It's what the public wants

I had been sent to the TV studios to do some interviews with the parents so that we could send them over to the magazine team and let them publish them in the next issue of the magazine. The show would go out the next month, by which time we should have been able to generate enough hype to guarantee our audience share for the next quarter. The advertising boys had had a hard time selling at first, but then the Mirabelle Watson case had hit the papers and stayed on the front page for four days. The selling was a lot easier after that.

I arrived at 10; the auditions were due to start at 1, but already there was a long queue of parents and their children. A lot longer queue than I'd expected. I stopped in the car park, looking at it starting at the studio doors and snaking round the side of the building, all along the wall, and then round another corner and out of sight. I looked at Joe, my camera-man, and he looked at me. Neither of us could find anything to say, so we picked up our feet and headed over to the front of queue.

Joe started the camera rolling as we approached, and I raised my microphone defensively. The parents, a young-ish couple with a blonde boy of possibly 11, spotted the red light on the camera and immediately straightened up. They beamed at the camera, white teeth almost sparkling, and the mother leant forward a little and said quietly, "Joel, the camera." The blonde boy looked up at us then too.

"Good morning!" I said trying to sound cheerful and bubbly. "We're from GlobalSat Networks. We're doing the 'Making of...' video. I hope you'll be willing to talk to us for a few minutes. We'd like to know why you've decided to enter your child in America's Next Serial Killer."