by David Lodge
Young Ritchie is Alistair, son of Sam Ritchie, the Club’s golf pro. He looks after the shop when his father is out giving lessons, and does a bit of beginners’ tuition himself. He can’t be more than twenty-five. “You’re not serious?” I said. “Cross my heart,” Rupert said. “Jean got tight, and started complaining because Joe wouldn’t dance, then she got young Ritchie to dance with her, giggling and hanging round his neck she was, then some time later they both disappeared. Joe went looking for her, and found them together in the First Aid room, in a compromising position. It’s not the first time it’s been used for that purpose, I believe. They’d locked the door, but Joe had a key, being on the Committee.” I asked Rupert how he knew all this. “Jean told Betty, and Betty told me.” I shook my head incredulously. I wondered why Joe was making all these cracks about Brett Sutton being the club gigolo, if he himself had just been cuckolded by young Ritchie. “Diversionary tactics, I suppose,” Rupert said. “He’s trying to draw attention away from Ritchie and Jean.” “What possessed young Ritchie?” I said. “Jean is old enough to be his mother.” “Perhaps it was pity,” Rupert suggested. “Jean told him she hadn’t had it since Joe had his back operation.” “Had what?” “It,” said Rupert. “Sex. You’re a bit slow on the uptake today, Tubby.” “Sorry, I’m gobsmacked,” I said. I was thinking of our conversation in the indoor courts last week: it was disturbing to realize that what I took to be Joe’s harmless teasing had had this painful subtext. I recalled now that Rupert hadn’t joined in the banter, though Humphrey had. “Does Humphrey know about this?” I asked. “I dunno. I don’t think so. He hasn’t got a wife to pass on the gossip, has he? I’m surprised Sally hasn’t picked it up.” Perhaps she has, I thought, and hasn’t told me.
But when I asked her later if she’d heard any scandal about Jean Wellington, she said, no. “But then I wouldn’t,” she said. “It’s a trade-off, that sort of gossip. You don’t get any dirt if you don’t dish some yourself.” I thought she would ask me for more details, but she didn’t. Sally has extraordinary self-control in that way. Or perhaps she just isn’t curious about other people’s private lives. She’s very wrapped up in her work at the moment – not only her teaching and research, but admin. There’s a lot of reorganization going on as a result of the change of status from Poly to University. They can make up their own degree programmes now, and Sally is chairing a new inter-Faculty postgraduate degree course in Applied Linguistics shared between Education and Humanities, as well as sitting on numerous committees, internal and external, with names like F-QUAC (Faculty Quality Assurance Committee) and C-CUE (Council for College and University English), and organizing the in-service training of local junior-school teachers to implement the new National Curriculum. I think she’s being exploited by her Head of Department, who gives her all the trickiest jobs because he knows she’ll do them better than anyone else, but when I tell her this she just shrugs and says that it shows he’s a good manager. She brings home piles of boring agendas and reports to work through in the evenings and at the weekends. We sit in silence on opposite sides of the fireplace, she with her committee papers, I connected to the muted television by the umbilical cord of my headphones.
Severe twinge in the knee while I was watching the news tonight. I suddenly shouted “Fuck!” Sally looked up from her papers enquiringly. I took off the headphones momentarily and said, “Knee.” Sally nodded and went back to her reading. I went back to the news. The main story was a development in the James Bulger murder case, which has been dominating the media for days. Last week the little boy, only two years old, was enticed away from a butcher’s shop in a shopping mall in Bootle by two older boys, while his mother’s attention was distracted. Later he was found dead, with appalling injuries, beside a railway line. The abduction was recorded by a security video camera, and every newspaper and TV news programme has carried the almost unbearably poignant blurred still of the toddler being led away by the two older boys, trustingly holding the hand of one of them, like an advertisement for Startrite shoes. It appears that several adults saw the trio after that, and noticed that the little boy was crying and looking distressed, but nobody intervened. Tonight it was announced that two ten-year-old boys have been charged with murder. “The question is being asked,” the TV reporter said, standing against the backdrop of the Bootle shopping mall, “What kind of society do we live in, in which such things can happen?” A pretty sick one, is the answer.
