by Ben Elton
‘I think we should definitely talk to her,’ Coleridge said.
‘There’s a lot of anger there and we need to know more about it.’
‘Besides which,’ observed Hooper, ‘she knows them all better than we ever will. Perhaps she has a theory.’
‘Everybody’s got a theory,’ Coleridge replied ruefully, ‘except us.’ On the screens the remaining housemates still looked shellshocked.
‘Well, 0 hunters and killers,’ Woggle said through a broken- toothed smile, ‘the people sided with life over death and light over darkness. It appears that the revolution beginneth.’ David got to his feet.
‘You’re right there, Woggle. I’m going to have a word with Peeping Tom.’
DAY FOURTEEN. 10.45 p.m.
I’m fookin’ coming with yez,’ said Moon. David and Moon stormed into the confession box together, where David made it clear that he had drawn the same conclusion that Layla had done earlier in the evening.
‘You’ve betrayed us. Peeping Tom,’ he said.
‘You know we did our best with Woggle. But we saw the banners out there and the people all shouting for him. They think we’re shits.’
‘It’s not a question of betrayal,’ Peeping Tom replied. Peeping Tom being Geraldine, of course, who was frantically scribbling down her replies and handing them to her ‘voice’, a quiet, gentle, soothing lady named Sam, who normally did voiceovers for washing-up liquid commercials.
‘The public have simply seen something in Woggle that they find attractive,’the soothing voice continued.
‘They find him attractive because that’s how you must have made him look!’ David snarled.
‘I’m a professional, I’m in the business, I know your tricks. Well, let me tell you I’ve had enough! I didn’t come in here to be manipulated and made a fool of. I want out. You can get me a taxi because I’m leaving,’ he said. The fookin’ too!’ Added Moon.
‘And I reckon the rest’ll go too, and then all you’ll be left with is the plague pit with Woggle in it. It’s fookin’ obvious you’re taking the piss.’
DAY THIRTY-FOUR. 10.25 p.m.
Hooper pressed pause.
‘This is very interesting, sir. None of this stuff was ever broadcast. I had absolutely no idea that the inmates were so sussed out to what was going down.’
‘Sussed out to what was going down?’
‘It means…’
‘I know what it means, sergeant. I’m not an imbecile. I was just wondering if you’d given any thought at all to how ugly it sounds?’
‘No, sir, actually I hadn’t. Would you like me to hand in my warrant card for using inelegant sentences in the course of an investigation?’
DAY FOURTEEN. 10.46 p.m.
Walking out would be very foolish. You would be sacrificing the chance of winning the half-million-pound prize,’ Peeping Tom said, and Sam put every ounce of her ability to soothe into each syllable.
‘I don’t care,’ David said.
‘Like I said, I know this business. We’re just a bunch of stooges to Woggle’s funny man. I came in here to get the chance to show the world who I am, but you’ve turned it into a freak show, an endurance test, and I don’t want to play any more.’ The fookin’ neither,’ said Moon. There was another pause while Peeping Tom considered a reply.
‘Give us two days,’ the soothing voice said finally.
‘He’ll be out.’
‘Two days?’ David replied.
‘Don’t lie to me. There isn’t another eviction for a week.’
‘Give us two days,’ Peeping Tom repeated.
DAY THIRTY-FOUR. 10.30 p.m.
That’s amazing,’ said Trisha.
‘Geraldine Hennessy must have known about Woggle all along. It’s obvious she had it ready up her sleeve.’
‘The sly bitch!’ Hooper agreed.
‘She said she got sent those clippings anonymously.’
‘Kindly explain what you’re talking about and please don’t refer to our witnesses as bitches.’
‘None of what we’ve just seen was broadcast, sir. We’ve only seen it because we impounded the tapes.’
‘I’m amazed it wasn’t wiped,’ Hooper added.
‘That’ll be Fogarty. He hates Geraldine Hennessy.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Coleridge demanded once more.
