Angel Touch

by Mike Ripley

  Title Page

  ANGEL TOUCH

  Mike Ripley

  For Kate and Miranda; early fans.

  Publisher Information

  Telos Publishing Ltd

  17 Pendre Avenue, Prestatyn, Denbighshire, LL19 9SH

  www.telos.co.uk

  Digital edition converted and published by

  Andrews UK Limited 2010

  www.andrewsuk.com

  Angel Touch © 1989, 2006 Mike Ripley

  Introduction © 2006 Mike Ripley

  Cover by Gwyn Jeffers, David J Howe

  This digital edition published in 2011 under licence to Andrews UK Ltd

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Author’s Introduction

  I wrote the second Angel novel in the ten month gap between Just Another Angel being accepted by Collins in Crime Club in October 1987 and it actually appearing in print in August 1988.

  I was working in London for the Brewers’ Society, the trade association of the British brewing industry, when there was a British brewing industry, and I was in regular contact with financial journalists, stockbrokers and City analysts.

  One evening, I had arranged to meet a certain broker for a pint or three in one of the pubs near Liverpool Street station. In those days, there were still good pubs, wine bars and even oyster bars there – and just about everybody smoked.

  I was early and so I did what I usually did in London pubs: hid behind a book and listened to other people’s conversations.

  Through a forest of Hugo Boss suits and bright red braces, I picked up on one particular voice saying: ‘… so he took out the market-makers in a dawn raid …’

  I thought that sounded fantastic, even though I had absolutely no idea what it meant. When my City broker finally turned up, I let him buy me pint and then asked him what ‘taking out the market-makers’ meant. His response was an instant, snappy ‘Who told you that?’ and he looked so guilty, I knew I was on to something.

  After another round of beers, or maybe two, I had my plot: a financial scam in the newly-reorganised City of London where a new breed of market-makers were trying to iron out (or exploit) the glitches in the ‘Big Bang’ electronic revolution that had shaken up the stock exchange.

  Despite all the promises of an IT-based future, 1987 was still the Bronze Age compared with today. In most London offices, the cutting edge of technology was the fax machine, though it was far from universal. My own office in the West End had only just consigned its telex machine and punched-tapes to a museum. A word processor was a middle-aged woman with a Dictaphone and an IBM golf-ball typewriter. No-one had a mobile phone smaller or lighter than a brick.

  Technology has changed so quickly since then that much of Angel Touch now seems completely dated, and few who work in the City now would recognise the ‘McGuffin’ of the plot. The background premise, though, may still hold good. On my visits to the offices of brokers and analysts, I had noticed the conspicuous absence of female faces, and the colour of the male ones was, without exception, white.

  Therefore I decided on a situation where there was a financial scam (insider trading) going on and the prime suspect was the sole black, female stockbroker. I wanted a situation where Angel, who knew nothing about the City or financial dealing, could be accepted because he was white and wore a suit, whereas Salome was automatically a suspect even though she was brilliant at her job.

  The other key element in the story was paint-balling – war games for terminally-teenaged men – which was still a game in those days and had not yet become a ghastly management torture under the guise of ‘team-building.’ It was so intrinsically silly a pastime, I just couldn’t resist it.

  Most of the characters in the book were reprised from Just Another Angel, but with one notable newcomer, the itinerant musician and professional Irish scallywag Francis Xavier Dromey, better known as Werewolf.

  Although he featured in only two books, Werewolf is one of the most fondly remembered of my creations. (Springsteen is the top one.) And like the plot of the novel, he was born in a pub, this time the Three Tuns, the home of the notorious Thursday Club, an informal friendly society of off-duty policemen, writers and other layabouts founded by the lovely Bill Carmichael, step-dad of Pierce (007) Brosnan.

  The prototype Werewolf had stumbled (literally) into the pub after a heavy morning auditioning somewhere. Striking up a conversation, as you do, with the regulars, this incredibly hairy young man with fantastically bad teeth and a beard you could hide a badger in, told us he was a jobbing actor, currently unemployed. Someone remarked that he must have been after the part of the Wolfman, and he liked the idea and slipped into character for the rest of the afternoon, whilst remaining witty and charming, though not necessarily upright. He was instantly christened ‘Werewolf’, including by the Irish landlady, but I think his real name was Peter something. He was good value and stuck in my mind, though I only ever met him that one time. I did see him some years later, as an extra in an episode of Casualty, the BBC’s hospital soap opera. He played a drunk. He was rather good.

  Angel Touch was published in the early summer of 1989 and received very favourable reviews in almost all the national newspapers. Marcel Berlins selected it as his crime novel of the year in The Times and it went on to win the Crime Writers’ Association’s Last Laugh Award for comedy.

  Much to the annoyance of my editor at Collins, I had acquired the services of an agent, David Higham Associates (who had been Dorothy L Sayers’ agents). Very quickly after publication, it seemed as if they had hit the agenting jackpot: they had sold the television rights.

