‘Tell me about last night.’

‘Tonight is Oscars night,’ Ken beamed. ‘The big one. Numero Uno. Nights don’t get any bigger than this. The night of nights. The nightiest night of them all. The night which, according to all the forecasts, promises to be the greatest night of Bruce Delamitri’s life.’

‘Last night?’ said Bruce, who had given up trying to make contact with the cop and now spoke almost to himself. ‘Last night was more terrible than I could have imagined possible.’

‘You’re watching Coffee Time USA. We’ll be back after these messages,’ said the male presenter, whose name was not Ken but Oliver Martin. The studio lights dimmed and the Coffee Time logo came up while Oliver and his female colleague, Dale, stacked their papers in an important manner. There was of course nothing on their papers, but maintaining the fiction that TV presenters are proper journalists, as opposed to people who read whatever comes up on the autocue, is one of the principal duties of currentaffairs broadcasting.

Bruce watched on the monitor in front of him as Oliver and Dale disappeared and were replaced on the screen by four bikiniclad babes clutching soda bottles and tumbling ecstatically out of an old VW Beetle.

‘A girl, a beach, it’s happening, it’s real.

It’s a boost, it’s a buzz, it’s the way you should feel!’

The studio controller killed the volume, and the bikini babes were left sucking on their bottles in muted delight.

‘One and a half minutes on the break,’ said the floor manager.

This was the signal for the makeup girls to rush in and pat gently away at all available faces. Oliver turned to Bruce, addressing him through a flurry of powder and pads.

‘I think what we need to concentrate on here is the fact that our industry is not a dream factory any more. We deal in gritty realism. We show it like it is.’

The makeup lady applied another layer of slap to Oliver’s already heavily caked features. The gritty reality was that anyone who had acquired such a deep and lustrous tan would long since have died of skin cancer. But Oliver was of the old school of TV presenting: he believed that sporting a thermonuclear tan was a mark of respect to the viewer, like wearing a nice shirt and tie. You had to show you’d made the effort.