Iain Banks: Dead Air

‘She’s on Sky, isn’t she?’

‘Contract coming up for renewal.’

‘Anyway,’ Debbie said, waving one hand.

‘Anyway,’ Phil said. ‘They’re still doing dummy programmes at the moment but they start for real on Monday and they want something hard-hitting and controversial; something that’ll get them headlines.’

‘I thought they just wanted me to practise on in one of these dummy programmes,’ I said. (Stupidly, I realised, as soon as I’d closed my mouth again; it was entirely possible Phil was winging it here.)

‘They did, at first,’ Phil said. ‘I persuaded them otherwise.’

‘They want Ken for the Monday programme?’ Debbie asked.

‘If we can get the terms right,’ Phil said.

Debbie could probably see the surprise on my face. ‘You’re not Ken’s fucking agent, Phil.’

(This was true, though he sometimes acted like one. My real agent, the long-suffering Paul, complained that thanks to my – to him incomprehensibly bizarre – political fastidiousness, what I needed was an anti-agent; somebody who would look for brilliantly remunerative work I could then cheerfully turn down. In fact, he said, aside from contract negotiation time at the station, all I really needed was an answering machine that shouted ‘No!’)

‘I mean the terms of control over content and the people involved,’ Phil explained patiently. ‘I didn’t want Ken going in there thinking he was about to do a short piece of light relief about mike technique or something and then being confronted with half a dozen swivel-eyed fanatics representing all the different brands of fundamentalists we’ve upset over the last year. That’s the sort of thing that can happen and I just wanted to make sure it wouldn’t.’

‘Why is Ken looking like… well, like that?’ She gestured at me. Like what? I thought. I tried to look business-like and unperturbed.

Phil glanced my way then said, ‘Look, this is something Ken and I talked about. We’ve had too many dodgy, manipulative offers for TV appearances for him in the past. Either they’re too trashy to be worth considering in the first place, or they sound really interesting and we get all fired up about it then it falls through, or they change their mind, or it turns out there was some hidden agenda. We agreed that I’d handle these proposals until there was something worth taking to Ken, then we’d talk about it.’ Phil glanced at his watch. ‘If it hadn’t been for this meeting we’d be doing just that right now,’ he said. (Happily he didn’t add ‘in the pub’.) He looked at me. ‘Sorry to land this on you like this, Ken.’ I waved a hand.

‘So…’ Debbie said, still sounding and looking suspicious. ‘What are you proposing?’

‘That we give them something hard-hitting and controversial, ’ Phil said.

Debbie still looked deeply dubious, but I could see she was interested. ‘Which would be what?’

‘One of their ideas is to get Ken to debate with a genuine Holocaust denier; a guy from the extreme-right Aryan Christian Movement who claims the Allies built the death camps after the War,’ Phil said. All three of us exchanged looks. ‘I wasn’t so sure about that,’ he added. ‘But, well, maybe – given what you’ve been saying about the perceived if mistaken bias against the Jewish and Muslim faiths – that would be the way to go after all.’ He turned from Debbie to me. ‘Obviously, only if you feel comfortable with the idea, Ken. I’m still not sure about it, frankly.’

‘Oh, I’m comfortable with it,’ I said. A fucking Holocaust denier? Somebody from the extreme Christian right prepared to put themselves up for a tongue-lashing? What self-respecting militant liberal wouldn’t want to get their teeth into one of those fucks?

Debbie’s eyes were so narrow they were almost closed. ‘Why do I feel that this might just be a good idea,’ she asked slowly, ‘and yet we seem to have come back to the original, totally facile and childish proposal that the way out of all this was to insult Christians some more?’

‘Oh, come on,’ Phil said with a laugh in his voice. ‘This guy’s Christian like Satan is Christian. The point is he’s wildly anti-Semitic and he’s mad. Articulate, but mad. Ken’ll be seen defending-’

‘You sure this guy’s mad?’ Debbie asked.

‘Well, he agrees with the idea currently gaining ground in sections of Arab society,’ Phil said, in the sort of slow, considered voice that told me he felt back in control here, ‘that the September eleventh attacks were organised by the International Zionist Conspiracy to discredit Islam and give Sharon carte blanche against the Palestinians. But it’s okay; he hates the Arabs too. This guy has a consistent belief system totally based around race, religion and sexuality; Nordic/Aryan/ Christian/straight equals good… everything else is just shades of evil.’

‘Who is he? What’s his name?’

‘His name is Lawson, umm… Briarley or something.’

I was only half listening. It was while Phil was talking about this that I thought of it; my big idea. I knew what I was going to do. If they did let me onto the show with that anti-Semitic fuck, I knew exactly what I was going to do to him.

It was perfect! Mad, bad and dangerous to contemplate and it probably meant I was a bit mad, too, but hey; fire with fire. My mouth went dry and my palms felt suddenly pin-pricked with sweat. Oh, fuck, I thought. What a sweet, beautiful, terrifying idea. Did I really dare?

‘Okay, I’m going to have to consult on this,’ Debbie announced.

I clicked back to reality. Debs was going to kick it upstairs. Sensible woman.

‘Fine by me,’ Phil said. He looked at me and I nodded. ‘But we need a decision by Friday at the very latest; tomorrow would be better.’

‘We’ll have one,’ Debbie said. She pushed back on her desk, her big, black, leather executive chair rolling over the wooden floor. We were excused, obviously.

‘Debbie?’ I said, getting up.

‘What?’

‘I want you to make it very clear to whoever else you talk to about this that I really want to do it. I mean, really want to do it. I think it’s important.’ Phil looked at me with a frown, then smiled at Debbie.

‘I’ll let you know,’ she said. ‘In the meantime, I think we’d all really appreciate it if you avoided offending any major ethnic or religious groups. Could you do that for us?’

‘We can certainly try,’ Phil said merrily.

‘Fuck.’

‘No, it’s okay,’ Phil said as we walked away down a broad corridor lined with framed plaques, discs, awards and letters of thanks and endorsement, none of which were mine. ‘This is a feature, not a bug.’

‘You weren’t making any of that up in there, were you?’

Phil grinned. ‘Course not, you silly sod.’ ‘Sod’, which I was under the impression had dropped off most people’s List Of Plausible Invective around about the early seventies, was Phil’s most powerful expletive. ‘I’ll call the Breaking News people before we hit the pub.’ He frowned at me as we stepped into the lift. ‘Didn’t realise you’d be quite so keen.’

I wasn’t going to tell him about my idea. Best if he didn’t know for his own sake, apart from anything else. ‘Yeah, well,’ I said. ‘Keen Ken; that’s what they call me.’

‘No they don’t.’

‘‘What I said was, these namby-pamby Holocaust revision people didn’t go remotely far enough. It wasn’t just the Holocaust that didn’t happen, it wasn’t just the death camps that were faked; the whole of the Second World War is a myth. Occupation of Paris? Battle of Britain? North African Campaign? Convoys and U-Boats? Barbarossa? Stalingrad? Kursk? Thousand-bomber raids? D-Day? Fall of Berlin? Singapore? Pearl Harbor? Midway? Hiroshima and Nagasaki? None of it happened! All special effects and lying. Guys of a certain age; you remember thinking how close those Airfix Spitfires and Lancasters looked to the real thing you saw in the film footage? That’s because they were just models too! All the old airfields, the concrete tank traps, a few so-called bomb-sites; they were built after the war.’