Iain Banks - Dead Air

Then, of course, just as everybody concerned had whipped themselves up into a high, teetering, effervescent froth of wild-eyed expectation and teeth-chattering frenzy, it all fell apart.

Even I’d got myself all worked up, and I’m Joe Totally Cynical about these things after years of people telling me they have this great project for getting me on telly and how they’re really excited about bringing a new dimension to my work, and then nothing happening.

‘You’re telling me it’s not fucking going ahead.’

‘It’s being postponed,’ Phil said tiredly, putting his mobile down on the scratched wooden table. We were in the Capital Live! canteen on the floor beneath Debbie’s office, having an early breakfast. It was just after seven o’clock. We’d come in early to do a special recorded edition of the show so that I could get to the Channel Four studios in time for the recording of Breaking News (they’d backed off the original idea of doing it live).

My mobile vibrated on my belt. I checked the display. My agent. ‘Yes, Paul?’ I said. Then, ‘Yes, I just heard.’ Then, ‘Yeah, I know. Me too. Par for the fucking course. Yeah… yada and then yada, raised to the power of yada. Yeah, when I see it. In fact probably not until I see it when it’s number thirty-seven on TV’s One Hundred Most Embarrassing Moments. Yeah, we’ll see. Okay. You too. Bye.’

I sat back in the creaking flexibility of the brown plastic seat and drummed my fingers on the table top, looking at my toast and marmalade and my cup of milky tea.

‘Look on the bright side,’ Phil said. ‘They’d just have wanted you there about four hours early, and then they’d have wanted to do another of those pre-interview interviews where some breathless researcher with a famous name just out of chalet school asks you lots of questions so they can find out which ones are the good ones and you give really good, fresh answers and then they ask you those same questions in the actual programme and you sound all stale and talked out because you’ve already answered them once and got bored with them, and during the recording you’ll have to answer the same questions a third or a fourth time because somebody knocks over a bit of the set and they have to start again from the top, so you’ll sound even more stale and talked out, then they’ll record more than three hours and use less than two minutes and you’ll forget to take your make-up off and workmen will give you funny looks in the street and afterwards people whose opinion you respect will say they missed it, or go all cagey when you ask them what they thought, and people you don’t like will call up and tell you they loved it and the papers you hate will either dismiss it or say how you should stick to what you’re good at, not that you’re very good at that either, and you’ll be all depressed and grumpy for weeks.’

Probably Phil’s longest diatribe; it was too laid-back to be called a rant. I looked at him. ‘So, when did they tell you it might happen now?’

‘Oh, tomorrow,’ he grinned.

‘Fuck off.’

‘Na,’ he said, leaning back too and stretching and yawning. ‘Lucky to be this year, now, according to my new close friend at Winsome, Moselle. Major rethink on format after the events of September the eleventh.’ He scratched his head. ‘What a brilliant excuse that’s turned out to be, for so many things.’

‘Yeah,’ I breathed. I toyed with my toast and stirred my already well-stirred tea. Part of me was deeply relieved. I’d come up with this great idea for what I was going to do on the programme if they put me on with the Holocaust denier guy, and it still excited me and scared me in equally intense proportions. Now I wouldn’t have to either do it and let fuck knows what happen, or chicken out and not do it and curse myself for evermore for being a sad, pathetic, hypocritical, lily-livered crap-out merchant. In fact, just the sort of sad, pathetic (etc.) who would feel as relieved as I now did that I wouldn’t have to make that choice, at least not for a while and maybe, the way I knew these things tended to work, ever.

I threw the teaspoon down and stood up. ‘Ah, come on, let’s go and do the fucking show.’

Phil glanced at his watch. ‘We can’t. Judy T’s using the studio till half past.’

I sat back down again, heavily. ‘Fuck,’ I said eloquently, putting my head in my hands. ‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.’

“Yeah, I’d just like to say that don’t you think these Eurosceptic people should be called Europhobes, yeah?’

Phil and I rolled our eyes. I leaned right up to the microphone. This has the pretty universally automatic effect of making people lower their voices, and I was no exception. It should sound like I was talking personally just to the caller. ‘Actually, Steve, we went through all this two years ago, on the evening show, and, if you recall, we did a sort of rolling Greatest Hits of the Evening Show for the first week of the daytime slot when that very point came up, oh, a few times. Kind of guessing here you’re new to the programme, Steve.’

‘Oh. Sorry. Yeah.’ Steve seized up, audibly. ‘It’s great,’ he managed. ‘Keep it up.’

‘Practically my personal motto, Steve,’ I said with a smile, sitting back again. ‘Thanks for calling.’ I clicked on to the next caller, which the screen said was a Mr Willis, from Barnet. Subject: Eurp & poound (Kayla may have put the ass in assistant, but her typing owed more to the carpet-bombing approach than any concept of precision targeting).

Mr Willis. Not a first name. That told you something immediately, without even saying Hello to the guy.

‘Mr Willis,’ I said crisply. ‘Mr Nott. Your point, sir.’

‘Yes, I just wondered why an apparently intelligent fellow like yourself was in such a hurry to get rid of the pound and throw in our lot with a currency that’s dropped so much value since it was launched.’

‘I’m not in a hurry, Mr Willis. Like most people in Britain I think it’s going to happen sooner or later, so it becomes a question of which is best, when is best, but I don’t claim to know. My point is that it’s all about economics and politics, and it shouldn’t be about sentiment, because the pound sterling is just money, like any currency. If the Germans can give up the Deutschmark, we can surely stop using bits of paper with the monarch’s head on them.’

‘But, Mr Nott, why should we? A lot of us happen to think the pound is important. We love the pound.’

‘Look, Mr Willis, you lost the pound… whatever it was, thirty years ago. I can just about remember this; the pound – the real pound – had two hundred and forty pennies; a third of a pound was six and eightpence-’

‘Yes, but-’

‘-there were thrupenny bits, sixpences, shillings, florins, half-crowns, half-pennies, ten-bob notes, and-’

‘I know-’

‘-if you were being fancy, guineas. That all went in the sixties and that was the end of the pound. What you’ve got now is a British dollar, basically, so why all the belly-aching about it?’

‘It’s not belly-aching to wish to preserve a vital part of our proud British culture. I am a member of an organisation-’

I looked at Phil on the other side of the desk and spread my hands. He did the throat-cutting thing. I nodded. ‘Mr Willis,’ I said, fading his voice down, ‘here’s a handy hint; attack the Euro via the interest rate. A single interest rate barely makes sense throughout the UK, let alone all twenty-five members of an expanded EU, unless you want – in fact to impose – absurd levels of worker mobility or a vastly increased centralised regional compensation fund.’