Inconceivable

by Ben Elton

  I spent yesterday lunchtime at a women’s clinic for alternative medicine and therapy. As I’ve said, all that New Agey stuff is not really for me, but on the other hand it’s foolish to dismiss things out of hand. Anyway, while I was there I bumped into Drusilla. she’d just been to an aromatherapy session and she reeked of orange and liquorice oils. It made me think of the school tuckshop actually. This was unfortunate because of course then I thought of all the girls I knew at school, and then I wondered where they all are now and of course then I thought they’ve all got babies! Twelve each, no doubt. Which is wonderful, and I’m glad for them, no really I am, but it does also make me feel a bit sad.

  Anyway, Drusilla (who seems to be nearly as fascinated by my infertility as I am myself) asked how long we’d lived in Highgate.

  ‘Five years,’ I said, to which she positively shrieked and said that this was our problem! I told her not to be ridiculous, of course, but asked her to tell me more (you can’t be too careful). Well, apparently it’s well known that there’s an unfriendly and infertile ley line running right through Hampstead and Highgate. I pointed out that other people conceive in Highgate, but apparently ley lines are very personal and can be a fertility drug for some and an absolute vinegar douche for others. Drusilla is convinced that our problem is geographical. She claims that the most powerfully positive ley line within this, our ancient and magical land of Albany, runs right across Primrose Hill! Well, I half guessed what was coming, but it was still a shock. She wants Sam and me to have it off on top of Primrose Hill!

  On bloody top! In the open air. At midnight under a full moon, no less.

  It’s not on, of course. Absolutely out of the question. Under no circumstances would I dream of doing such a thing. Well, it’s ridiculous. She’ll have us fellating at Stonehenge next.

  Incidentally, I nearly shouted at that arrogant sod Carl Phipps today. I was on my own in the office and he came in to pick up some faxes, from an American producer no less, very grand. I must say he was looking rather nice, wearing a maroon-coloured corduroy suit, so I said, ‘Oh you’re looking rather nice, Carl,’ and he said, ‘Well, one tries.’ I mean the arrogance! He might just as well have said, ‘Yes, I am gorgeous, aren’t I?’ Which he is not, incidentally. Anyway, then he sat right down on the corner of my desk and said, ‘You’re looking like something of a sex bitch yourself today, Lucy’ which was simply not true. All I had on was a silly little miniskirt, my kinky boots and that little tight top I quite like. Frankly I looked awful, so it was stupid of him to pretend I didn’t.

  Carl is terribly popular with the public. He’s definitely our biggest client. He gets loads of fan mail from that costume thing he did at the Beeb. I can’t think what people see in him.

  Dear Book,

  Good news and bad news. Lucy has vetoed my all-round scrotal fitness plan. She says that the test must not be rigged. If we’re to get anywhere with discovering why we’re infertile I must present an honest picture of myself and my life. i.e. half pissed most nights and occasionally at lunchtime. Lucy suspects, I fear, that my fondness for booze (which though sociable is by no means excessive) may be the problem. She imagines that the inside of my scrotum resembles the Groucho Club at 1.45 on a Saturday night, i.e. nearly empty but with a thin smattering of pissed-up free-loading liggers who have no real skills or purpose and appear to make no positive contribution to anything whatsoever that might justify their comfortable and socially exalted existence.

  Therefore, despite her low opinion of my fertility, Lucy wants it to be presented honestly and for this reason the zinc and the multivitamins have been ditched. Also (rather splendidly) she’s told me to keep drinking. Although only at normal levels, whatever they may be. I find it almost impossible to work out how much I drink. I mean I know it’s not that much, but how much is that? If ever I ask myself ‘How many did I have last night?’ I always answer, ‘Oh, only a few.’ But when you actually try and work it out, check how much you spent, the state of the whisky bottle still on the kitchen table, the various places you’ve been, suddenly you’re worrying that you’re an alcoholic.

  Anyway, Lucy’s decision not to let me prepare for my test has certainly made life easier. I’m particularly pleased to be able to give up the Testicular Workout. It promised firm, full and rounded testicles in a wrinkle-free scrotum inside one month, but it required a kind of tensing of the arse and lower gut muscles which made me frown furiously. I’m glad not to be bothering with that any more. I have enough new lines on my face without deliberately grimacing for ten minutes a day.

