Yesterday afternoon between 1pm and 6pm brought David presenting a show around our coverage of a London Irish rugby match, with me doing sport bulletins for it every hour or so.

David is not the greatest oracle of sporting knowledge known to man, so I took the opportunity at the end of each bulletin of lobbing a few basic sporting questions at him. He got by relatively well, thanks mainly to cheating by getting his producer to frantically write out the answers on the talk-back monitor we use to communicate between studios.

Then David got an email from a listener which went, roughly, as follows:

"David,

To help you get back at your Mr Sport Know-It-All I've included three sports questions. Let's see if he really knows his sport!"

David read this email out on air with me sat there in the studio, then said he'd ask me the questions after a song. Naturally this wasn't good news - I'm no fan of being humiliated on air, even though you'd think I'd be familiar with the concept by now.

But the moment we went to the song (Suburbia by the Pet Shop Boys, an excellent choice) I had a flash of inspiration.

The questions had come via email, and I happened to know that David had left himself logged in on a computer in the newsroom.

So I dashed down the corridor to the newsroom, found his email inbox lying unguarded, and found the email with the questions in it, which went something like:

1. Who are the Oakland Raiders playing tomorrow?

2. With the regular Raiders quarterback injured, who will deputise for him?

3. Who is the Raiders' third choice quarterback should they both be injured?

Okay, I'm something of an exceptionally fair-weather American Football fan. I will occasionally watch it and I used to play the John Madden computer games, created by EA Sports, quite a lot. But ask me any of the above questions and you'd get a blank response. (OJ would be much better than me, in fact, given he consumes internet columns like Tuesday Morning Quarterback regularly). But at least now I knew what the questions were, which gave me a head start.

So I set about finding the Oakland Raiders website in the vain hope of finding some quick answers (bear in mind Suburbia had a minute or so left to run at this point - good job it's a song I know, so I could time when I had to be back in the studio).

Then, just when I thought all hope was lost, I realised that - of course - the bloody answers were at the bottom of the email for David's benefit! One hurried bit of printing later and I sauntered casually back into the studio as Suburbia finished.

David began by saying the questions were about the Raiders. "Oakland Raiders?", said I, innocently. "Oh right, I'm quite a big Raiders fan," I lied, hoping David would think the piece of paper in front of me, replete with answers, was just my sports bulletin script from earlier on. "Go on, ask me the questions."

And he did. And each I answered perfectly:

1. Cleveland Browns
2. Andrew Walter
3. Marques Tuiasosopo

That last one took some pronunciation, but we got there. With each answer David's face grew a little more memorable, to the point where he cut to the next song in disbelief that I actually did know my Oakland Raiders. Only with the microphones faded down did I waft the piece of paper with the answers on it and own up. And we couldn't have broadcast much he said after that...