‘You must be the only person in the country who doesn’t know, sir. Woggle was wanted by the police. But it only emerged on day fifteen. It’s obvious now that Geraldine Hennessy knew all along; that’s why she was able to promise to get him out.’
DAY FIFTEEN. 9.00 p.m.
I simply cannot believe that they have just made the whole thing up about Woggle,’ Layla told the assembled press on the morning after her departure. She had spent all of the preceding night looking at tapes of the show and press cuttings collected for her by her family. It had been a grim business. She discovered that what coverage there had been of her had made her look like a snooty, self-obsessed airhead. Much of that impression had been given in the first handful of shows, for increasingly during the second week Woggle appeared to be the only issue of any real interest in the house.
‘It was so not all about Woggle,’ Layla protested.
‘There were nine other people in that house — interesting, strong, spiritual, beautiful people. It has fallen to me to speak up for all of us. We have spent our time under House Arrest interacting, talking, loving, hugging, being irritated and inspired by each other. Woggle, on the other hand, spent his time in the house being a dirty and unreasonable slob and spreading disease, and it is so not all about him.’ But as far as the public were concerned it was, and that morning even more so, because that was the morning that Geraldine put her Woggle policy into drastic reverse. The sensational news became public about halfway through Layla’s press conference, and as it swept through the room Layla saw the interest in her and anything she might have to say diminish very rapidly to zero. Geraldine had had to act, and act quickly. Woggle had been a colossal success, but he was now in danger of being an even more colossal failure. If the other inmates walked out now, as they were perfectly entitled to do. Peeping Tom would be left in default of seven more weeks of nightly television that it was contracted to deliver to the network. Peeping Tom would be bankrupted. Which was why Geraldine sent the old press clippings of the photo of Woggle kicking the girl to the police. The incident had happened four years previously, and Woggle had looked quite different. He had been a little chunkier and had a pink Mohican haircut, but if you looked closely at the large nose and the bushy eyebrows and the spider’s web tattooed on the man in the picture’s neck, there was no doubting that it was Woggle. Actually Geraldine had been surprised that the papers had not dug it up themselves, but since Woggle had never been caught or identified it would have taken a good memory for faces to recall four years previously, when the photo had been splashed across all the front pages with the headline ‘who are the ANIMALS?’ It had been a hunt-saboteur operation that got out of hand. Woggle and a number of fellow Saabs had invaded a kennels in Lincolnshire with the intention of freeing the dogs. The master of hounds and a number of stable hands had confronted them and an ugly row had developed. The Saabs struck first, trying to force their way past the master, and when he refused to yield they had knocked him to the ground with an iron bar. A general fight then broke out, and Woggle had waded in with his boots and a bicycle chain. This was a side of Woggle of which the people in the house and indeed his fans the viewing population had no idea. There was much about Woggle of which the housemates disapproved (everything, in fact) but it would never have occurred to them that a propensity for violence was one of his faults. But, on occasion, it was. Although as Woggle and his old animal-liberationist colleagues sometimes pointed out, ‘We’re only ever violent to humans.’ Like most zealots, Woggle had his dark, intolerant side, and while he valued the wellbeing of dumb creatures and even insects most highly, he was singularly unconcerned about his fello
w man. Therefore when he had found himself confronted by a stable hand wielding a rake, he waded in and whacked her. The fact that she was only fifteen and weighed less than he did did not concern him. Chivalry was not an issue when it came to defending foxes. As far as Woggle was concerned, if you were a fox-murderer, or an associate of fox-murderers, you had sacrificed your right to any consideration. It did not matter if you were small and blonde and cute, you were fair game and deserved what you got. And this girl was small, blonde and cute, which was why, when the newspapers were choosing between the horrific images of violence taken by the master’s wife from the upstairs window of her farmhouse, there had been no contest. It was an image that briefly shocked a nation: the jolly blonde ponytailed cutie in gumboots and a Barbour jacket spread out on the ancient cobbles of the stable yard with blood in her hair, while the ugly, crusty, pierced, punk thug lashed out at her with his great steel-capped boots. It had been a public relations disaster for the Saabs, compounded by the fact that the fifteen-year-old in question was a dog-mad, fox-loving member of the RSPCA who regularly petitioned the local hunt to switch to the drag method. Woggle had brought the press clipping to show Geraldine on the last night before he and the others were scheduled to go into the house. He had been delighted to have been chosen and had not told Peeping Tom about his past until this point, in case it counted against him. He was very much looking forward to going under House Arrest, not least because it guaranteed him full board and a dry roof, which was quite a tempting prospect after months spent in a tunnel. Now, however, he was worried that the subsequent notoriety might cause him to be identified as the man in the picture and possibly get him arrested.
