Dead famous

by Ben Elton

  ‘I thought you were supposed to be observers, that the whole thing was an experiment in social interaction?’

  ‘Look, constable,’ Fogarty explained patiently, ‘in order to create a nightly half-hour of broadcasting we have at our disposal the accumulated images of thirty television cameras running for twenty-four hours. That’s seven hundred and twenty hours of footage to make one half-hour of television. We couldn’t avoid making subjective decisions even if we wanted to. The thing that amazes us is that the nation believes what we show them. They actually accept that what they are watching is real.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they think about it much. I mean, why should they?’

  ‘That’s true enough. As long as it’s good telly they don’t care, which is why as far as possible we try to shoot the script.’

  ‘Shoot the script?’

  ‘It’s a term they use in news and features.’

  ‘And it means?’

  ‘Well, say you’re making a short insert for the news, investigating heroin addiction on housing estates. If you simply went out to some urban hellhole with a camera and started nosing around, you could be looking for the story you want till Christmas. So you script your investigation before you leave your office. You say…All right, we need a couple of kids to say they can get smack at school, we need a girl to say she’d whore for a hit, we need a youth worker to say it’s the government’s fault…You write the whole thing. Then you send out a researcher to round up a few show-offs and basically tell them what to say.’

  ‘But how could you do that on House Arrest? I mean, you can’t tell the housemates what to say, can you?’

  ‘No, but you can be pretty sure of the story you want to tell and then look for the shots that support it. It’s the only way to avoid getting into a complete mess. Look at this, for instance…This is Kelly’s first trip to the confession box on the afternoon of day one.’

  DAY ONE. 4.15 p.m.

  It’s brilliant, wicked, outrageous. I feel just totally bigged-up and out there,’ Kelly gushed breathlessly from the main monitor. She had come to the confession box to talk about how thrilling and exciting it all was.

  ‘I mean, today has just been the wickedest day ever because I really, really love all these people and I just know we’re all going to get along just brilliantly. I expect there’ll be tension and I’ll end up hating all of them for, like, just a moment at some point. But you could say that about any mates, couldn’t you? Basically I love these guys. They’re my posse. My crew.’ Deep in the darkness of the editing suite Geraldine glared at Fogarty.

  ‘And that’s what you want her to say, is it?’ Bob cowered behind his styrofoam cup.

  ‘Well, it’s what she did say, Geraldine.’ Geraldine’s eyes flashed, her nostrils flared and she bared her colossal overbite. It was as if the Alien had just burst out of John Hurt’s stomach.

  ‘You stupid cunt! You stupid lazy cunt! I could get a monkey to broadcast what she actually said! I could get a work-experience school-leaver pain-in-the-arse spotty fucking waste-of-space teenager to broadcast what she actually said! What I pay you to do is to look at what she actually said and find what we want her to say, you cunt!’ Fogarty threw a commiserating glance at the younger, more impressionable members of staff.

  ‘Who is Kelly, Bob?’ Geraldine continued, throwing an arm towards the frozen image of the pretty young brunette on the screen.

  ‘Who is that girl?’ Fogarty stared at the television. A sweet smile beamed back at him, an open, honest, naive countenance.

  ‘Well…’

  ‘She’s our bitch, Bob, she’s our manipulator. She’s one of our designated hate figures! Remember the audition interviews? All that pert ambition? All that artless knicker-flashing. All that girl power bollocks. Remember what I said, Bob?’ Fogarty did remember, but Geraldine told him anyway.

  ‘I said, ‘Right, you arrogant little slapper, we’ll see how far you get towards presenting your own pop, style and fashion show once the whole nation has decided you’re a back-biting, knob- teasing fucking dog,’ didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes, Geraldine, but on the evidence of today she’s turned out to be really quite nice. I mean, she’s a bit of an airhead, and vain, certainly, but she’s not really a bitch. I think we’ll find it quite hard to make her look that nasty.’

  ‘She’ll look however we want her to look and be whatever we want her to be,’ Geraldine sneered.

  DAY THIRTY 9.20 a.m.

  Does Geraldine normally talk to you like that?’ Trisha asked.

