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I've written before on this blog about why we interrupt guests.

We don't do it very often. We don't like doing it. We know you hate it when we do.

But occasionally, live programmes go awry. Guests speak for much longer than we expected - or budgeted.

We can't make the programme any longer when they do. So, however reluctantly, we sometimes have to stop them talking.

We had to do it last Friday with a guest called Michael Lamoureux. He owned a small fortune in RBS shares, but only because he started out with a large one. His investment was worth £100,000 at one stage; now it's valued at less than £4,000.

Mr Lamoureux is unhappy. He thinks shareholders were misled. He is now planning to sue the RBS Group, and .

(You can see the full interview with him by looking up last Friday's programme on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer - it's about 15 minutes in.)

We invited Mr Lamoureux onto the programme as he had interesting things to say, and we thought other Working Lunch viewers might be in a similar position.

He was an informative guest, and we're very grateful to him for taking the time and trouble to appear.

But we asked him one question too many. And his answer was a lot longer than we anticipated.

This gave us a big problem. Our programme was already packed full. There was very little scope for items to over-run their allocated time.

We let Mr Lamoureux talk further - in fact, for as long as we could. But in the end, we had to step in.

We did it politely, and contritely.

But I'd like to apologise to him again for doing so. Jumping in to stop a guest can create a bad impression; some of you think it's a sign that we didn't like the interview, or the interviewee.

That's not the case.

We stopped him simply because the interview had already run one minute longer than expected - time we would need to claw back from the following items - and was showing no sign of ending imminently.

What's baffled some of you - including Mr Houghton in Cheshire, who was good enough to email in - was that we stopped Mr Lamoureux for a much longer interview with the chairman of Starbucks, Howard Schultz.

Mr Houghton writes that interrupting Mr Lamoureux "was made increasingly irritating by the content of the following item which appeared to contain a ten minute recommendation to drink Starbucks coffees."

This was not some free advert for the company. This was a rare interview with the British media with the chief of one of the world's biggest companies; you don't get to hear from him very often.

So we decided that what he had to say was worth hearing at length. That's the strength of Working Lunch's interviews - when we've got the big names, we can give them more time that they'd usually get in a daily news programme.

While Mr Schultz talked about the company's growth and innovation, we questioned him about the state of the economy, his company's response to the slowdown in consumer spending and the viability of his expansion plans.

These are important questions when finding out how the recession is changing companies' plans for future investment, job creation and spending. Those decisions will determine the length and depth of the slowdown, here and around the globe.

Howard Schultz masterminded Starbucks' transformation from a few small coffee shops in the Pacific Northwest into a multi-million pound operation that straddles the planet. He built a local name into one of the world's most prominent brands.

This was no mere pundit, or economic watcher. His decisions count - and it's important to know even a little of his thinking.

But - in retrospect - I think we may have played it a little too long. What felt an appropriate length when we listened to it in advance, in isolation, actually felt a little long when surrounded by other, much shorter items. It could, perhaps, have been improved by a surgical trim.

That's the joy of hindsight - it allows you to look at something afterwards and say, perhaps ...