‘So why are you showing me all this now, Woggle?’ Geraldine had asked.
‘I don’t know. I thought maybe if you knew about it then if anybody says anything you could say that you’d checked it out and it wasn’t me but some other bloke with a spider tattoo.’ Woggle, like all the other house inmates, had been so taken in by Peeping Tom’s protestations about the contestants’ welfare being their first concern that he actually thought that Geraldine would be prepared to lie to the press and the police on his behalf. In fact her only concern on being confronted with Woggle’s confession had been whether she could possibly get away with letting a person who was wanted for assault into a highly pressurized and confined social environment. In the end she had decided to risk it. It had only been a scuffle at an animal-rights protest, and Woggle looked like such a peaceful old hippie. Besides which, there were only hours left before the game started, and Woggle was potentially such very good telly that she simply could not face the idea of giving him up.
‘We can always deny any knowledge of it if the cunt goes mad and bops someone for eating a ham sandwich,’ Geraldine said to Bob Fogarty.
‘I mean, the cops and the press never caught him at the time, so why should we have recognized him now?’ So Geraldine had hidden the old clippings in a drawer and thought no more about them. Until day fifteen, when she found Peeping Tom in a situation where, having made a hero out of Woggle, she needed, as she said at the emergency planning meeting held in the small hours of the morning, ‘to get the cunt out sharpish’. It did not take long for the photograph of Woggle kicking the teenage girl to find its way back to Peeping Tom Productions. Geraldine had sent it to the police at 9.15 a.m. with an accompanying letter explaining that she had received it at the office that morning from an anonymous source. By 9.30 one of the press ringers at Scotland Yard had alerted the papers and by 9.45 they and the police had been beating a path to Peeping Tom’s door. Inside the house, knowing nothing of these developments, the mood was very sombre. Woggle had spent the night under his blanket in his usual corner. The others had been drinking out in the garden until the chill had forced them in at around four. They all felt very sorry for themselves, Woggle because he had been assaulted and defiled, the others because their lovely exciting adventure was being ruined by Woggle. When it came, relief for the eight and disaster for the one struck like a thunderclap.
DAY FIFTEEN. 10.00 a.m.
This is Chloe,’ the tannoy announced.
‘Woggle, would you please gather up your things. You are to leave the house in ten minutes.’ Garry, Kerry and Jazz cheered, the others, ever mindful of the game that they were playing, masked their inner delight beneath thoughtful, sensitive faces. Woggle popped his head out from under his blanket.
‘You can’t chuck me out, I haven’t been voted,’ he said.
‘I know my rights and I’m not fucking going.’
‘Woggle, this is Chloe. We are not chucking you out. The police wish to interview you. Get your things.’ There was stunned silence.
‘Fucking hell, Woggle, what you done?’ Garry asked.
‘Nothing, bollocks, I’m not going. They’ll have to come and get me.’ And so they did, and that evening, in one of the television coups of the year, the nation watched as three uniformed police officers entered the Peeping Tom house and arrested Woggle for assault. Most of the other inmates were too stunned to react, but in what was without doubt a brilliant effort at audience manipulation Dervla suddenly cast herself in the roll of feisty, quick-thinking friend of the oppressed. She leapt up from the couch and gave Woggle the name of her solicitor.
‘Insist on being allowed to look up the number in the book,’ she said, allowing her Irish accent to ring out more strongly than usual, perhaps thinking it a fitting brogue in which to conduct a civil liberties protest.
