KID: Great show tonight, Mr Bisson, you really read that news.
BISSON: Oh yeah? Well, no thanks to you, kid.
KID: What's wrong, sir?
BISSON: What's wrong, he says! Hey, I know you're new to this current affairs broadcast caper, but let me tell you one thing that can kill a red hot bulletin stone dead: wonky paper.
KID: Sorry, Mr Bisson?
BISSON: The paper. The paper on my desk. The desk paper. It was wonky. I mean, Godammit, kid, it's come to something when a professional studio broadcaster has to straighten his own paper in the middle of the news. In the middle of the sodding news! On-air paper straightening - I could have died.
KID: I'm sure nobody noticed.
BISSON: Nobody noticed? They'd have to be blind, deaf and...inattentive not to have seen it. Pow pow pow, papers on the desk, desperate to get that hotch-potch into anything resembling a rectangle, every collision like a gunshot to my heart.
KAREN: Hi, Mike.
BISSON: Oh, hi, Karen. Nice work tonight, I really liked the professional way you delivered the word "Nicaragua".
KAREN: Yeah, peachy, Mike, but geographical elocution aside, have you been speaking to this little shit about the cataclysm of a show tonight?
BISSON: Just what I was in the middle of, Karen. If I said it once, I said it a hundred times: I require rectilinear sheaves, not this A4 sandstorm that engulfed me tonight. I'm a professional, godammit!
KAREN: The paper? Oh, God, Mike, that desk paper was the least of our troubles.
BISSON: Was yours straight, then?
KAREN: Christ, no, it was like a shitting jumble sale on there. But that's peanuts compared to the bit when they turned the lights out before the end of the show. Hey, shrimp, how'd you think that looked, Mike and me sitting in darkness like a couple of radishes? Tell me, because I'd love to know, is this ITN or is it...some smaller, less professional news broadcasting outfit...probably with a narrower remit? Hmmm?
KID: I'm sorry Miss Trancher, I made a mistake.
KAREN: Oh, he made a mistake! So, that's alright then, nobody needs to worry about the fact that I sat there in dingy silhouette like a kiddy-fiddling beanspiller ina Panorama truthsluice!
BISSON: It was pitch bloody black! I could hardly see to straighten my paper: probably made it slightly worse, if anything. Darkness, you twatnut! That's the opposite of news!
KID: I'm sorry, really I-
BISSON: Save it, kid, you're fired - go on, sling your hook. I'll see that you stay unemployed in this business until at least the end of the 90s!
KAREN: You know, Mike, at times like this I dream of a time when newsreaders sit on their desks, not behind them, and don't even have any blank sheets of paper. A glistening future when anchormen stalk around the room pointing at colourful shapes instead of delivering hard facts, and editorials replace headlines altogether.
BISSON: Good God, steady on there, Karen, that's fantasy talk.
KAREN: Yeah, I guess. What say you and me go grab a couple of Tia Marias and slag the BBC?
BISSON: Oh yeeeahh.
