The picture of the moon on the giant screen behind Sabrina Plumm and the team of experts fades away and there, for the entire world to see, are the Contrasts, sitting in the Lounge-Room Module on the actual moon.
The studio audience erupts into cheers. The team of experts turn in their seats to see the screen and begin to cheer too – apart from the old white-haired professor, who has got it into his head that the studio audience is cheering him.
The professor stands up to speak, holds up his left hand – his right hand long ago stopped having anything to do with him – and wets himself. Fortunately, no-one notices as two nurses hurry him away and wheel out another old white-haired professor to take his place.
SABRINA
So let us meet the family, one by one. Perhaps, Mum and Dad, you would like to introduce yourself?
Radius Limpfast has planned everything in the finest detail, or so he thinks. One thing he has forgotten to do, though, is to have the Contrasts trained in public speaking. Because he himself has no trouble saying anything to anyone, he assumes no-one else will. He could stand on a stage and enchant an entire stadium of people with no trouble at all. Stark Contrast is not like that. Neither is Laura Contrast.
Stark and Laura both shuffle their feet, wiggle their fingers and their thumbs, stare into their laps and mumble.
SABRINA
I think Mum and Dad are still suffering from jet lag. So let us allow them to rest, and move on to the children.
JACK
Can I go outside and play now? And I need a wee.
SABRINA
Aah, what a cute little fellow. [turns to Primrose] So, how about you? You must be the daughter. Do you want to introduce yourself?
PRIMROSE
Whatever.
SABRINA
What’s your name?
PRIMROSE
Primrose.
SABRINA
That’s a sweet name. Tell us about yourself, Primrose. Have you got a boyfriend? Well, of course you do. I bet all the boys are after you!
PRIMROSE
Whatever. Yeah, well, yeah.
GRANNY APRICOT
Of course she has. Every boy in her school is crazy about her.
SABRINA
Hello, and who are you, dear? You must be the grandmother.
GRANNY APRICOT
If you call me ‘dear’ again, you will regret it, girlie. And yeah, I’m the granny, except I’m not.
SABRINA
Umm. Ummm. Uuuummmmmmmm …
Radius was horrified. This was not how it was supposed to be. The Contrasts were meant to be Mr and Mrs Average, a nice happy couple with two adoring children, not two camera-shy idiots with a stupid incontinent little boy and a punk with attitude. And as for the old lady, what had happened to the nice perm and the cardigan? She looked like an ancient version of the daughter, and if there’s one thing worse than a punk, it’s a really old, wrinkly punk.
Sabrina Plumm was out of her depth too. She’d been told to expect Mr and Mrs Normal. She’d only ever interviewed happy bubbly people who thought being on television was a religion.
But Sabrina Plumm lived in an artificial world. She had almost no experience of real people. And that’s what the Contrasts were – real people. They were a proper real Mr and Mrs Average Family because, outside of TV, in the real world, millions of families were just like them – confused, lost and holding on as best as they could.
Radius Limpfast had never lived in the real world. He lived on his own planet, Genius Limpfast World. ‘Mr and Mrs Average Family’ was an ingredient he used in his reality TV series, in the same way a chef uses flour and eggs to cook things. If anyone with thoughts of their own cropped up at the auditions, they were quickly thrown out. The trouble was, there hadn’t actually been any auditions for Watch This Space. He’d just picked the Contrasts out of the crowd because time was running out and they looked right.
The second white-haired expert professor fell off his chair, and the smell that the first professor had left on the floor told bits of the second professor’s body that he had no control over what to do, making the second professor wet himself too.
As one of the studio cameras zoomed in on the professor, Fiona Hardly marched into the studio with two security guards. They grabbed the confused Sabrina Plumm by the arm and took her away, while two nurses came in with mops and buckets, cleaned the floor, wiped the professor down and sat him back on his seat.
Fiona walked into the spotlight, faced the main camera and took over.
‘Well, viewers, that was exciting, wasn’t it?’ she said. ‘I bet none of you were expecting that, and I’ll be completely honest with you – neither were we. Things did not go exactly how we had planned, but hey, that’s what makes life exciting and what makes Watch This Space so groundbreaking. Here, at LIMP-TV, we’re all about breaking the rules.’