  ‘She talks to everybody like that.’

  ‘So you get used to it, then?’

  ‘It’s not something you get used to, constable. I have an Msc in computing and media. I am not a stupid cunt.’ Trisha nodded. She had heard of Geraldine Hennessy before her House Arrest fame. Most people had. Geraldine was a celebrity in her own right. A famously bold, provocative and controversial broadcaster, Trisha ventured.

  ‘Rubbish!’ Said Bob Fogarty.

  ‘She’s a TV whore masquerading as an innovator and getting away with it because she knows a few popstars and wears Vivienne Westwood. What she does is steal tacky, dumbed-down tabloid telly ideas, usually from Europe or Japan, smear them with a bit of hip, clubby, druggy style, and flog them to the middle class as post-modern irony.’

  ‘So you don’t like her, then?’

  ‘I loathe her, constable. People like Geraldine Hennessy have ruined television. She’s a cultural vandal. She’s a nasty, stupid, dangerous bitch.’ In the gloom Trisha could see that Fogarty’s cup was shaking in his hand. She was taken aback.

  ‘Calm down, Mr Fogarty,’ she said.

  ‘I am calm.’

  ‘Good.’ Then Fogarty played Kelly’s confession as it had been broadcast.

  ‘I’ll end up hating all of them.’ Seven words were all she said.

  DAY ONE. 4.30 p.m.

  Kelly left the confession box and went back into the living area of the house. Layla gave her a sympathetic little smile and stroked her arm as she walked by. Kelly turned back, smiled and then they had a little hug together.

  ‘Love you,’ said Layla.

  ‘Love you big time,’ Kelly replied.

  ‘You stay strong, OK?’ Said Layla. Kelly assured Layla that she would certainly attempt to stay strong. Kelly was so pleased that Layla was hugging her. Earlier in the day they had had a small tiff over Layla’s insistence on including walnut oil on the first group shopping list. Layla pointed out that since she ate mainly salad, dressings were very important to her and that walnut oil was an essential ingredient.

  ‘Also it lubricates my chakras,’ she’d said. Kelly had suggested to Layla that with their limited food budget, walnut oil was surely rather an expensive luxury item.

  ‘Well, I think that’s an entirely subjective observation, babes,’ Layla replied, relishing her own eloquence, ‘and quite frankly depends on how much you value your chakras.’ David then weighed in, supporting Layla. He pointed out that as far as he was concerned the bacon that Kelly had suggested they order, because she cooked a wicked brekkie, was hardly an essential item…

  ‘Except perhaps to the pig that donated it.’. David observed piously from the unimpregnable fortress of his lotus position.

  ‘Personally I would far rather order walnut oil than corpse.’ All the other boys leapt in and supported Kelly, but David and Layla’s effortless occupation of the moral high ground had made Kelly feel rotten and for a minute she had thought she would cry. Instead she went into the confession box and told Peeping Tom how much she loved everybody. Now she had re-emerged and Layla had rewarded her with a hug. Kelly was wearing only a T-shirt and a tiny pair of shorts and Layla was dressed with similar minimalism in a little silk sarong and matching bikini top. Their tight little tummies touched and their breasts pushed against each other. Across the room the hot-head camera clamped to the ceiling whizzed and whirred and zoomed towards them with unseemly haste.

  DAY THIRTY. 9.
45 a.m.

  You know that even though the weather was warm and sunny Geraldine insisted that the central heating be on at all times, don’t you?’ Fogarty said. Trisha was astonished.

  ‘You made it hot in order to get people to take their clothes off?’

  ‘Of course we did. What do you think? Peeping Tom wanted bodies! Not baggy jumpers! Twenty-four degrees Centigrade is the optimum good telly temperature, warm but not sweaty. Geraldine always says that if she could make it twenty-five degrees in the room and minus five in the vicinity of the girls’ nipples she’d have the perfect temperature.’ Trisha looked at Fogarty thoughtfully. He certainly was going out of his way to make his employer look bad. Why was that? She wondered.

