Dead famous

by Ben Elton

  ‘Why was there a crisis over the cheese?’ She asked Fogarty.

  ‘Well, because the duty editor resigned and took both his assistants with him. I had to come in myself and cover. Don’t you call that a crisis? I call it a crisis.’

  ‘Why did he resign?’

  ‘Because unlike me he still had some vestige of professional pride,’ Fogarty reflected bitterly, dropping a square of milk chocolate into his cup of watery foam, something Trisha had never seen anyone do before.

  ‘As a highly trained, grownup adult, he simply could not continue to go home to his wife and children each evening and explain that he’d spent his entire working day minutely documenting a quarrel between two complete idiots about a piece of cheese.’

  ‘And so he resigned?’

  ‘Yes. He sent Geraldine an email saying that House Arrest was a disgrace to the British television industry, which, incidentally, it is.’

  ‘And what did Geraldine do?’

  ‘What do you think she did? She leaned out of her window and shouted, ‘Good riddance, you pompous cunt!’ At him as he got into his car.’

  ‘She didn’t mind, then?’

  ‘Well, it was very inconvenient certainly, particularly for me, but we soon got a replacement. People want to come to us. We make ‘cutting-edge television’, you see.’ Fogarty’s voice was bitter with sarcasm.

  ‘We’re at the sharp end of the industry, we’re hip, challenging and innovative. This is, of course, an industry where they thought it was challenging and innovative when the newsreaders started perching on the fronts of their desks instead of sitting behind them…Damn!’ Fogarty fished about in his cup with a teaspoon, searching for the square of chocolate. Trisha concluded that he had been intending only to soften the outside rather than melt it completely. People develop strange habits when they spend their working lives in dark rooms.

  ‘God, I was jealous of that bloke who left,’ Fogarty continued.

  ‘I came into television to edit cup finals and Grand Nationals! Drama and comedy and science and music. What do I end up doing? I sit in the dark and stare at ten deluded fools sitting on couches. All day.’ Trisha was discovering one of the great secrets of House Arrest. The people who worked on it loathed the people they were charged with watching.

  ‘It’s all just so boring! No one is interesting enough to be looked at the way we look at these people, and particularly not the sort of person who would wish to be looked at. It’s catch twenty-two, you see. Anyone who would want to be in that damn stupid house is by definition not an interesting enough person to be there.’ Fogarty stared at his bank of television monitors. A long, sad, hollow silence ensued.

  ‘It’s the hugging I hate most, you know,’ he said finally, ‘and the stroking…And above all the endless wittering on.’

  ‘You should meet my boss,’ said Trisha.

  ‘You two would really hit it off.’ Fogarty fell silent once more before resuming his theme.

  ‘If that lot in the house had any idea of the contempt in which we hold them from our side of the mirrors, the cruel nicknames we give them…’

  ‘Nose-picker’, ‘Sad slap’, ‘the Farter’…If they knew the damning assessments we make as we chop up their comments to suit our needs, the complete lack of respect we have for any of their motives…Well, they’d probably wish they’d all got murdered.

  DAY THIRTY-ONE. 3.00 p.m.

  Coleridge and his team were becoming increasingly frustrated with Woggle. The problem was that he kept getting in the way of the other housemates. The people at Peeping Tom had thought him such good telly that large chunks of what footage remained from the early days of the show concerned his exploits and the other housemates’ ever more frustrated reactions to them.

  ‘If it had been Woggle that was murdered we could have made a circumstantial case against any of them,’ Coleridge complained.

  ‘I’m sick of the sight of him myself and I didn’t have to live with the man.’

  ‘You can’t blame the producers for pushing him,’ Hooper said.

  ‘I mean, for a while there the country was obsessed. ‘Wogglemania’, they called it.’ Coleridge remembered. Even he had been aware of the name popping up on the front pages of the tabloids and on page three or four of the broadsheets. At the time he had not had the faintest idea who they were talking about. He had thought it was probably a footballer or perhaps a celebrity violinist. Hooper ejected the video tape that they had just finished and put it on the small ‘watched’ pile, then took another tape from the colossal ‘have not yet watched’ pile and put it into the VCR.

