Making Soapies in Kabul

by Trudi-Ann Tierney

  We climbed into a car and, pointing at my throat as I coughed a few times, we indicated to our Dari-speaking driver that I had either some cold-like affliction or a fur ball. Whatever. I needed a chemist.

  ‘Mujeeb’s? Shar-E-Naw? Butcher Street,’ I offered.

  Traffic in Kabul is a nightmare at the best of times, but on a Thursday afternoon, with Afghans all rushing home to prepare for their Friday off, it can come to a standstill.

  ‘Nay, nay. No Mujeeb’s,’ said our driver. ‘Here. Pharmacy, here,’ pointing out the window in reference to the pharmacy just up the road.

  It took considerable effort to convince him that we simply had to go to Mujeeb’s and it was a decidedly grumpy Ayub, our security guard, who trailed us into the chemist forty minutes later. Our discomfort was only magnified by the fact that the shop assistant was barely in his teens.

  Muffy and I fussed over cough medicines and fiddled with tubes of antiseptic cream, all the while non-verbally egging each other on to go for the hard stuff. After assembling our irrelevant pile of medical supplies on the counter, Muffy finally dived in. ‘So do you . . . um . . . have . . . um . . . do you have Valium?’

  ‘How many boxes?’ Without missing a beat.

  ‘Just one, I guess.’

  ‘Three!’ A little eagerly from me. I didn’t relish the thought of going through this again anytime soon.

  Three boxes were plucked from the cabinet and casually plonked on the counter.

  ‘How about . . . oh, what’s it called again? Viagra?’ Muffy ventured.

  ‘Three?’

  ‘Make it two.’

  Boxes of Normison and Ritalin were added to the heap. When the boy went out the back to fetch the Tramadol, Ayub picked up a box of Viagra and examined it. I did my throat-pointing and coughing routine again, feeling emboldened by the fact that he couldn’t read English, but his knowing smile, by way of reply, made me blush.

  Drug deal done, the assistant began to tally it up. But then he stopped mid-calculation. ‘Would you like some Xanax as well?’

  Having a twelve-year-old kid try to upsell me on prescription drugs was not one of the high points of my life but, after a nanosecond of silent consultation, Muffy and I agreed to buy it.

  Muffy had to stop doing the Mujeeb’s run during her final months in Kabul. We had both appeared in what we thought was going to be a corporate video for a newly opened, four-star hotel. We were helping out AK, who needed some western bodies to make the place look chic, and I personally felt obligated to assist as I had just about destroyed the hotel’s business.

  Only the previous month, we had used it as a location for Secrets and had staged a terrorist attack there. Unfortunately for the owner, two days before the initial episode went to air there was a real attack in the streets surrounding the hotel. It went on for almost two days and having it re-enacted on one of the country’s most popular soaps wasn’t the best publicity. The poor man came to the office, begging us to pull the follow-up show. The best I could do was edit it all in tight, so as to try to make the place unrecognisable.

  For reasons still unknown to us, the ‘corporate video’ found its way on air, appearing on prime-time TV during every ad break. I was just one of many diners in their ‘luxury’ restaurant. Muffy played the receptionist and was prominently featured not wearing a headscarf.

  As soon as the ad started airing, Muffy began being recognised. A waiter at our favourite Chinese joint asked her what time the dining room closed; an assistant at the local shop wanted to know how much the rooms cost. With every enquiry, Muffy patiently explained that she was not, in fact, the receptionist at the Kabul Star Hotel. Afterwards, discussing it with me, she would wonder what kind of desperate foreigner would be working front desk at a hotel in Afghanistan.

  Being celebrity-spotted by an assistant at Mujeeb’s finally saw her break. ‘Listen! I am not the receptionist at the Kabul Star Hotel. I have never worked at the Kabul Star Hotel. I’m a TV producer—I work in television, okay!’

  ‘Which station do you work for?’ he asked.