Sunday 21st Feb. 6.30 p.m. I’m writing this on my laptop in the break between the dress rehearsal and the recording of The People Next Door, sitting at a Formica table in the Heartland Studios canteen, surrounded by soiled plates and cups and glasses left over from an early dinner shared with the cast and production team, and not yet cleared away by the somewhat lackadaisical catering staff. Recording begins at 7.30, after a half-hour warm-up session for the audience. The actors have gone off to Make-Up for repairs, or are resting in their dressing-rooms. Hal is doing a last check on the camera script with his PA and vision mixer, Ollie is having a drink with David Treece, Heartland’s Controller of Comedy (I love that title), and I have just managed to shake off the attentions of Mark Harrington’s chaperone, Samantha, who lingered after the others had gone, so I have an hour to myself. Samantha Handy has a degree in Drama from Exeter University and is doing the job faute de mieux, as Amy would say. Looking after a twelve-year-old boy whose chief topic of conversation is computer games, and making sure he does his homework, is obviously not her natural vocation. She really wants to write for television and seems to think I can help her get a commission. She’s a good-looking redhead, with amazing boobs, and I suppose another man, Jake Endicott for instance, might be tempted to encourage her in this illusion, but I told her frankly that she would do better to try and persuade Ollie to give her some scripts to report on as a first step. She pouted a little and said, “It’s just that I have this fabulous idea for an offbeat soap, a kind of English Twin Peaks. Sooner or later somebody else is going to think of it, and I couldn’t bear that.” “What is it?” I said, averting my eyes from her own twin peaks; and then added hastily, “No, don’t tell me. Tell Ollie. I don’t want to be accused of pinching it one day.” She smiled and said it wasn’t my sort of thing, it was too kinky. “What’s kinky?” said Mark, who was working his way through a second helping of Mississippi Mud Pie. “None of your business,” said Samantha, flicking him lightly on the ear with a long, tapered fingernail. She asked me if I thought she should get an agent, and I said I thought that would be a good idea, but I didn’t offer to introduce her to Jake Endicott. This was entirely for her own good, but naturally she didn’t appreciate my chivalrous motives, and took her young charge off to Make-Up slightly miffed.
I never miss these Sunday recording sessions if I can help it. It’s not that I can contribute much at this late stage, but there’s always a kind of First Night excitement about the occasion, because of the studio audience. You never know who they’re going to be or how they’re going to react. The ones who write in for tickets are usually fans and can be relied upon to laugh in the right places, but there’s always a risk that because the tickets are free people won’t show up on the night. To be sure of filling the seats Heartland relies mostly on organized groups, like social clubs and staff associations looking for a cheap night out – bussing them in and out so they can’t escape. Sometimes you get a party from an old people’s home who are too gaga to follow the plot, or too deaf to hear the dialogue, or too short-sighted to see the monitors, and once we had a group of Japanese who didn’t have a word of English between them and sat in baffled silence throughout, smiling politely. Other nights you get a crowd who really enjoy themselves, and the cast surf through the show on continuous waves of laughter. The unpredictability of the studio audience makes sitcom the nearest thing on television to live theatre, which is probably why I get such a buzz out of the recording sessions.
Heartland TV’s Rummidge studios occupy a huge new building that loo
ks a bit like an airport terminal from the outside, all cantilevered glass and tubular steel flying buttresses, erected three years ago on reclaimed derelict industrial land about a mile from the city centre, between a canal and a railway line. It was intended to be the hub of a vast Media Park, full of studios, galleries, printshops and advertising agencies, which never materialized because of the recession. There’s nothing on the site except the gleaming Heartland monolith and its enormous landscaped car park. The People Next Door is recorded in Studio C, the biggest one, big enough to house an airship, with raked seating for three hundred and sixty running its entire length. On the floor, facing the seats, the permanent set is laid out – a particularly large and complex one, since there are two of everything: two living rooms, two kitchens, two hallways and staircases, all separated by a party wall. Party Wall was my original working title, in fact, and the split-screen we use for some scenes, with action going on simultaneously in both households, is the visual trademark of the show, and frankly the only innovative thing about it. About a million lights sprout from the ceiling on metal stalks, like an inverted field of sunflowers, and the air-conditioning, designed to cope with all of them at once, is too cool for comfort. I always wear a thick sweater to dress rehearsals, even in summer. Hal Lipkin and most of the other production staff sport The People Next Door sweatshirts, navy blue with the title sloping in yellow cursive writing across the chest.
This is a long hard day for everyone, but especially for Hal. He’s totally in command, totally responsible. When I arrived in the late morning he was down on the set talking to Ron Deakin, who was standing on top of a stepladder with a Black and Decker power tool. It’s a “party wall” kitchen scene. Pop Davis is in the process of putting up some shelves under the sarcastic goading of Dolly Davis, while Priscilla and Edward next door are having a worried conversation about Alice, distracted by the whine of the drill. At the climax of the scene Pop Davis pushes his drill right through the wall, dislodging a saucepan that nearly falls on Edward’s head – a tricky bit of business, which depends on pin-sharp timing. They’ve rehearsed it of course, but now they’re having to do it for the first time with real props. The lead on Ron’s Black and Decker is not long enough to reach the powerpoint, and there’s a hiatus while the electrician goes to fetch an extension cord. The cameramen yawn and look at their watches to see how long it is to the next coffee-break. The actors stretch and pace about the set. Phoebe Osborne practises ballet steps in front of a mirror. Making television programmes consists very largely of waiting around.