  ‘You do know that the ‘have not yet watched’ pile is just a satellite of a much bigger one, don’t you, sir? Which we have in the cells.’

  ‘Yes, I did know that, sergeant.’ Hooper pressed play and once more the sombre Scottish brogue of Andy the narrator drifted across the incident room.

  ‘Day four in the house and Layla and Dervla have suggested that a rota be organized in order to more fairly allocate the domestic chores.’ Coleridge sank a little further into his chair. He knew that he couldn’t allow himself another mug of tea for almost fifty minutes. One an hour, fourteen pint mugs a working day, that was his limit.

  DAY FOUR. 2.10 p.m.

  I want to have a house meeting,’ said Layla.

  ‘So would it be cool if everybody just chilled? So we can all just have a natter maybe?’ Across the room Moon’s bald head poked out from the book she was reading, a book entitled You Are Gaia: fourteen Steps to Becoming the Centre of Your Own Universe.

  ‘It’s dead spiritual, this book,’ Moon said.

  ‘It’s about selfgrowth and development and personal empowerment, which at the end of the day I’m really into, if you know what I mean, right?’

  ‘Yeah, Moon, wicked. Look, um, have you seen the state of the toilet?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Well, it’s not very cool, right? And Dervla and I…’

  ‘I’m not fookin’ cleaning it,’ said Moon.

  ‘I’ve been here four days and I ain’t even done a poo yet. I’m totally fookin’ bunged up, me, because I’m not getting my colonic irrigation, and also I reckon the electrical fields from all the cameras are fookin’ about with me yin and me yang.’

  ‘Layla’s not asking you to clean the toilet. Moon,’ said Dervla gently.

  ‘We just think it would be good to organize some of the jobs that have to be done around the house, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Whatever. I’m chilled either way. But at the end of the day I’m just not scrubbing out other people’s shite when I haven’t even done one. I mean, that would be too fookin’ ironic, that would.’

  ‘Well, I don’t mind doing heavy work, like lifting and shifting,’ said Gazzer the Geezer, pausing in the push-ups that he had been doing pretty continuously since arriving in the house, ‘but I ain’t cleaning the bog, on account of the fact that I don’t mind a dirty bog anyway. Gives ya something to aim at when you’re having a slash, don’t it?’ The look of horror on Layla’s delicate face filled the screen for nearly ten seconds.

  ‘Well, never mind the toilet, Garry. What about the washing- up?’ Dervla enquired.

  ‘Or do you not mind eating off mouldy plates either?’ David, beautiful in his big shirt, did not even open his eyes when he spoke.

  ‘Perhaps for the first week or so we should just do our own chores. I’m detoxing at the moment and am only eating boiled rice, which I imagine will be rather easier to clean off plates than whatever bowel-rotting garbage Garry, Jazz and Kelly choose to gorge themselves on.’

  ‘Suits me,’ said Gazzer.

  ‘I always clean my plate with a bit of bread anyway.’

  ‘Yes, Garry,’ said Layla, ‘and I’m not being heavy or anything, but perhaps you should remember that the bread is for everyone. I mean, I hope you think that’s a chilled thing to say? I’m not trying to diss you or anything.’ Gazzer simply smirked and returned to his p
ushups.

  ‘Wouldn’t doing our washing-up individually be a bit silly, David?’ Said Kelly.

  ‘And why would that be, Kelly?’ David opened his eyes and fixed Kelly with a soft, gentle, tolerant smile that was about as soft, gentle and tolerant as a rattlesnake.

  ‘Well, because…Because…’

  ‘Please don’t get me wrong. I feel it’s really important that you feel able to say to me that I’m stupid, but why?’

  ‘I didn’t mean…I mean, I didn’t think…’ Kelly said no more. David closed his eyes once more and returned to the beauty of his inner thoughts. Hamish, the junior doctor, the man who did not wish to be noticed, made one of his rare contributions to the conversation.

  ‘I don’t like house rotas,’ he said.

  ‘I had five years of communal living when I was a student. I know your sort, Layla. Next you’ll be fining me an egg for not replacing the bogroll when I finish it.’