‘If you call directory inquiries they’ll say you’ve used up your phone call. I know their tricks.’ David was not going to be upstaged. He stepped boldly in between the policemen and Woggle, who was still sitting on the floor.
‘Be aware, officers, that I have committed all of your faces and your numbers to memory. I am an actor and am trained in the art of mental retention. If anything happens to Mr Woggle you shall answer to me.’ It sounded great, and it would have sounded even better if the leading copper had not brought David down to earth by pointing out that since the arrest was being recorded by six separate video cameras he did not think that there would ever be a problem identifying the arresting officers. Then the policeman turned to Woggle.
‘Get up, please, sir.’
‘No. I ain’t moving. I am the Peeping Tom One. Free the Peeping Tom One!’
‘You can’t arrest him for having fleas,’ said Dervla.
‘Why not?’ Garry interjected.
‘Should have done it weeks ago.’ Kelly stepped forward and put some apples and biscuits in Woggle’s lap.
‘In case they don’t feed you.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Kelly,’ David sneered.
‘Like you give a toss.’
‘He’s a human being,’ Kelly protested.
‘That’s debatable,’ said Jazz, who was over at the kitchen area putting the kettle on and trying to look cool and unconcerned.
‘I’m young, gifted and black,’ his hip, easy stance was saying.
‘Coppers come through my door every day.’ In fact Jazz had never been arrested in his life, but the pose looked great and his standing with the public rocketed.
‘We are bearing witness to this arrest,’ Dervla said firmly.
‘Yes, we are,’ Moon added, rather weakly. Hamish clearly decided that he couldn’t compete and, following his plan that only the noticed get nominated, he got up and went into the boys’ bedroom for a liedown.
‘Sir,’ the lead policeman said, ‘we do not know your name beyond the fact that you are known as Woggle. However, we have strong photographic evidence to suggest that you are the person wanted by Lincolnshire Police in connection with the serious assault of one Lucy Brannigan, a girl of fifteen at the time of the attack.’ The other inmates stopped in their tracks, stunned.
‘What? Sexual assault?’ Garry asked.
‘Come along, sir,’ said the policeman.
‘I can’t believe it, Woggle,’ said Jazz.
‘I knew you we
re a dirty disgusting little toe-rag, but I never thought you were a nonce.’ Everybody drew back from the little figure squatting in the corner. Dervla disengaged herself and disappeared into the girls’ bedroom. Woggle wasn’t having this.
‘She was a fox-murderer!’ He shouted.
‘An animal-torturer! It was a fair fight and I kicked her in the head. She bloody deserved it, the fascist! If you live by the sword you die by the sword.’ And as if to prove this point the policemen picked Woggle up and carried him away. As they took him, struggling, through the door the blanket fell away to reveal Woggle’s skinny body, still naked and covered in white flea powder. He looked pathetic. It was the final indignity.
DAY THIRTY-FOUR. 11.50 p.m.
On the drive home Coleridge attempted to banish Woggle from his mind by listening to Radio 4. The thing about Radio 4 for Coleridge was that no matter what they were talking about he always got caught up in it. He had often found himself sitting in his car outside his house waiting to hear the end of some discussion about crop rotation in West Africa, or some other subject he had never heard of and would never think of again. Even the shipping forecasts made good listening, conjuring up as they did strange emotions and race memories of dark rocky coastlines, furious typhoons and the long lonely watches of the night. The subject being discussed that night as Coleridge drove home was an economic slump in rural Ireland. The shift of money and young people to the cities, coupled with cuts in European agricultural grants, had left some villages in desperate financial straits. Negative loans and mortgages were forcing many households to the edge of despair. Coleridge’s ears pricked up at the mention of one of the villages worst affected, Ballymagoon. Where had he heard that name recently? He wondered. It wasn’t until he was opening his second can of beer (and thinking about having a bit of ham with it) that Coleridge remembered. He had read the name on a suspect profile. Ballymagoon was the village in which Dervla was born.