‘Here she is. The beautiful, the fabulous-Angel!’

She’d done this a hundred times before, and it should have been easy, but as she emerged and the applause washed over her, something terrible happened. The lights seemed to dim, and suddenly her mind was filled with darkness and panic.

Please, not now! I thought those attacks were over!

Mercifully, the dreadful moment passed swiftly. She could cope again, just.

She advanced on the suicidally high heels, hands outstretched, voice tuned to a note of artificial ecstasy to greet the presenter.

Her fellow contestants were Mr and Mrs Strobes. She’d met them in the hospitality room before the show and it had been an endurance test.

‘We’re so sorry about your divorce,’ Mrs Strobes had said. ‘We think it’s just terrible the way he threw you out.’

‘Parting was a mutual decision,’ Angel had hastened to say.

But what was the point, with Joe flaunting his new companion at every party and nightclub?

The audience was agog to see her, so she smiled and waved, turning this way and that so that they shouldn’t be disappointed. She could almost hear the comments.

‘A right sexy little piece-a bit of all right.’

That was what her husband had wanted from her. For him she’d been a ‘right sexy little piece’ for eight years, and suddenly eight years felt like a very long time.

The show started. The questions were ridiculously easy, but even so she gave a performance of racking her brains, giggling at her own ‘ignorance’. They wanted ‘dumb blonde’ so that was what she would give them.

The soap actor on the other side seemed to be genuinely dumb, and Angel’s team was soon in the lead. The clincher came when the host burbled, ‘And now, Angel, here’s a real tough one for you. Who painted the Sistine Chapel? Was it a) Maisie the Mouse, b) Michelangelo, or c) Mark Antony?’