The day’s routine is slow and methodical. First Hal directs a scene from the edge of the set, stopping and starting to re-block the moves if necessary, until he’s satisfied. Then he retires to the control room to see what it looks like from there. Five cameras are positioned at different angles to the set, focused on different characters or groups of characters, and each one is sending its pictures to a black-and-white monitor in the control room. A colour monitor in the middle of the bank of screens shows what will be recorded tonight on the master tape: a selection made by the production assistant, following a camera script prepared by Hal, in which every shot is numbered and allocated to a particular camera. She chants out the numbers to the vision mixer at her side as the action proceeds, and he presses the appropriate buttons. If you’re sitting in the studio audience you can tell which camera is actually recording at any given moment because a little red bulb on the camera body lights up. From the gallery Hal speaks to his floor manager Isabel through her headset, and she relays his instructions to the cast. Sometimes he decides he needs to change a shot, or insert a new one, but it’s striking how seldom he has to do this. He’s already “seen” the entire show in his head, shot by shot.
Multicamera, as this technique is known in the trade, is peculiar to television. In the early days of the medium everything was done this way, even serious drama – and done live (imagine the tension and stress, with actors running round the back of the set to get into position for their next scene). Nowadays most drama and a good deal of sitcom is done on film or single-camera video. In other words, they’re made like movies, every scene being shot several times from various angles and focal distances, in take after take, on location rather than in a studio, and then edited at the director’s leisure. Directors prefer this method because it makes them feel like genuine auteurs. The younger ones sneer at multicamera and call it “joined-up television”, but the fact is that most of them couldn’t handle it, and would have their limitations cruelly exposed if they tried. With post-production editing you can always cover up your mistakes, but multicamera requires everything to be pretty well perfect on the night. It’s a dying art, and Hal is one of the few masters of it still around.
Ollie came into the studio later and sat down beside me. He was wearing one of his Boss suits – he must own a wardrobeful. I think he buys them because of the name. As he sat down the wide shoulders of the jacket rode up and nudged his big red ears. Bracketing his broken nose, these make him look like an ex-boxer, and indeed it’s rumoured that he started his career promoting fights in the East End of London. “We must talk,” he said. “About Debbie?” I asked. He looked alarmed and raised his finger to his lips. “Not so loud, walls have ears,” he said, though we were alone in the raked seating and the nearest wall was fifty feet away. “Lunch? Dinner?” I suggested. “No, I want to involve Hal, and the cast will think it’s funny if we get into a huddle on our own. Can you stay for a drink after the recording?” I said I could. At that moment I was surprised to hear Lewis Parker saying from the set, “Well, if she is pregnant she’ll have to have a termination,” and Debbie replying, “I suppose you think that will solve everything.” I turned to Ollie. “I thought those lines had been cut.” “We decided to respect your artistic integrity, Tubby,” Ollie said, with a wolfish grin. When I asked Hal about it in a coffee break, he explained that they had saved some time by cutting a bit of business in a later scene so there had been no need to lose the lines after all. But I wonder if this isn’t part of some plot to soften me up for the more serious matter of Priscilla’s role.
It’s five to seven. Time for me to take my seat in the studio. Wonder what kind of an audience we’ve got.
Monday morning, 22nd Feb. The audience turned out to be bloody awful. For starters we had a Moronic Laugher among them. That’s always bad news: some idiot with a very loud, inane laugh, who goes on baying or cackling or shrieking at something long after everybody else has stopped, or starts up when nobody else is laughing, in the lull between two gags. It distracts the audience – after a while they start laughing at the Moronic Laugher instead of at the show – and it plays havoc with the actors’ timing. Billy Barlow, our warm-up man, spotted the danger right away and tried to subdue the woman (for some reason, it’s invariably a woman) with a few sarcastic asides, but Moronic Laughers are impervious to irony. “Did I say something funny?” he enquired as she cackled suddenly (she was a cackler) in the middle of his perfectly straight explanation of some technical term. “I think it must be in your mind, madam. This is a family show – no innuendos. You know what an innuendo is, don’t you? Italian for suppository.” There was enough laughter to drown the cackler temporarily, though I’ve known Billy get a lot more with that joke on other occasions.
The warm-up man is essential to a successful recording. Not only does he have to get the audience in a receptive mood beforehand, he also has to bridge the gaps between scenes, as the cameras are moved from one part of the set to another, and fill in the pauses while the technicians check the tape after each take; and if a retake or pick-up is required he has to soothe the audience’s impatience and appeal for their co-operation in laughing at the same lines the second time round. Billy is the best in the business, but there are limits to what even he can do. This audience was really sticky. They merely tittered at what should have been big laughs, and were silent when they should have tittered. As line after line fell flat the cast got anxious, and beg
an to make mistakes or dry, requiring frequent re-takes, which made the audience still more unresponsive. Billy began to perspire, pacing up and down in front of the seats with his radio mike, frantically cracking jokes, his capped teeth exposed in a strained smile. I laughed like a drain, though I’d heard them all before, to encourage the people around me. I even forced a laugh at some of my own lines, something I never normally do. I began to think that it couldn’t just be the audience’s fault, there must be something wrong with the script. It had obviously been a bad idea to centre the plot on Alice’s suspected pregnancy. Ollie and Sally had been right. The subject was making the audience uneasy. Then of course, when it came to the lines about termination, in the dramatic pause that followed Priscilla’s question, “Suppose she chooses to have the baby?” the Moronic Laugher broke the silence with all the sensitive understanding of a mynah bird. I covered my face with my hands.