  She grimaced at me, suddenly realising that she had given too much away. I scooped up our stash, ushered her out the door, and turned to smile at the boy behind the counter.

  ‘Darling, she is the receptionist at the Kabul Star Hotel. And there is a swimming pool on the roof.’

  Season One of The Ministry was one of the few drama productions we ever produced without external funding. Conceived by Saad, the eight-part comedy series centred on the day-to-day running of a government ministry and tackled corruption, nepotism, sexism, violence, and collusion between the government and major criminals.

  The actors all spoke Dari, the topics we covered were all transparently relevant to Afghan society, and we constantly referenced local current events and scandals. Mindful of the fact that the show would undoubtedly offend the government and wary of having it yanked off air by the conservative Ministry of Culture, we set the show in the fictional country of ‘Hichland’ (Nothingland). This device, also masterminded by Saad, made us untouchable.

  I appointed AK to oversee production. We had a minuscule budget, so he suggested that we shoot the show on one camera as a mockumentary. This would be an invaluable time saver, and would cover for the boom mikes and lighting stands that invariably found their way into so many takes on all of our shows.

  None of the writers, cast or crew had ever seen a mockumentary, and conveying the concept to them took considerable time and explanation. In an early rehearsal with the wonderful actor Abdul Qadir Farookh, who played the minister, we asked him to improvise a little spiel about his ‘job’ (as the Minister for Garbage, of course), but he launched into a personal discourse about his early days as an actor in Afghan theatre. However, AK had assembled a cracker ensemble cast; the scripts were hard-hitting and funny, and the show proved to be a huge hit when it aired in August 2011.

  It also garnered interest from around the world. Saad tweeted a link to a three-minute trailer for the show and, within thirty-six hours, we had over fifty thousand hits on YouTube. Suddenly journalists from everywhere wanted to know about Afghanistan’s version of The Office.

  A dear friend, Jerome Starkey (writing for The Times in London), was the first journo to visit the set and, blessedly sensing the excitement of our team, stayed with us for two hours as he patiently interviewed everyone from the lead actors to the lighting man.

  After the UK Sun ran a piece pointing out the similarities between The Ministry and The Office, Ricky Gervais even got on board, blogging: ‘They found a fat, middle-aged bloke with a beard. That bit was easy. The difficult part was finding a town in Afghanistan as grim as Slough.’

  Muffy and I celebrated that night—a mention from The Master was as good as it got. But after our thirty-seventh drink, we were suddenly struck by the thought that Ricky Gervais might have thought that we’d actually ripped off his show. After a rambling, repetitive and dreadfully slurred discussion between us on the matter, we were quite certain that he intended to sue the company.

  At 4am, and quite oblivious to the fact that it was 11.30pm in London, we decided that the only course of action was to call him immediately and plead our case against plagiarism. Mercifully, we only got as far as his agent’s answering machine and, thankfully, they never returned our call.

  We quickly launched into creating a second season, again under our own financial steam, and I gave the two local writers free rein to devise episode outlines. They were coming along quite nicely, save for the fact that three of the eight episodes ended with everyone fainting; but, with a fair bit of polish and a little less swooning, we were ready to start scripting in December.

  Then one night I ran into Daniel, the press officer for the British Embassy, at a party and he proposed an idea that turned all our hard work firmly on its head. Apparently the ambassador, Sir William Patey, was a huge fan of The Ministry and, as he was leaving his post in the next few months, wondered if he might do a wee cameo in the se
cond series—a kind of swansong to Afghanistan. I immediately agreed.

  We would have to work closely with the embassy to come up with a suitable and acceptable storyline to accommodate his appearance; we would need to rework all our outlines and shoot his scenes out of sequence, but it would be worth it to get him on the show. I had met Sir William on many occasions. Easy-going, funny and a natural performer, during our first meeting with him regarding his cameo, he made it abundantly clear that he wanted us to take the piss out of him.

