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months and I would have established a new on-air employment record. I rarely last more than a year before I get sacked for saying something that somebody somewhere thinks I shouldn’t have. ‘Lalo.’
    ‘What?’ It was my turn to blink.
    ‘Lalo,’ Phil repeated. I could only see his head above the various screens and electronic gear between us. Sometimes I couldn’t even see that if he’d got his head buried in a newspaper.
    ‘Isn’t that one of the Teletubbies? I only ask because I know you are an expert.’
    ‘No; Lalo Schifrin.’ He fell silent, shrugged.
    ‘Good radio shrug there, Phil.’ I had sound effects for many of the silent syllables that made up Phil’s fractured body language, but I was still working on one for a shrug.
    He raised his eyebrows.
    ‘Right.’ I picked up an old-fashioned mechanical stopwatch from the green baize of the desk. I clicked it. ‘Okay, I’m putting the dead air stopwatch on you until you explain yourself, Ashby.’ I glanced up at the big studio clock above the door. Another ninety seconds and we were off air. Through the triple glazing, in the production suite where producers used to be decently confined, in the good old days, our assistants appeared to be conducting a low-level conflict, which consisted of throwing paper planes at each other. Bill the newsreader wandered in on them, waving his script and shouting.
    ‘Lalo Schifrin,’ Phil said patiently into the silence on our side of the glass. ‘He wrote the original theme for Mission Impossible .’
    I clicked the stopwatch off. ‘Four seconds; you’re not even trying. So; Lalo. You mean for the TV series, I take it.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Bully for him. And your point would be, caller?’
    Phil knitted his brows. ‘Vaguely pop-related people with names that sound like they were given them by babies.’
    I snorted. ‘Just people? So “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”, by the Fabs, wouldn’t count? Or “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”? Or “Gaba-Gaba Hey”?’
    ‘Hardly target audience, Ken.’
    ‘Is Lalo ?’
    ‘Jay-Lo.’
    ‘Jay-Lo.’
    ‘Jennifer Lopez.’
    ‘I know who Jay-Lo is.’
    ‘P. Diddy, for that matter.’
    ‘Lulu? Kajagoogoo? Bubba without the Sparxx? Iio? Aaliyah?’
    ‘Gawd rest the poor girl’s soul.’
    I shook my head. ‘It’s only Tuesday and we’re at the Friday bottom-of-the-barrel stage already?’
    Phil scratched his head. I pressed a Function button on my FX keyboard; an exaggerated, wooden, head-scratching noise of dubious comedic value sounded in my headphones. It was either that or the dead air watch again, and you can over-do these things. Our listeners, whom we knew - thanks to some very expensive, pro-active and robust market research - to be statistically stoutly loyal and containing a major proportion of ad-agency prime-target As and Bs with a lofty disposable income profile, would be familiar with the array of assertedly wacky and indeed even zany sound effects I used to give them an idea of Phil’s silent on-air actions. They also knew about dead air, which is the terrifically technical term us radio boffins use for silence. I took a breath. ‘Can we talk about what we haven’t talked about yet?’
    ‘Must we?’ Phil looked pained.
    ‘Phil, I was held off the air for three days last week; we played the pop equivalent of martial music through the whole show yesterday—’
    ‘What, is that what you get from Marshall amps, yeah?’
    ‘—and yet we’re told the world changed for ever seven days ago. Shouldn’t a purportedly topical show reflect that?’
    ‘I didn’t even know you knew the word “purportedly”.’
    I leaned closer to the mike, lowering my voice. Phil closed his eyes. ‘Thought for today, listener. For our American cousins …’ Phil groaned. ‘If you do find and kill Bin Laden, assuming he is the piece of scum behind this, or even if you just find his body …’ I paused, watching the hands on the studio clock flick silently towards the top of the