  ‘Anyway,’ the man concluded, ‘Miss High and Mighty, oh so brilliant. Machiavellian genius Geraldine Hennessy got it totally wrong with Kelly, although she has never admitted it. She thought that just because she didn’t like Kelly nobody else would, but the public did like her and apart from Woggle she was the most popular one on the show. We had to change tack and from day two we edited in Kelly’s favour.’

  ‘So sometimes the subject does lead the programme?’

  ‘Well, with a little help from me, I must admit. I gave Kelly plenty of cute angles. I was buggered if I was going to do Geraldine’s dirty work.’

  DAY THIRTY-ONE. 8.30 a.m.

  After reading Trisha’s report of her interview with Fogarty, Coleridge called a meeting of all his officers.

  ‘Currently,’ he said firmly, ‘I am of a mind that we are pursuing the wrong seven suspects and the wrong victim.’ This comment, like so many that Coleridge made, was met with blank stares. He could almost hear the whoosh as it swept over their heads.

  ‘How’s that, then, boss?’ Said Hooper.

  ‘Boss?’

  ‘Inspector.’

  ‘Thank you, sergeant.’

  ‘How’s that, then, inspector?’ Hooper persevered wearily.

  ‘How is it that we’re pursuing the wrong suspects and the wrong victim?’

  ‘Because we are looking at these people in the way that the producers and editors of Peeping Tom Productions want us to look at them, not as they are.’ Coleridge paused for a moment, his attention drawn to an officer at the back of the room who was chewing gum, a female officer. He longed to tell her to find a scrap of paper and dispose of it, but he knew that the days when an inspector could treat his constables in that manner had long gone. He would not be at all surprised if there was a court in Brussels that could be cajoled into maintaining that the freedom to chew gum was a human right. He confined his reaction to a withering stare, which caused the girl’s jaw to stop moving for all of three seconds.

  ‘We must therefore be extremely cautious in our views, for apart from a brief interview with each of the surviving housemates after the murder, we know these people only through the deceiving eye of the television camera, that false friend, so convincing, so plausible, so real and yet, as we have already seen, so fickle and so false. We must therefore begin at the beginning with all of them and presume nothing. Nothing at all.’ And so the grim task of reviewing the House Arrest tape archive continued.

  ‘It’s day three under House Arrest and Layla has gone to the refrigerator to get some cheese.’ This was the voice of Andy, House Arrest’s narrator.

  ‘Layla’s vegan cheese is an important part of her diet, being her principal source of protein.’

  DAY THIRTY. 9.45 a.m.

  You know that even though the weather was warm and sunny Geraldine insisted that the central heating be on at all times, don’t you?’ Fogarty said. Trisha was astonished.

  ‘You made it hot in order to get people to take their clothes off?’

  ‘Of course we did. What do you think? Peeping Tom wanted bodies! Not baggy jumpers! Twenty-four degrees Centigrade is the optimum good telly temperature, warm but not sweaty. Geraldine always says that if she could make it twenty-five degrees in the room and minus five in the vicinity of the girls’ nipples she’d have the perfect temperature.’ Trisha looked at Fogarty thoughtfully. He certainly was going out of his way to make his employer look bad. Why was that? She wondered.

  ‘Anyway,’ the man concluded, ‘Miss High and Mighty, oh so brilliant. Machiavellian genius Geraldine Hennessy got it totally wrong with Kelly, although she has never admitted it. She thought that just because she didn’t like Kelly nobody else would, but the public did like her and apart from Woggle she was the most popular one on the show. We had to change tack and from day two we edited in Kelly’s favour.’

  ‘So sometimes the subject does lead the programme?’

  ‘Well, with a little help from me, I must admit. I gave Kelly plenty of cute angles. I was buggered if I was going to do Geraldine’s dirty work.’

  DAY THIRTY-ONE. 8.30 a.m.

  After reading Trisha’s report of her interview with Fogarty, Coleridge called a meeting of all his officers.

  ‘Currently,’ he said firmly, ‘I am of a mind that we are pursuing the wrong seven suspects and the wrong victim.’ This comment, like so many that Coleridge made, was met with blank stares. He could almost hear the whoosh as it swept over their heads.

