Meet Me In Manhattan: A sparkling, feel-good romantic comedy to whisk you away !. Claudia Carroll

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       Chapter Five

      Just a few days after that, I was back in work at the first 8 a.m. pitching session of the week; a fun, intense two hours which basically involves the entire Afternoon Delight team sitting around News FM’s bright, airy boardroom, lobbing ideas back and forth at each other and hoping against hope that your story would somehow be the one that would turn into a grenade and catch fire.

      It’s always one giant buzzing adrenaline rush and is by far my favourite part of the whole week. But then, as I’d learned from all my long years working there, there’s a sort of alchemy to a daytime phone-in show like ours. Often we’ll brainstorm an idea to death and leave the meeting convinced this would be a major talking point for the show, something that would really get the whole nation fired up, only for it to flop right on its ear and just fizzle away to nothing. Generally any topic that came under the banner headlines Anglo-Irish shares, bank CEOs’ inflated pensions, the Tea Party, or absolutely anything involving Angela Merkel.

      And yet other times, one of us will chance on an improbably daft story buried deep in a tiny corner of page seventeen in the Chronicle; usually something gross, like how drinking your own wee can add on years to your life. So we often toss it into the show, more as a gag item than anything else, and you can be bloody sure that’s the story that would have the phone lines hopping for the afternoon and eventually end up trending on Twitter. And if you ever manage to score a Twitter trend, it’s considered major brownie points for you round here, where your impact level on social media is seen as something of a barometer of success.

      Anyway, that particular morning, there were seven of us all sitting round the giant oval table of News FM’s boardroom, surrounded by a picnic of Starbucks cups, muffins and half-eaten cheese bagels. A stunningly impressive boardroom by the way, with a panoramic view right over Grand Canal Quay, where a weak, wintry sun was making the water sparkle and dance in the early morning light.

      ‘So, anyone want to start the ball rolling?’ said Aggie, executive producer of the show and my direct boss, kicking off her high heels like she always does before settling down to business. She’s fabulous, Aggie; takes no nonsense and doesn’t sugar-coat things. One of those straight-talking, ‘lean in’ women of the Sheryl Sandberg school, utterly unafraid to make tough calls and not in the least bothered about what other people think of her. For God’s sake, this is a woman who’s let her hair go completely white/grey. Voluntarily. Yet every one of us sitting round that table would think of her less as a boss and more of a friend, if that makes any sense. A boss-friend, if you will.

      ‘Oh you know what? I read a really juicy one over the weekend,’ Dermot piped up from right beside me. Dermot’s my best buddy round here; he’s about my own age, and like me was recently cut back from being a full-time researcher to just part-time. So he and I are in exactly the same boat and both of us continue to gamely pitch up to work on days we’re effectively not getting paid for. Except in Dermot’s case he really drives the point home by turning up on his freebie days in arse-clinging Lycra and tight spandex gym tops. Subliminal message: ‘Just so you all know, I had to drag myself away from a treadmill for this.’

      ‘Go on,’ said Aggie, tapping a biro on the notepad in front of her.

      ‘OK, so it’s about a new epidemic of false widow spiders that’s sweeping parts of the country,’ said Dermot, swinging back in his chair, arms folded, almost with a thought balloon coming out of his head saying, ‘Bloody well pay me for being here and I’ll fill you in some more.’

      ‘False widow spiders?’ said Aggie, to a few disgusted ‘eughhhs!’ from around the table.

      ‘Yeah, well apparently there was a women in Cork who had to be hospitalized because she was bitten by one,’ Dermot went on, undeterred. ‘So her doctors told her this was one of several cases that had presented over the last few days … and you know, the false СКАЧАТЬ