  Anyway, in four days’ time it will all be over. Which means from tomorrow onwards I’m not allowed to ejaculate. Apparently a three-day period of being left alone in quiet contemplation will give my sperm time to consider their characters and pull themselves together a bit. No great hardship, this abstinence.

  Sex for Lucy and me at the moment is rarer than a decent sitcom on ITV and I’m usually too tired to be bothered with slapping the monkey.

  No reply yet from Tosser, or indeed the Channel Controller, but I take this as no slight. They’re both very busy men, very busy men indeed, as, of course, am I.

  Big Issue

  Dear Pen Pal,

  I gave blood today. This test is to consider my hormone level to see if I ovulate. I did it at an NHS Female Health Clinic in Camden. I didn’t do it at my normal GP’s because Dr Cooper is on holiday and I don’t really like Dr Mason (nothing specific, just don’t really like him).

  God, Camden’s getting gruesome. If you’re not out of your brains on drugs the police stop you and ask if you’re lost. I walked up the High Street holding my copy of the

  as a sort of shield. So depressing, all those homeless people. How did it happen? Thatcher, I used to think, but she’s been gone for donks and they’re still here. You give money to a couple of them but you can’t give money to them all and when you’ve run out of change you want to say to the ones you haven’t given anything to that you’ve already given money to the previous ones, but why would they care?

  The clinic was depressing, as it would be. All these women having their bits and their boobs checked, or barren like me. One tries to maintain a positive outlook but it’s not easy.

  There was an old

  TV Times in the waiting pen (I won’t call it a ‘room’, that would make it sound too cosy; it was just a sort of square of plastic chairs with a couple of broken toys on the floor). Anyway, the TV Times contained quite a good article about Carl Phipps, when he was still in that awful thing Fusilier! on ITV. Quite nice pictures, although I must say I prefer him now he’s got longer hair. That crew cut was rather brutal. Still, his eyes haven’t changed, still soft and limpid. He knows how nice they are, though, like David Essex used to. I’ll bet he uses twinkle drops. The text went on and on about how girls are always getting terrible crushes on him. You can see how they might, but God, some women are stupid.

  Dear etc.,

  Quite astonishing development at work today. I’ve been to Downing Street. I didn’t meet the Prime Minister, but it’s still amazing. It completely took my mind off my sperm test.

  It happened like this. I’d just sat down to another morning of brooding over the lack of direction or passion in my career, leafing through another pile of scripts, wondering why the hell I can’t seem to find it in me to write one myself, when Daphne said that the Channel Controller was on the line. Well of course I was thrilled, he could only be phoning personally to accept my dinner invitation! I was mentally leafing through Delia as I grabbed the phone and had already decided on the salmon mousse to start when it turned out that Nigel had called about something even more exciting! He was phoning from Barcelona, where he was (of course) attending an international television festival. Perhaps the single greatest perk of being at the Beeb is the international festival circuit. The BBC don’t pay you much, but they do let you lig. Even I get to go to a few. Lucy and I had a fantastic weekend in Cork last April, except that she thought
she was ovulating so I wasn’t allowed to drink. Controllers, being an altogether superior breed, of course, virtually spend their lives at festivals. You can always find them in some exotic location bemoaning the fact that Baywatch is the most popular Programme in the world and that cartoons are the sickness at the heart of children’s broadcasting.

  Anyway, this was why Nigel was calling from Barcelona.

  But oh, such news! It turned out that the Prime Minister’s office had been on to the BBC about the PM appearing on Livin’ Large. Livin’ Large is our current Saturday morning kids’ pop and fun show and every week they have a sort of interview spot where the children get to ask questions of a celebrity. Now, unbeknownst to me (surprise, surprise) our PR people had had a brilliant idea. (I must digress here to remark that the fact that our PR people had had a brilliant idea was shocking news in itself and evidence of how much things have changed around the old place. BBC press and public relations used to consist of an office with a large enthusiastic woman in it whom everyone ignored.