  I sat with my writers and mapped out new outlines, incorporating a storyline where the ‘Borland’ (British) Embassy gives funding to the ministry to clean up the city and the minister embezzles the lot. I took on the job of personally writing the two scripts featuring the ambassador and we sent them to the embassy in mid-January for approval.

  Daniel liked the four scenes featuring Sir William, but would have to get the nod from him before he could agree to anything. And if the ambassador was happy, it would then still need the go-ahead from London. We pushed on with scripting the rest of the show, trusting that Sir William and London would come through.

  He was due to leave the country at the end of March but, as February drew to a close, we still didn’t have a firm commitment regarding his appearance. I got Saad on board at that stage—he was a personal friend of Sir William’s and could perhaps give the process the nudge that it so desperately needed. He forwarded me Sir William’s succinct reply in early March: ‘The Ministry has three weeks to get organised.’

  We were ready to go but still didn’t have formal script approval, and it took a further two weeks to finally sort it out. The scenes I had written would take a good half a day to shoot but, due to the ambassador’s busy schedule, he could only spare us an hour of his time. This was entirely understandable, but a little prior notice would have helped.

  It took a couple of hours of pacing around and some solid chain-smoking to devise a solution. By the end of the day I had confined his cameo to one short scene, where the minister briefly meets the ambassador before Sir William blows him off in favour of a tennis game with another foreign diplomat. I wrote in an advisor to the ambassador, who could take on the bulk of his dialogue in the remaining scenes, and had no other option than to cast myself in that role.

  We seemed genuinely set to go—the only conceivable problem I could see was me mastering a plummy English accent—but, the day before the shoot, a whole new drama erupted. Much of the comedy in the scene derived from the minister (at the prompting of his PR man) wearing a kilt to the meeting, in order to impress the ambassador. When Farhad sheepishly informed me that Abdul was refusing to wear the kilt, I almost swallowed my tongue.

  Abdul had been to the tailor for fittings and was fully aware he was going to wear the thing, so I struggled to comprehend this last-minute backflip. Farhad explained that it was actually Abdul’s family members who were against the idea; he had told his sons about our wardrobe choice the previous evening and they had convinced him that he would bring great shame upon them all if he appeared on television wearing a ‘skirt’. I argued that Afghan men wear salwar kameezes—effectively ‘dresses’—all the time, but it seemed it was the exposing of his bare knees that was the shameful part.

  I immediately advised the embassy of this latest development, begging their understanding and promising them a fresh scene within the hour. I ultimately decided to write the minister’s refusal to wear the ‘skirt’ into the episode and, after assurances from Abdul that he had no problem sporting elaborate jewellery on TV, had him turning up to the meeting wearing a sporran around his neck. Hey, it wasn’t comedy genius, but the clock was ticking and I still had an English accent to perfect.

  The morning of the shoot was rather manic. We had the ambassador from 11am until noon, and had to be set up and ready to go as soon as he arrived. And, because we were shooting at the embassy, we would be subjected to extensive and time-consuming body and equipment checks before we could enter. There would be no time to rehearse with Sir William and the scene was a complex beast—it was in both Dari and English. In a quick read-through at the office, the actors struggled to find their cues.

  While the crew set up, Tahir took us through rehearsals; Muffy stood in for the ambassador, and we ran through it over and over and over again. We were as good as we were going to get when Sir William finally made his entrance.

  He proved to be a one-take wonder. He didn’t have his lines down pat, but he improvised his way through what turned out to be a very funny scene. We wrapped at 11.50am and the actors and crew spent the final ten minutes all getting their photos taken with the British ambassador, before he graciously took his leave.

  This was the first scene we shot for the second series and we left the embassy all very excited about the project. Then the very next day, Adiba in business development called me for a meeting where she recommended that we include The Ministry in a massive proposal promoting ‘good governance and civil society’ that we were currently bidding for.

  I was honestly surprised by her suggestion. We had previously canvassed the idea with another big client and had been shot down in flames. Ridiculing the government went against everything NATO was trying to promote, and that particular client wanted nothing to do with the show. Still, I agreed to meet with this new potential funder the following morning.

