Iain Banks: Dead Air

‘Is fucking irrelevant, Phil,’ Debbie said, putting her glasses down on the surface of her desk, which covered about the same area as our whole office. Her view, from near the top of the Mouth Corp building, was out over the Square and the cluttered rooftops of Soho, towards the blunt, pitted blade of Centrepoint. Debbie was thirty but looked older; she was fit in a chunky sort of way, her hair was mousy brown and she had tired, puckered eyes.

‘I’m not sure I see it as irrelevant at all, really,’ Phil said with the air of an academic discussing some fine point of ancient Etruscan property law, or the historical basis of estimates for the Yellow River’s silt-deposition rate during the Hang dynasty. ‘The whole point is that you put a disclaimer at the beginning and the end. You’re not saying, “Go and kill these people.” You’re saying, “No one here is saying, ‘Go and kill these people.’”’

Debbie glared at him. ‘That’s just semantics.’

‘No, it’s… grammar,’ Phil said, appearing baffled that anybody could possibly think otherwise. He looked briefly at me. Of course it was semantics rather than grammar (I was almost positive), but Debbie, who was certainly one of the more human execs in the Mouth organisation in general and Capital Live! in particular, and not an ignoramus, wasn’t quite smart enough to feel confident arguing the toss over that. At such moments I loved my producer.

‘Phil!’ Debbie said, slapping the surface of her desk. Her flat-screen monitor wobbled. ‘What if somebody, what if a Muslim person switches on just after your so-called disclaimer at the start of this, this… diatribe, and then switches off, totally fucking incensed – as well they fucking might be, if they can even believe their ears – just before the end? What the fuck are they going to think they just heard?’

‘Oh, come on,’ Phil said. ‘That’s like asking what if somebody hears the word “country” but switches off before the “-ry” bit. I mean, it’s just one of those things.’ He held his hands out.

‘That’s one word; this is a whole speech.’

‘Yes, but it’s the principle,’ Phil insisted stubbornly.

Debbie switched from Phil to me. ‘Ken,’ she said, ‘even for you…’

‘Debbie,’ I said, holding up both hands as though in surrender. ‘We’re proving our own point here.’

‘What?’

‘About prejudice, about bigotry.’

‘How does insulting people do that? How does the Islamic Council of Churches screaming down the phone at me do anything to defeat bigotry? You’re just-’

‘Because we had the Head Rabbi screaming down the phone last month,’ I pointed out.

‘The Israel-as-a-rogue-state rant,’ Phil said, nodding.

‘So fucking what?’ Debbie said loudly. ‘Are you trying to claim that insulting two religions is somehow better than insulting one?’

‘It’s being even-handed,’ I agreed.

‘It’s being bigoted towards ethno-religious groupings!’ she shouted. ‘It is, arguably, inciting religious and even racial hatred towards Jews and Muslims!’

‘That’s not fair,’ I protested. ‘We insult Christians too whenever we possibly can. We did that whole week of Christ as Certifiable Nutter.’

‘But he was a Jew!’ Debbie yelled. ‘And sacred to Islam as well!’

‘One stone; three birds!’ I yelled back. ‘What’s the problem?’

‘All Abrahamic religions have been selectively targeted, over time, for trenchant, robust, but above all fair criticism,’ Phil put in. ‘I have the relevant records.’

Debbie looked from Phil to me. ‘This isn’t a fucking joke, guys. There are mosques, synagogues being fire-bombed-’

‘You sure?’ Phil said.

‘-people being attacked because they’re “Middle Eastern” in appearance-’

‘Yeah, I know,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Jesus; Sikhs have been attacked for being Islamic terrorist sympathisers.’ I spread my arms. ‘So proving the essential point here; bigots are fuckwits. ’

‘The point,’ Debbie said exasperatedly, ‘is that some nasty little dickhead from the National Front or the British National Party could listen in to a programme of yours where you lay into the Jewish people or the Muslims and fucking cheer you on, Ken.’ Debbie slapped the desk again, but softer this time. She put her glasses back on and fixed her gaze on me. ‘Now is that what you want?’

This was actually a pretty good point, and one that Phil and I had worried over ourselves. ‘That’s why we have to attack bigotry and stupidity everywhere!’ I blustered. ‘If we stop now they’ll be left thinking the last lot we went after were the definitive bad guys.’

‘What?’ Debbie said, looking over her glasses at me again. (Fair enough; this last assertion didn’t make much sense even to me.)

‘I think that is a fair point,’ Phil said, nodding.

‘Well, here are another two points, gentlemen,’ Debbie said, sticking her glasses back up her face and pulling herself closer in towards her desk. ‘There’s such a thing as this station’s licence and the Broadcasting Standards Authority. There are also such things as our advertisers. They pay all the fucking bills and they can pull their ads even faster than the BSA can pull our licence. Several already have.’

‘But they’ve been replaced,’ Phil said, looking just a little red in the face now. He took his glasses off.

‘For now, at lesser rates,’ Debbie said steelily.

‘Rates have been going down everywhere for the whole year!’ Phil protested. He started polishing his glasses with a clean hanky. ‘New ones are always going to be lower than old ones in the current climate! It’s-’

‘Some very important people, some very vital advertisers, have been having words with Sir Jamie,’ Debbie said through clenched teeth. (To our credit, I thought, at this point not one of the three of us even glanced towards the Dear Owner’s portrait on the wall.) ‘At cocktail parties. In his club. At board meetings. On the grouse moors. At charity events. Over his mobile and his home phone. He is not happy. He is not happy to the extent that he is seriously weighing up which he needs most: your show or his good name. Which do you think he will choose?’ She sat back, letting this sink in. ‘Guys, you run a reasonably successful programme for us, but in the end it’s only ten hours of air time per week out of one hundred and sixty-eight. Sir Jamie’s backed you until now, Ken, Phil, but he can’t let you jeopardise the station, let alone the reputation of the Mouth Corporation or the goodwill he’s built up from nothing over the last thirty years.’

Phil and I looked at each other.

‘Jesus Christ, Debs,’ Phil said shakily. ‘Are you telling us to tone it down, or are we sacked? I mean, what?’ He put his glasses back on.

‘You’re not sacked. But it’s not just tone it down, it’s make amends.’

‘Make amends?’ I squawked.

‘This attacking Islam and Judaism, in particular, has to be reversed.’

‘So we can attack Christianity?’ I suggested. Debbie glared at me. ‘What?’ I said, holding out both hands.

‘We’ve got the perfect thing,’ Phil announced, just like that.

I did probably the first genuine double-take I’d ever done in my entire life. ‘We have?’

Phil nodded. ‘Ken doesn’t know about this yet,’ he told Debbie.

‘I don’t?’

‘Suggestion came in just yesterday from the Breaking News people.’

(I just managed to prevent myself saying, ‘It did?’)

‘The new Channel Four thing?’ Debbie asked, eyes narrowed.

‘Yeah; their competitor for Newsnight,’ Phil said.

‘Weren’t they trying to poach Paxman for that?’

‘I think so, but he wasn’t having it. Last rumour I heard was their main presenters would be Cavan Lutton-James and Beth Laing.’