  Now it’s a huge and entirely separate company called something like BBC Communications or Beeb COM, whose services I have to hire. It’s quite extraordinary. In order for me to ensure that BBC shows are plugged in BBC publications I have to pay BBC money to BBC Communications. It seems loopy to me, but George assures me that it’s cut away a lot of ‘dead wood’.) Anyway, BBC Communications’ idea had been to ask the Prime Minister if he would like to appear on Livin’ Large and take some questions from ‘the kids’, thereby cutting through all that cynical adult bullshit and plugging in to the pure unsullied enthusiasm of youth. Astonishingly, it seemed to me, the man was considering it.

  The problem for Nigel (the Controller) was that Downing Street (which is a vigorous, ‘can do’ sort of a place these days) wanted to meet today! and no other later date would do because the PM’s diary is chockablock with summits and Cabinet crises right through till Christmas. Nigel had of course tried to get a flight back from Barcelona but there was a football match, or the French air-traffic controllers weren’t letting anybody out of Europe today or something. Anyway, the upshot of it was that I would have to go to the meeting!

  Well, I spent the rest of the morning phoning my mum and Lucy and everybody I knew and trying to get my tie ironed. Of course, one might have thought that in the heart of one of the largest television studio complexes in the world getting one’s tie ironed would have been easy. To get someone from wardrobe would, one might imagine, have been the work of a moment.

  Unfortunately ‘wardrobe’ no longer exists as such. It’s a separate company called Beeb Frox or else something equally awful, and one has to negotiate with it. This Daphne, my wonderful secretary, duly did, and came back with a quote of £45. It seemed a bit steep to iron a tie but apparently Beeb Frox claimed it would scarcely cover their paperwork. I told Daphne that seeing as this was the Prime Minister and all, she’d better get on with it, but it turned out not to be that simple. In order for my office to generate a payment from finance (BeebCash Plc) I needed first to prove that I had secured the most competitive tender for the work. Daphne said that she was required to approach a minimum of two outside costumiers to see if they would iron my tie more cheaply than Beeb Frox. Only when we had three estimates to compare could we commission the work.

  Meanwhile, it would also be necessary to decide out of what programme budget the ironing of the tie was to come. Clearly this would have to be Livin’ Large, but if that was the case their Line Producer would have to sign the chit. Also, Livin’ Large was not made in house but by an independent company called Choose Groove Productions. Incidentally, I must add here that this does not mean that Choose Groove Productions make Livin’ Large in any practical sense, oh no, the BBC make it, with BBC staff in a BBC studio, paid for by BBC money, the only difference being that some bloke with a ponytail in Soho takes a thirty-grand-an- episode production fee and gets to stick his company logo on the end of the programme. It was to this lucky recipient of the BBC’s forced entry into the marketplace that Daphne would have to go to get budgetary authorization for my tie to be ironed.

  In the end, Daphne flattened the tie underneath a pile of old copies of Spotlight for a stick of my KitKat.

  So anyway, to get on with the story, this afternoon there I was, fronting up to the gates of Downing Street and being saluted through by a policeman. It was like a dream. I walked up the street with my briefcase, just like cabinet ministers do on the news, and in through the famous door.

  I must say it’s bloody dowdy inside, or at least the bits I saw are.

  Amazing. The entrance hall is like a rundown hotel. Nobody could accuse any of the previous fifteen administrations of wasting money on decoration because I swear that the place hasn’t had a lick of paint since Chamberlain was waving his bit of paper about.

  While I was waiting I noticed an old plastic carrierbag chucked on the threadbare carpet against the skirting board. I remarked to the amiable old doorman that I hoped it wasn’t a bomb and he said that he hoped so too but that it probably belonged to somebody.

  Anyway, after about ten minutes one of the PM’s ‘forward planning team’ arrived, a young woman called Jo whom I think I recognized from her having been on Question Time. She ushered me into a small room with a chair and an old couch and some dirty coffee cups on a table. Here she ‘briefed’ me on the background to this particular ‘outreach initiative’. She told me that the Prime Minister was Britain’s newest, youngest, hippest prime minister since Lord Fol d’Rol in 1753 and that her office had the job of reminding people of this fact and generally demonstrating that the PM was neither fuddy nor duddy.