  ‘Oh, so it’s you that does that, is it?’ Said Dervla.

  ‘I was giving an example,’ said Hamish hastily.

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s worse than a bogroll finisher,’Jazz shouted, leaping into the conversation with eager enthusiasm: ‘a draper! The sort of bastard who finishes the roll, all except for a single sheet, which he then proceeds to drape over the empty tube!’ Jazz may have been a trainee chef, but that was just a job, not a vocation. It was not what he wanted to do with his life at all. Jazz wanted to be a comedian. That was why he had come into the house. He saw it as a platform for a career in comedy. He knew that he could make his friends laugh and dreamt of one day making a rich and glamorous living out of this ability. Not a standup, though; what he wanted to be was a wit. A raconteur, a clever bastard. He wanted to be on the panel of a hip game show and trade inspired insults with the other guys. He wanted to be a talking head on super-cool TV theme nights, cracking top putdowns about ex-celebrities. He wanted to host an award ceremony. That was Jazz’s ambition, to be one of that elite band of good old boys who made their living out of just saying brilliant things right off the cuff. He wanted to be hip and funny and wear smart suits and be part of the Zeitgeist and just take the piss out of everything. First, however, Jazz needed to get noticed. He needed people to see what a cracking good bloke and dead funny geezer he was. Since entering the house he had been looking for opportunities to work his ideas for material into the conversation. The mention of empty toilet rolls had been a gift.

  ‘The draper is a toilet Nazi!’ Jazz cried.

  ‘He doesn’t have to replace the roll, no, ‘cos it ain’t finished yet, is it? He’s left just enough for the next bloke’s fingers to go straight through and right up his arse!’ Jazz’s outburst was met with a surprised silence, not least perhaps because he had chosen to deliver most of it directly into one of the remote cameras that hung from the ceiling.

  ‘You don’t even know if they’ll broadcast it. Jazz,’ said Dervla.

  ‘Gotta keep trying, babes,’ Jazz replied.

  ‘Billy Connolly used to gig to seagulls when he was a Glasgow docker.’

  ‘Look! Please!’ Layla protested.

  ‘Can we please just chill! We are trying to organize a rota.’

  ‘Why don’t we just take it easy and see what happens?’ Said Hamish.

  ‘Things will get done, they always do.’

  ‘Yes, Hamish, they will get done by people like me and Layla,’ said Dervla, the soft poetry of her voice becoming just a little less soft and poetic, ‘after which people like you will say, ‘See, look, I told you things would get done,’ but the point will be that you didn’t do them.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Hamish replied, returning to his book.

  ‘Make a rota if you want. I’m in.’

  DAY THIRTY-ONE. 3.10 p.m.

  You see, sir,’ said Hooper, pressing pause once more, ‘Hamish backs off, he doesn’t want to be noticed. Only the noticed get nominated.’ Coleridge was confused.

  ‘Didn’t Hamish go to the confession box and say that his ambition was to have sex before he left the house?’

  ‘That’s him — the doctor.’

  ‘Well, wouldn’t saying something like that get him noticed?’ Hooper sighed.

  ‘That’s different, sir, the confession box is for the public. Hamish needs to be a bit saucy in there so that if he does get nominated for eviction by the housemates, the public won’t want to evict him because he says he’s going to have sex on television.’

  ‘But surely that would be an excellent reason for evicting him,’ Coleridge protested.

  ‘Not to most people, sir.’

  DAY FOUR. 2.20 p.m.

  The shrugs of the rest of the group indicated that Layla and Dervla had won the day, and since the inmates of the house were allowed neither pencil nor paper Jazz, drawing on his training as a chef, suggested that they make the rota grid out of spaghetti.

  ‘Spag sticks to walls,’ he said.

  ‘That’s how you check it’s done. You chuck it at the wall and if it sticks it’s done.’

  ‘Well, that’s fahkin’ stupid. Jazz,’ said Gazzer.

  ‘I mean, then you’d have to scrape your dinner off the wall, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘You don’t throw all of it, you arsehole, just a strand or two.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘Jazz lightly boils some spaghetti,’ said Andy the narrator, ‘and makes a rota grid on the wall.’