  At the time, this was the crime writer’s Holy Grail. The Angel books would never make movies, but a television series was a distinct possibility, and suddenly people were talking about ‘the natural successor to Minder,’ and a reviewer on Capital Radio actually described Angel as ‘a young Arthur Daley with a degree.’

  If television was hungry for new material, there was plenty to choose from. The years 1987 and 1988 had seen the blossoming of a new wave of British crime writers, several of whom formed the Fresh Blood group in 1991. But television is a fickle mistress.

  Mike Phillips’ Blood Rights, featuring his journalist detective Sam Dean, was the first to be snapped up and filmed by the BBC in 1990 but, inexplicably, it remained a one-off. Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus series set in Edinburgh (though Ian lived in France then) was getting noticed by discerning critics, even if mega-stardom and bestseller lists were some years off. Probably due to the continued success of that other Scottish detective Taggart, it was to be the year 2000 before Rebus was portrayed on the small screen by John Hannah, and 2006 before he was reincarnated by Ken Stott. John Harvey’s wonderful Inspector Resnick series, set in Nottingham, was adapted for BBC2 starring the excellent Tom Wilkinson. Grittier and more realistic than the usual TV cop-show fare, the short series (two of the books were filmed) was to suffer from bizarre scheduling and disgracefully allowed to wither and die on the vine by 1992.

  But Angel’s biggest rival was probably Mark Timlin’s south London private eye Nick Sharman, a role eventually taken by Clive Owen (the best James Bond we never had) in 1996.


  The rights to Angel Touch had been bought by an independent production company for an initial one year, with the standard option of one further year. The idea was to develop a script and put together a pilot show with a view to selling the idea of a series to one of the television broadcast companies; either the BBC or one of the ITV companies such as Granada or Yorkshire or the brash newcomer on the scene, Carlton.

  Being a total virgin in the whacky world of television, I was prepared to do what I was told, which was precisely nothing. The production company made it clear from the start that they wanted to employ a scriptwriter with television experience and not a fledgling novelist who had published two books and two short stories.

  For two years all I had to do was dodge the question, ‘Who do you want to play Angel?’ I knew that if I was not allowed any input into the script, I was hardly likely to get a say in the casting, especially as we were entering the era of star-lead productions, where you could sell anything to a TV network as long as it had John Thaw or David Jason or Nick Berry (!) in it. (Later, the same applied to James Nesbitt and, almost, Robert Carlyle.)

  As 1991 drew to a close, I was told that a writer had been hired and a script was due by Christmas. Now the going rate then for a one-hour pilot script and treatment was roughly £8,000. I don’t know how much the Angel hack got, but all he delivered was a synopsis of the book and a note saying he had taken on other work and hadn’t the time to do a proper treatment or script.

  I was appalled by this, but my production company didn’t bat an eyelid, simply telling me not to worry as there were ‘plenty more writers out there.’

  The second year option expired and my agent negotiated a third-year option as ‘there was no other offer on the table.’ As it turned out, there was considerable interest in the books (of which there were now four, three of which had won awards) up at Yorkshire Television, but they were unwilling to show their hand just yet.

  Another scriptwriter was commissioned; this time one I had heard of. I had even seen a two-part surreal thriller he had written for the BBC. I felt slightly more confident, although I never heard from the writer. In fact, I heard nothing at all from the production company for about six months and then, when I asked for an update, they reluctantly disclosed the fact that there was a script and it was being pitched to Carlton TV, although I was not allowed to see it. I was aware, because I knew Mark Timlin, that Carlton were also considering a series starring his Nick Sharman, but my production company told me not to worry my pretty little head over things like that.

  And then two very odd things happened.

  On my birthday in 1992, I met a woman in a pub in Oxfordshire, as you do, who turned out to be the producer of Lovejoy, the current BBC Sunday evening hit pulling in anything up to 11 million viewers. About a week later, she rang my agent, having gone out and bought a couple of my novels, and offered me the chance to write scripts for the series.

  In 1993, my first solo-credit episode (containing a part specially written for Bert Kwouk) was broadcast, and I was no longer a scriptwriting virgin.

  I had such a good time working on Lovejoy (filming near to my home on the Essex/Suffolk border) that I hardly gave Angel Touch a thought. And then one day I was invited, out of the blue, to the Holborn offices of Yorkshire TV for a meeting on my way home from work with their Head of Drama, Keith Richardson.

  Intrigued, and sworn to secrecy, I learned that Yorkshire were interested in Angel as a vehicle for ex-EastEnders’ star Nick Berry, who was currently starring in Heartbeat, the ITV show going head-to-head with the Lovejoy for the big Sunday night viewing figures. Keith Richardson’s main concern seemed to be ‘How can we do the music?’ but he had obviously read the books and insisted that Nick Berry had too (an unusual thing for an actor.) There was, however, the slight problem that my production company held the rights.

  I went away from that meeting feeling confident that things were happening. (Actually, I went straight from that meeting to a wine bar near the Old Curiosity Shop near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which at that time was occupied by homeless squatters in what was known as ‘Cardboard City’, and from there sprang the plot of Angel City, which just proves that no day is wasted.)