  I had a pretty good grasp on ‘good governance’, but was a little lost when it came to ‘civil society’. I rocked up to the meeting completely unprepared and a little overwhelmed. When I was asked to detail how I intended embedding its messaging into the show, I threw out some random idea about the secretary, the only female character in the series, having a four-sided cardboard enclosure constructed around her desk in order to segregate her from the men in the ministry.

  President Karzai had just endorsed a restrictive code of conduct issued by an influential Council of Clerics; this code forbade women travelling without a male guardian or mingling with men in schools, marketplaces and offices. I offered that the secretary could turn to local civil society organisations for support in her fight against segregation, before ultimately speaking out against corruption in the ministry.

  The client, and the four representatives from various local NGOs also present at the meeting, loved it. The contract would be signed in May, and I returned to the office burdened with the task of telling my writers that we once again had to rework our outlines.

  We spent the next two days mapping out a new narrative that accommodated both Sir William’s storyline and our new client’s agenda. I assured Saad that we could include the messaging without diluting the comedy, so I worked very closely with the writers to keep my promise. And when one of them did a runner to Germany two weeks later, I effectively took the lead on the project.

  The remaining writer, Ashraf, had been with our team for two years and was excellent at scripting drama. He was studying Medicine and was earnest, clever and very clued-up on current affairs. He was obviously the brains behind the show’s political content because, to be honest, comedy writing was not his strong point.

  With Hakim as our go-between, Ashraf and I argued over scenes that lacked any real humour, over story set-ups that fizzled out to nothing and the fact that the soldier (a minor character in the show, but a good friend of Ashraf’s) seemed to dominate every episode. Hakim was also a very good friend of Ashraf’s; when I would privately ask him whether he thought scenes his mate had written were funny or whether, perhaps due to cultural differences, I was just not getting it, I know it pained him to have to betray his friendship and side with me.

  The final episode of The Ministry went to air in mid-August 2012, and the buzz around the show was phenomenal. But I derived my greatest joy from knowing that my team produced this incredibly popular, ‘must-watch’ series all by themselves. My role in the scripting process was necessary, due to the ever-changing landscape of the narrative and a client-mandated deadline that meant we had to work fast, but, apart from that,
I had very little to do with production. Sure, I visited the set a few times and dutifully did a spot of acting, but essentially I was able to let my team roll along alone.

  I’d started this job fully intending that, one day, I would do myself out of it. And it made me so proud, after three years, to know that I was almost there.

  Dick Willy had just flown out of Kabul. Again.

  He had been threatening to return to Afghanistan ever since his inglorious exit in 2010. Because he’d been complaining of feeling heart-sick and lost back home in the States, his best friend there, having grown tired of his constant crying jags and his endless expressions of yearning for his ‘spiritual homeland’, finally demanded that he come to Kabul and make peace with his past.

  The triumphant return lasted a little over three months and ended in another messy, emotional departure. In fairness to Dick, his ruin coincided with a sort of Lord of the Flies scenario at our guest house, where he had been living since July. We had all turned feral and hostile and loopy, and Dick was cast as the doomed Piggy.

  I had lived at the Bliss Guest House since November 2011 and it was my ninth residence since arriving in Afghanistan. I knew about Bliss long before I moved in, as it was renowned for its parties. With a beautiful garden, a well-stocked bar and a friendly ambience, its regular social gatherings were legendary affairs, and there was a lengthy waiting list to become a tenant.

  Muffy and I lucked our way to the top of the tree when the manager of Bliss, Adiba, came to work for our company. At the time we were living in the crudely fortified guest house run by Bela. I suspect the poor woman had stayed in the Ghan way too long. She was always stressed and exhausted; she was perpetually at loggerheads with the Afghan owner, whose nephew supervised the operation on his uncle’s behalf. She was also a little too interested in the private lives of her guests.