  ‘Bitching,’ said Jazz, admiring his handiwork.

  ‘Now each of us can be represented by grains of boiled rice. The starch will make them stick.’

  ‘Wicked!’ Shouted Moon.

  ‘We can each personalize our grains, like them weird fookers in India or wherever who do rice sculptures. I saw it on Discovery, they do all this incredible tiny detail and the really, really philosophical thing about it is, it’s too fookin’ small to see?’

  ‘Well, that’s just fahkin’ stupid, isn’t it?’ Gazzer opined.

  ‘It’s not! It’s a fookin’ philosophical point, ain’t it? Like if a tree falls in a forest but nobody hears it. Did it make a noise or whatever. These blokes don’t do it for you or me. They decorate grains of rice for God.’

  ‘You’ve lost me.’

  ‘That’s because at the end of the day you’re dead thick, you are, Garry. You think you’re not, but you are.’ They all began to discuss how they could individualize their grains of rice, and it was at this point that Woggle spoke up from his corner.

  ‘People, I have yet to speak, and I think that this domestic fascism is totally divisive. The only appropriate and equitable method of hygiene control is to allow work patterns to develop via osmosis.’ They all looked at Woggle.

  ‘Listen, guy, I have to tell you,’ said Jazz.

  ‘The only thing developing via osmosis on you is mould.’ Layla tried to be reasonable.

  ‘Surely, Woggle, you’re not saying that any type of group organization is fascism?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’ There was a pause while the nine people who were trapped in a small house with this creature from the black latrine took in the significance of his answer. They were going to have to live with a man who considered organizing the washing-up tantamount to invading Poland. Woggle took the opportunity of their stunned silence to press his advantage.

  ‘All structures are self-corrupting.’

  ‘What are you talking about, guy?’ Said Jazz.

  ‘Because I have to tell you, man, you are sounding like a right twat.’

  ‘Centrally planned and rigidly imposed labour initiatives rarely produce either efficient results or a relaxed and contented workforce. Look at the Soviet Union, look at the London Underground.’

  ‘Woggle,’ Layla was now sounding slightly shrill, ‘there are ten of us here and all I’m saying is that in order that the house stays nice it would be a good idea to rotate the housework.’

  ‘What you are saying, sweet lady,’ Woggle replied in his irritating nasal tone, ‘is that a person can only be tru
sted to act responsibly if he or she is ordered to do so.’

  ‘I am so going to hate you,’ said Jazz, speaking for the group.

  ‘In the greater scheme of things,’ Woggle said, ‘within the positive and the negative energy of creation, hate is merely the other half of love, for every season has its time. Therefore in terms of the universe as a whole, actually, you love me.’

  ‘I fucking don’t,’ said Jazz.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ said Woggle.

  ‘I fucking don’t!’ said Jazz.

  ‘You do,’ said Woggle. Woggle never gave up.

  DAY FIVE. 9.00 a.m.

  Dervla pushed the bar of soap up under her T-shirt and washed her armpits. She was just beginning to get used to showering in her underwear; it had felt very uncomfortable on the first morning and rather silly, like being on a school trip and insisting on undressing under the covers. The alternative, however, meant exposing her naked body full frontal to the viewing millions, and Dervla had absolutely no intention of doing that. She had watched enough reality TV to know what the producers liked most and took great care as she lathered under her arms. It would be extremely easy to inadvertently pull up her vest and expose her breasts and she knew that behind the two-way mirrors in the shower cubicle wall a live cameraman was watching, waiting for her to do just that. One flash would be all that was required and her tits would be hanging around somewhere on the Internet till the end of time. Having showered, Dervla went to brush her teeth, and it was while doing this that she noticed the letters on the mirror. For a moment she thought that they had been left in the condensation by the previous occupant of the shower room, but when more appeared she realized with a thrill that they were being written from the other side of the mirror. Although Dervla had been incarcerated for only four days, already she had begun to feel as if she and her fellow inmates were the only people left on earth. That their little sealed bubble was all that was left in the world. It was quite a shock to be reminded that it wasn’t. That outside, beyond the mirror, just inches away but in another world, someone was trying to talk to her.