  ‘We want the kids to know that their PM is not just the youngest, most energetic and most charismatic premier in British history but that he’s also their mate, a regular bloke who likes popmusic, wearing fashionable trousers, and comedy with proper swearing in it. Which is why we think it’s important to place him on Livin’ Large.’

  ‘God yes, great idea,’ I said, pathetically. It’s amazing how even the proximity to power seduces a person.

  ‘But in a dignified context,’ Jo added firmly. ‘No gunk tanks or ‘gotcha’s. It struck us that some kind of ‘youth summit’ would be appropriate, you know, the boss chats with the future and all that. It could be an extended version of that section where the celebrity guest takes questions from the kids.’

  I said it sounded fantastic and that the BBC would be honoured.

  ‘But nice questions, of course, not political. That wouldn’t be appropriate. Questions about the issues that matter to kids.

  Popmusic, fashion, computers, the Internet, that sort of thing.’

  My mind reeled. This was fantastic. A genuine television event!

  Like Mrs Thatcher getting grilled about the Belgrano on Nationwide or the Blue Peter elephant shitting on John Noakes.

  The Prime Minister himself doing an interview with kids on live TV and I was to exec it! Christ! Like I say, I reeled.

  ‘This means a lot to the PM,’ Jo continued. ‘Dammit, as far as ordinary people are concerned politics is boring! The kids don’t want a lot of old fuddy-duddies telling them what to do. We need to let people know that things have changed. Basically, it’s very important to us that the premier gets a chance to point out that he likes popmusic and that he actually plays the guitar. Will that be possible?’

  Well, as far as I was concerned he could point out that he liked liver and onions and played the didgeridoo if he wanted, but I said that I thought everybody knew that the PM played the guitar; it seemed to have come up in every interview he’d ever done.

  ‘People have short memories,’ said Jo, ‘besides which we need to make it clear that it’s the electric guitar he plays, not some strummy-crummy, clicky-clacky, Spanish castanets type, classical fuddy-duddy stuff.’

  Well, I nodded and agreed and wondered if it would be appropriate to kiss her arse and pretty soon Jo signalled that the meeting was over.

  An
d so there it is. I, Sam Bell, have successfully brokered a historic live TV encounter between the PM and Generation Next.

  Trevor and I spent the afternoon trying to think of a good hook for the trailers. Trevor kept coming back to ‘The Premier meets the Little People’ but I’m sure that’d just make everyone think of leprechauns.

  I must say this business has changed my attitude to my job entirely. I mean, if I was in the independent sector I certainly wouldn’t be meeting the PM. Besides which, it has occurred to me that I could use my newly acquired inside knowledge of Downing Street to write a political thriller. It could be just the inspiration I need.

  Good old Beeb, say I. When Tosser offers me a job I’ll turn it down.

  Dear Penny,

  Guess what! Sam nearly met the PM today. I could hardly believe it when he told me. Now that’s what I call cool. I’m so proud of him. I’m married to a man who deals with the very highest in the land and from what he tells me he handled it incredibly well. The only thing that made me a bit sad is that if we never have kids then I won’t be able to tell them that their dad once nearly met the PM. Oh well, I really must stop thinking things like that.

  Dear Self,

  Another bit of good news today. They tell me that I can produce my sperm sample at home! Yes, apparently sperm survives for one hour once outside the body (if kept warm) and as long as you can get the stuff back to the clinic within that time it doesn’t matter where you pull one off the wrist. Great news.

  Anyway, I went in to see Dr Cooper after work to pick up the sterilized pot (you can’t just hand it in in a teacup). You can get the pots at Boots, but I’m not asking some sixteen-year-old girl for a sperm pot. Dr Cooper decided to take the opportunity to offer advice and consultation. He asked me whether I was aware of the manner in which I should produce my sample. I told him that I thought I could just about remember, I might be a bit rusty (it being as much as three or even four days since I last played a solo on the one-stringed bass), but I was sure that it would all come flooding back.