MY SCHOOL had a pile of old equipment in the physics lab. Galvanometers with bent needles, a Rontgen tube burnt out from high- energy X-rays used to make informal portraits of the insides of pupils’ heads, and the splendid Van de Graaff generator. Its plaintive screaming summoned static electricity out of thin air on lost schoolday afternoons. Static is the enemy of radio producers. It lurks between stations, corrupts our hard drives, crackles on recordings. Our job is to create order out of the mess. Which is why we love stories. We despise the news precisely because it frolics in the disorder of senseless acts.

All around us at work is noise. Real noise from the constant refurbishment at Broadcasting House, and the tiring metaphorical noise from people such as authors’ agents. At the bottom of the heap is pure noise itself, static. Yet, sitting in my office now, at nearly midnight, with the radio tuned to nothing but static, I feel free for the first time in months. Through static, I hear beyond my tiny life.

The producer’s day is full of judgements that are meant to be the foghorn by which we navigate through the mist, on potential contributors, on redundant sentences, on music. I am enjoying the static, which falls indiscriminately on me like snow now. Producers are the pushers of the addictive powdery stuff of stories. But we have fallen under their spell and have become enslaved. Maybe static is a tropical rainstorm washing away the filth of words, which cling and insinuate and have compromised us so. Long live static.