And the weird thing is that at no point in the proceedings did Mr Peterson seem to draw any pleasure from his own act. He looked, by turns, utterly terrified, and on the brink of tears: as if this wasn’t entertainment but some strange kind of punishment he was putting himself through.

Year after year.

He stood there, sweating in the heat of the afternoon sun – the body of Mr Peebles hanging limply from his hand – wearing the wide-eyed look of a rabbit dazzled by headlights.

‘What’s up, Mr Peebles?’ he said. ‘You look sad.’

The head of the dummy swivelled through so many degrees that it would have broken a real creature’s neck.

‘I get you don’t really care oo-ats wrong with ne,’ came the reply.

‘Of course I care, Mr Peebles. Now, what’s wrong?’

‘I’ve groken ny gicycle.’

Mr Peterson tried to move the dummy’s head, and then spent a couple of seconds trying to stop the head falling off.

The smaller kids were chuckling and occasionally roaring with laughter.

‘It’s like a traffic accident,’ Simon whispered to me, ‘it’s horrible, and wrong, but you can’t take your eyes off it.’

‘The act?’ I asked. ‘Or the whole thing?’

Lilly leaned forwards. ‘You know Britain’s Got Talent?’ She asked.

I nodded.

‘They lied,’ she said.

NOTE – Britain’s Got Talent

One imagines a televised version of the talent show that Kyle is describing.

In Stars in their Lives, Reg Channard writes: ‘The obsession with celebrity was an all-consuming illness, which had reached epidemic proportions by the early years of the twenty-first century. Adolescents actually stopped studying at schools and colleges in order to pursue this crazy fever dream of celebrity. The end result was that many menial, degrading jobs were taken by people who possessed no formal qualifications, but had reasonable singing voices and knew a couple of poorly choreographed dance routines.’