  All I had to do was wait for the rights to revert to me at the end of the third year and I could sell them to Yorkshire and Nick Berry. The only way my production company could hang on to them was if they exercised their option, something that usually happened, technically, on the first day of filming once the project was in production.

  More months went by with a not a word from my production company, but then came news, from an unknown source and in a very unexpected place.

  I was at a Lovejoy party in the Groucho Club in Soho, and while I was in the Gentlemen’s lavatory on the second floor, minding my own business, two young men in smart suits entered and took up position at urinals next to me. Deep in conversation, they probably never noticed me, but my ears certainly pricked up when one told the other: ‘And the latest from Carlton is they’ve put Angel into turnaround and they’re going with the Sharman series.’

  Back in the party, one of the other Lovejoy writers told me that ‘turnaround’ meant that Carlton had given up on the project and were basically offering their interest in it for sale.

  The next day, I rang my production company and had the news rather casually confirmed to me. No doubt they would have got around to telling me one day. I asked if I could now, finally, see the pilot script that we had waited three years for and that had been rejected by Carlton. They said they would try and find a copy, but I insisted on sending a motorbike messenger round to their office that afternoon to collect one.

  It quickly became clear once I read it, why Carlton had lost faith in the project. Not only was it a bad script, but it was deliberately quirky to no obvious dramatic advantage. Angel made his first entrance dressed as an aardvark (!) playing the trumpet (!!) as a novelty entertainer at a children’s birthday party. The writer also insisted on misspelling ‘trumpet’ as ‘trumphet’ throughout, adding to the air of unreality.

  Slightly more worrying from my point of view was the fact that the script of Angel Touch bore no relation to the novel Angel Touch. It was, in fact, a script based on Just Another Angel, which was not the novel named in the rights contract!

  There was no point in complaining to anyone, though I did write to the Head of Drama at Carlton disassociating myself from the script. I assumed the Carlton adventure was over and once the third-year option expired, I could turn to Yorkshire TV and start the whole process again!

  But real life is often weirder than fiction. By all the rules (as if there are any rules in television!) my production company should have cut its losses at the end of that third year. They knew a fourth-year option was unlikely, and so the only way to hang on to the rights would be to exercise the option as if the series was being filmed, even though they had no script, no cast and no broadcaster! They would also have to pay me a large amount of money, as options are based on 10% of the full fee, the other 90% being paid when the cameras started turning. The only possible reason for exercising the option would be to hang on to the rights in the hope that another broadcaster would buy them out at a profit.

  Such a course of action seemed highly unlikely, almost impossible; but it wasn’t. At about 15 minutes to midnight on the day the option expired, large amounts of cash were wired to my agent who rang me the following morning to tell me the news. My reaction was an immediate ‘Oh bugger!’

  The rights to Angel were thus locked up for the hypothetical duration of a ‘first series’ that was never going to be made.

  I didn’t hear from that production company again, though they held on to the rights (quite legally if pointlessly) until 1996 when they ‘reverted’ to me.

  Since then, four other production companies have toyed with the television rights, one of them even paying me to write a script of Ang
els In Arms, but nothing ever made it into production.

  I still hear stories of Angel in bars and restaurants in Soho. Of how the comedian Lenny Henry was tipped for the role of taxi-driving, trumpet-playing Angel, even though he couldn’t drive or play the trumpet. Of how a mysterious pilot was actually filmed in Battersea (though I suspect this was location filming for the American vampire series Angel.) And there was the time I met the writer Alan Plater, who told me he had been offered the job of scripting an Angel book for television five years earlier, but had been too busy. And people still ask me who I would like to see play Angel on the small screen.

  Will anyone ever? Who knows. It used to be the accepted wisdom in publishing that ‘getting on the telly’ increased the sales of your paperbacks ten-fold whether or not the TV show (or indeed the books) were any good.

  I don’t think that formula holds good any longer. I know of writers whose books were televised who now have trouble finding a publisher at all. I know others who have become bestsellers without any TV exposure at all.

  And though it has been two years now since anyone showed an interest in the television rights, it might happen. Reginald Hill’s marvellous Dalziel and Pascoe novels series started in 1970 but took 25 years to make it to television, so me and Angel won’t give up hope just yet.

  In a way, I would miss the constant ‘Who do you want to play Angel?’ question. Once, at a meeting of television luvvies, I was asked and I said: ‘Oh well, if Kenneth Branagh’s busy …’ expecting to get a laugh. Instead, three of them, with deadpan faces, pulled out mobile phones and said ‘Have you checked with his agent?’

  Being half-serious, at various times I did suggest a younger Neil Morrissey, Sam West or Mick Ford of the RSC. Others have suggested cast members from Emmerdale (where my mate Richard Thorp always said he wanted the role of Duncan the Drunken) or EastEnders; Robert Carlyle, Lenny Henry, Nick Berry (several times) and even Sir David Jason.