Concrete Pencil: Fantasy football? Try fantasy news

But there seems to be no reason to suspect he and Snowy wouldn't be able to still count themselves among the best in the business.

The home reporting team would need Amy Archer, Jennifer Jason Leigh's character from The Hudsucker Proxy, Redford and Hoffman, William Boot (from Waugh's Scoop) and Wodehouse's Psmith.

Lois Lane's in, Clark Kent's out though, as is John-Boy Walton - they'd be no good in the pub.

Danny Concannon and Greg Brock (both from The West Wing) have got DC covered. Jack Parlabane, care of Christopher Brookmyre, could stir up some trouble wherever we sent him. Peter Parker can take the pictures.

News editor would have to be Gus from series five of The Wire, the editor could be any from Bill Nighy's turn in State of Play, Ben Bradlee in All The President's Men, Robbie Robertson in the Maguire Spider-Mans, Walter Matthau in The Front Page and Michael Keaton in The Paper.

Although, winning maximum points for charm and deviousness (and there aren't really any other criteria by which you'd want them judged) it has to be Cary Grant in His Girl Friday.

Proprietor, of course, would be Charles Foster "It's a sledge" Kane.

So you've got some egos there, and judging by their recorded working practices they are going to want a greater level of control than is usual over the finished product.

That awful cliche of the newspaper plot - the reporter typing the headline into the computer - is an unforgivable lapse. This is why neither John Simm's nor Russell Crowe's Cal McCaffrey makes it. He sat there writing the headline. And it didn't even fit.

The headline writing and the copy editing and the rewriting and the final page sending are done by sub editors. 

Sub editors are the true geniuses of newspapers, the unthanked heroes, the engine room. (Full disclosure: I'm one - but I'm more then half right). They're the ones Giles Coren was so beastly about. And there'll be none of that on the Concrete Times.

Tintin, Lois, Charles Foster and the rest, pay attention - here, the subs rule.

So we're going to need some good ones. And, admittedly, the humble Hod Carrier hasn't featured much in films, so we'll need real-life ones who have come from or gone to greater things.

Graham Greene can do the splash. Bill Bryson (like Greene, on The Times) can take travel and science. All the big editors used to come from us (we'll have Kelvin MacKenzie back, I guess). 

Caradog Prichard (Telegraph man who wrote a criminally underrated novel and may be the source of the name - the eponymiser? - of Concrete Child 2.) He's on foreign.

Mystic Meg (Express) can do the features.

And if your copy's late, you little quiffed Belgian prima donna, we'll drop your byline.