“I know you’re all on the clock, but you need to understand how this all started.”

 

Across the mahogany board table, the lawyers stared wordlessly back. There were six—four men, two women, all Tom Ford suits and Gucci glasses. The senior partner had flown across the Atlantic to be there. She smelt subtly expensive, like she sweated ambergris and orris. They said nothing, so I began.

 

How it started was at the gym, an unpresupposing squat red-brick box on the edge of a zone of light industrial units. Forget lines of beautiful people spinning. Forget those city center steel and glass affairs. I just want to manage expectations after the mention of Tom Ford suits. My gym is entirely without romance. Imagine it as a call center in a previous life. Because it was.

 

While struggling through my twenty minutes of cardio, my wandering mind is always glad of visual stimuli. But that day I was irked. The line of silent wall-mounted televisions had gone. I wouldn’t say it was one of the reasons I came to the gym, but I had grown attached to the multiple screens delivering news headlines, cozy antique hunts and travelogues. I enjoyed trying to get more than a five-letter word on Countdown whilst wondering exactly which Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy film that was…

 

“People watch their phones,” the identikit trainer at the desk told me.

 

“Yeah, but I always liked seeing something I wasn’t expecting.” Over the racket of anodyne dance beats and autotune vocals I cited movies and shows I would have otherwise been oblivious to had I not stumbled on trailers.

 

“People watch their phones,” he repeated, glassy-eyed, his smile fixed.

 

“But don’t you sometimes want to be surprised? The joy of the random?”

 

I could almost see cogs turning. He just wasn’t getting it.

 

“People prefer…”

 

“Their phones. I know.”

 

Back home, I tried explaining to my wife, but she wasn’t getting it either. “When we grew up there were just three channels, and you only had one telly in the house. You watched what your parents watched, and that way you saw a whole load of stuff you didn’t expect to, that wasn’t your choice, that stretched you mentally, and you learnt so much about the world. Nobody exposes themselves to the unexpected anymore.”

 

“You’re soap-boxing again, dear,” my wife advised.

 

“The world’s become an echo-chamber.” Dehydration followed by post-workout caffeine and sugar had made me bellicose.

 

My beloved said something pointed about freedom and choice, and if I didn’t like it maybe I should join the Taliban.

 

I glanced over at Auntie Bertha on the sofa, flicking through the channels. She’d lived with us since her husband, my father’s brother, died. On screen, a flame-haired harridan leaning over a cooking pot was replaced by a manic advert for toilet cleaner, usurped in turn by a cartoon locomotive. “There, that’s what the world needs.”

 

“What?”

 

“That,” I pointed at Justin Bieber. Or maybe just somebody who looked like him.

 

“The world needs what?”

 

“That.” Auntie Bert had now passed via golf on to people in scrubs over-emoting.

 

“Soap operas?”

 

“No. A channel that just channel hops other channels. That’s what the world needs. A constant stream of the unexpected.”

 

She told me if I felt that way, I should do something about it.

 

So I did.

* * *

 

I looked around the board table at the line of flawless faces, all perfect skin, perfect hair. If they ever smiled, I knew their teeth would be impeccable, aligned, and bright.

 

“And you named the channel after your late aunt?” the senior American asked. I had a grim inkling all six were speaking through her, as if they were one creature, a hive mind, like a wasps’ nest or a Portuguese man o’ war. If my mother were here, she’d have mumbled a single word under her breath: cockle-ectomy.

 

“It’s also a joke, an old nickname for the Beeb, the BBC. You know we have a channel in this country called ‘Dave’?”

 

The American looked over at the screen in the boardroom tuned silently to Auntie. Plant-life cut to an Arabic news anchor, followed by a couple of bars of Busby Berkley, and thence to an urban scene via a brief image of a Coke can.

 

“And advertising is sold by the fraction of a second?”

 

“That Coke can,” I said, “that’s another ten thousand dollars for Auntie.”

 

The lawyer took in another few seconds of the staccato stream of fractured feed, selected from the world’s thirty-three thousand television channels. I smiled. I could tell she was struggling to look away.

 

“Mr. Bagnall, a personal view, if I may. You have created a monster. A television channel that mesmerizes but delivers nothing. No entertainment. No information. I’ve heard it described as more addictive than crystal meth. People have died on America’s highways, unable to look away from their phones whilst driving. You’re responsible for an epidemic of absenteeism and truancy. It is reckoned Auntie is responsible for a three percent drop in global productivity. You’ve reduced literacy and activity levels in children.”

 

“Now hold on a second,” I began. I wasn’t paying them in six-minute increments for this. And, even if I were, they just weren’t getting it. Auntie wasn’t meant to be a visual opiate. It was a smorgasbord of the unexpected. Anyone could get off at any point, click to the channel that had just flashed past and watch. How could it be my fault if the world chose not to move off the kaleidoscopic taster menu?

 

The lawyer held up a placating hand before I could get too belligerent. “I think you’ve given humanity exactly what it deserves. We propose setting the initial public offering at one point eight billion dollars.”

 

I sat back down in my seat, unaware I had risen. I found myself staring at Auntie, quite unaware of what was passing before my eyes. One point eight billion dollars? Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps they got it better than I did.