  ‘How’s that, then, inspector?’ Hooper persevered wearily.

  ‘How is it that we’re pursuing the wrong suspects and the wrong victim?’

  ‘Because we are looking at these people in the way that the producers and editors of Peeping Tom Productions want us to look at them, not as they are.’’ Coleridge paused for a moment, his attention drawn to an officer at the back of the room who was chewing gum, a female officer. He longed to tell her to find a scrap of paper and dispose of it, but he knew that the days when an inspector could treat his constables in that manner had long gone. He would not be at all surprised if there was a court in Brussels that could be cajoled into maintaining that the freedom to chew gum was a human right. He confined his reaction to a withering stare, which caused the girl’s jaw to stop moving for all of three seconds.

  ‘We must therefore be extremely cautious in our views, for apart from a brief interview with each of the surviving housemates after the murder, we know these people only through the deceiving eye of the television camera, that false friend, so convincing, so plausible, so real and yet, as we have already seen, so fickle and so false. We must therefore begin at the beginning with all of them and presume nothing. Nothing at all.’ And so the grim task of reviewing the House Arrest tape archive continued.

  ‘It’s day three under House Arrest and Layla has gone to the refrigerator to get some cheese.’ This was the voice of Andy, House Arrest’s narrator.

  ‘ ‘Layla’s vegan cheese is an important part of her diet, being her principal source of protein.’

  ‘You see how television pulls the wool over our eyes!’ Coleridge exclaimed in exasperation.

  ‘If we weren’t concentrating, we might actually have formed the impression that something of interest had occurred! This man’s talent for imbuing the most gut- wrenchingly boring observations with an air of significance normally reserved for matters of life and death is awe-inspiring.’

  ‘I think it’s the Scottish accent,’ said Hooper.

  ‘It sounds more sincere.’

  ‘The man could have covered the Cuban Missile Crisis without altering his manner at all…It’s midnight in the Oval Office and President Kennedy has yet to hear from Secretary Khrushchev.’

  ‘Who was Khrushchev?’ Hooper asked.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake! He was General Secretary of the Soviet Union!’

  ‘Never heard of it, sir. Is it affiliated to the TUC?’ Coleridge hoped that Hooper was joking but decided not to ask. Instead he pressed play again.

  ‘Layla has just discovered that some of her cheese has gone missing,’ said Andy.

  ‘He says it as if she’s just discovered penicillin,’ Coleridge moaned.

  DAY THREE. 3.25 p.m.

  Layla slammed the fridge door angrily.

 
‘Hey right, I mean, yeah, I mean, come on, OK? Who’s been eating my cheese?’

  ‘Oh yeah, right. That was me,’ said David.

  ‘Isn’t that cool?’ David always spoke to people in the sort of soft, faintly superior tone of a man who knows the meaning of life but thinks that it’s probably above everybody else’s head. Normally he talked to people from behind because he tended to be massaging their shoulders, but when he addressed them directly he liked to stare right into their eyes, fancying his own eyes to be hypnotic, limpid pools into which people would instinctively wish to dive.

  ‘I mean, I thought it would be cool to have a little of your cheese,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Layla replied.

  ‘Half of it, actually…But that’s totally cool. I mean totally, except you will replace it, right?’

  ‘Sure, yeah, absolutely, whatever,’ said David, as if he was above such matters as worrying about whose cheese was whose.

  ‘Later,’ said Andy the narrator, ‘in the girls’ room, Layla confides in Dervla about how she feels about the incident involving the cheese. Layla and Dervla lay on their beds.’

  ‘It’s not about the cheese,’ Layla whispered.

  ‘It’s so not about the cheese. It’s just, you know, it was my cheese.’

  DAY THIRTY-ONE. 8.40 a.m.

  I’m honestly not sure if I can continue with this investigation,’ said Coleridge.

  DAY THIRTY-ONE. 2.00 p.m.

  Actually it was Layla’s cheese that gave Geraldine her first crisis.’ Trisha had returned to the monitoring bunker to speak once more with Bob Fogarty. She and Coleridge had agreed that Fogarty was the person who knew most about the housemates and also about the workings of Peeping Tom.