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Well, I must say, a big help you lot were getting me out of that pub. I had to call Marty in the end and he came round with his brassy broad to rescue me. I managed to persuade him that it was an emergency and he rearranged his busy schedule to oblige. I wouldn't come out of the toilets until I could hear Marty's whining tones softly wheedling through the door. When I did, thumbs-guy and the northern terror had gone. Apart from Marty and his squeeze, the only people there were the barman (holding the sieve ready) and Hans Moretti sitting in the corner. It was definitely him. He wasn't saying much, he was just sitting there with his eyes closed as if in deep meditation.

Marty let me tag along in his limo. He's set it up like a mini editing suite so he can continue to work when on the road. Problem was, the only seat was just about a double one with not quite enough room for the three of us, so I had to sit wedged between Marty and his girlfriend. It was very uncomfortable with my elbows tucked in, one buttock suspended mid-air over the seat, half sitting on the flaccid, pipe-cleaner-like legs of Marty and half sitting on the steel-hard lap of his girlfriend. Whenever we turned a corner, I could feel her thigh muscle tense to stop herself leaning over and my whole body would be lifted perceptibly upwards. She and I stared forward self-consciously while Marty watched his giant TV, apparently unabashed and oblivious to the awkward seating arrangement.

He was checking out the pilots of potential new shows. First up was 'Prankhunt'. It's a low-grade amalgamation of various stunts fronted by a smarmy runt who dances around manically in lurid fancy-dress amid shrieking torrents of studio laughter squirted out discretely in a Pavlovian response to his catch-phrase "I'm a total prankhunt!" Each week it's the same set of 'running gags' just performed on different members of the public. Tawdry anchor man performs some of them himself. There's one where he sticks his head through the open windows of cars waiting in traffic queues and screams "Look at me!" inches away from the terrified faces of the drivers. Another one just has him exiting restaurant toilets and yelling "Bummer!" back through the door before running away. At the end of each show, anchor man also hosts 'Yooza Looza' which is sort of a spoof award thing which has him tracking down the minor celebrity who is deemed to have undergone the most humiliating personal degradations of the week. Captured on wobbly hand-held smirk-o-vision, the team crash the celeb's home and force on them the 'award' which is usually just mutely accepted with confused resignation.

Next was 'You Deserve It', in which two members of the public have wedges of money wafted in front of their faces, just out of reach, by celebrity taunters who repeatedly feign handing over the money but whip it back at the last moment. This goes on for fifty minutes, plus ad breaks, with the celebrities each time pretending that they were just joking before and they'll really hand over the money but, each time, sharply withdrawing it again. At the end, both contestants have their saliva chemically analysed and the one exhibiting the greatest physiological stress response, shown by elevated levels of hydrocortisone, wins both lots of money. The other one is tied up inside a sack full of monkeys pumped with ketamine and rolled down a hill.

What Marty's really excited about now, though, is a new concept he's working on with interactive reality TV. He's working on a bit of kit that connects the new Phatbox V to a webcam and allows viewers to, wait for it... watch each other. He's calling it 'Mutualtainment' and, basically, it means that viewers just sit and stare at each other. Sitting, staring, chewing, sniffing, chewing, staring, chewing, staring, for hours and hours and hours and hours.

Marty got the idea from that newscaster on the Fox Infospout Channel who cracked up the other day. Did you see that? She was half-way through reading a story on celebrity pancake endorsement when she just paused, stopped reading, took a deep sigh and slumped back in her chair. For a few seconds you could hear vague background noises of concerned shuffling off-set, then the camera zoomed in to her eyes, briefly wobbling and having to refocus as it did so. You could actually see something die inside her as the light went out in those eyes and a half-tear slowly welled up on her lower lid. The amazing thing was, they made that the new lead story and, for the next two hours, stuck with rolling-news coverage of the newscaster herself, sitting in her chair, staring ahead and silently weeping, while the superimposed news-ticker kept running along the bottom of the screen with captions like "Breaking story: sultry anchoress stares newspair in the face."

Marty's been in a really good mood lately and just signing off everything - including, as you would have seen from that flyer on the bus, 'Badge'. When he dropped me off in the limo, he told me he'd arranged a little party back at his pad to celebrate getting 'Badge' into production. I don't really feel that comfortable accepting but I think I better go.