‘So, I’m Ros,’ I said brightly, holding out my hand. The agent stared at it as though I were offering her a shitty stick. The man didn’t move. Slowly, I pulled my hand back in towards me and bit my lip.

‘Veronica, Ros just joined us from America,’ Ted offered. ‘We’ve brought her in especially for the project, the result of a global search for the perfect producer.’

I looked over at my boss without saying a word. What was he talking about?

‘Fan-fucking-tastic,’ Veronica replied, rattling her fingers against the table before pulling a pen out of her bag and slipping it between her fingers as though it were a cigarette. ‘Let’s hear what she has to say then.’

‘Obviously we know Snazz has a lot of fans,’ I began, watching as the panda reached across the table for a Hobnob, broke it into four pieces and carefully fed it up underneath his mask. ‘And we want to offer them something with the podcast they can’t get anywhere else.’

Veronica nodded, winding her finger in the air, signalling for me to continue.

‘Well, one idea would be …’ I looked down the table to see the panda staring back at me blankly, not moving, not breathing, just a dead-eyed panda with black, blank pits boring into me. I stared into the abyss and the abyss was a YouTuber. ‘One idea would be for Snazz to choose some vintage video games and tell the story of how the game was developed, any social significance, interesting founder stories, stuff like that?’

Veronica looked over at her young charge. He did not move.

‘He hates it,’ she declared. ‘What else?’

I took a deep breath and opened my notebook, pretending to be pleasantly surprised by what I saw when in fact the page was filled with a shopping list of things I needed to pick up from Tesco on my way home from work.

‘What if he interviewed other inspirational young people? I’m thinking Greta Thunberg, Millie Bobby Brown … Malala?’

Veronica quite rightly choked on her coffee.

‘Next,’ she barked.

‘He’s not very chatty, is he?’ I said as Snazz pulled the zip on his jacket up and down and up and down in silence. ‘All my ideas involve quite a lot of him talking.’

‘He’ll be fine,’ Veronica replied. ‘I’ll give him some Red Bull and a Mars Bar.’

Snazz snapped another Hobnob in half and tittered under the mask.

‘Red Bull and a …?’ I whispered, wondering if the number to Childline was still the same.

She fixed me with a cool, level glare. ‘Do you have any more ideas? Because these are just as bad as the ones we heard before.’