but it’s slightly simpler and more intuitive to use, and I’d been making full use of it – not least scrolling between the DAB radio and the Aux Input, into which I’d inputted my iPod.

Anyway, all had been going swimmingly – and then one day I inserted the ignition fob into its slot in the dash (nothing as quaint as a key in a 335i) and a few seconds later noticed that instead of displaying the usual iDrive menu, the screen was filled with the legend ‘BMW’. What’s more, from the entertainment system there wasn’t a peep. I switched off, counted to ten and tried again. The ‘BMW’ script stared back at me silently, unblinkingly.

Same thing next morning, at which point I realised it wasn’t going to fix itself. So I called our local dealer, Wollaston BMW of Northampton, and spoke to a technician. ‘Try holding down the eject buttons for the CD and navigation DVD and then pressing the on/off button for the stereo,’ he advised, so I did. The screen extinguished for a few seconds – promisingly – but then back came the proud and by now mildly irritating ‘BMW’ legend.

It would be several days before the service dept could take a look, and with a couple of long journeys planned, not to mention my daily commute now deprived of musical entertainment, this was a bit of a bugger. Worse, after they’d had the Beemer for a day, they announced they’d need it back in again for a full software update, which, they said, usually did the trick. But that would take another day, and the ‘special machine’ wasn’t available for another week or so. The good news is that it did do the trick, and the 335i is now restored to full, iDriven, iPodded health – or at least iHope it is.