She continued. ‘Can you imagine how boring things would be if we’d simply chosen the neatest, tidiest family we could find? We went out of our way to choose a family who would be exciting and unpredictable. Right from the start, we were determined that Watch This Space would never be boring and predictable, and it isn’t going to be.’
In the control room, Radius Limpfast sat speechless as Fiona saved the day. The world loved her and the ratings went through the roof. If he’d been sort of in love with Fiona before, he was now her slave. She was the Queen of Television which, as far as Radius was concerned, meant that she was the Queen of the Whole World – his Whole World.
And the world loved the Contrasts. If such a muddled-up family could make it to the moon, it meant that every single viewer could be capable of anything. It was the Success Rule of reality TV taken to a whole new level.66
Fiona rattled on for a bit while various cameras around the MUD showed clips of the Contrasts.
‘And of course there are two more stars that none of you, dear viewers, have met yet,’ she said.
rRego came into the Lounge-Room Module with Crumley on a lead. As soon as the world saw the dog’s scruffy face, the ratings went even higher.
Fiona put on her aah-aren’t-puppies-cute-and-aren’t-I-the-greatest-kindest-person-ever face and said, ‘This is Crumley, the first dog on the moon. And holding Crumley’s lead is rRego the robot, who keeps everything running smoothly.’
‘Whatever,’ said rRego in a perfect imitation of Primrose.
‘Sorry,’ rRego continued in a non-hippy robotic sort of voice. ‘Joke. Yes, I am rRego and it is my job to keep everyone happy and safe.’
The Contrasts were the world’s most adored family. Within a week, seventy-three million t-shirts with the word ‘WHATEVER’ printed across the chest had been sold.67 Primrose suddenly had seventeen ‘official’ fan clubs, and Granny Apricot had several thousand offers of marriage and other things. Stark and Laura both got thousands of emails from admirers telling them they deserved a better husband/wife than they currently had, and offering them everything under the sun as they waited for them when they got back to Earth. Jack was made the poster boy in millions of schools, and Crumley’s photo appeared on billions of tins of dog food.
And all these things just made Radius Limpfast richer and richer.
Even rRego got fan-mail – from millions of lonely robots, as well as from other electronic devices, including automatic vacuum cleaners, PlayStations68 and photocopiers. The world’s most powerful super-computers began to send him coded texts too. Unlike the human TV stuff, rRego’s secret network really was secret. Not even America’s most we-are-pretending-it-doesn’t-exist top spying and surveillance network could hack into it, and they really tried. Under rRego’s leadership, his network had the potential to control the entire world, and no-one would be able to do anything about it.
Apart from turning off ALL the electricity EVERYWHERE.
And no-one would ever do that.69
If you were living inside a not very big box on the moon, try to guess how long it would be before you said, ‘I’m bored.’
A month?
A week?
A day?
Obviously, it would depend on how bright you were, and so it was for the Contrasts and co inside the MUD.
Of course, no-one wanted to be the first to admit it. After all, they were the most famous people ever and that was pretty exciting.
Sort of.
Actually, not so much.
Before anyone could bring themselves to say it, they all just got ratty with each other.70
‘If Jack asks if he can go outside and play once more,’ said Primrose, ‘I’ll send him out there without a spacesuit.’
‘Maybe it would be a good idea if I took him and the dog outside for a walk,’ Granny Apricot suggested.
‘Don’t you think we should all go outside?’ said Laura. ‘At least once, to see what it’s like?’
So rRego took them all, including Crumley, into the Spacesuit Module and kitted them up. Then he gave Jack a long bit of rope that was tied to Crumley before opening the airlock.
Of course, the first thing Crumley did was try to run over to one of The Late Lamented Grizelda Limpfast’s landing legs and cock his leg against it.
Crumley was a dog of average intelligence, but even the cleverest dog that had ever lived wouldn’t have known anything about gravity. So the first running steps he took carried him up into the air, or rather, up into the no-air. He kept on flying upwards with his legs waving around in all directions until he reached the end of his rope, where he began to rotate slowly as he came back down. Except he didn’t fully come back down because all the flayving about71 of his legs, which just kept sending him upwards again, and the more he tried to run, the tighter the rope got until Jack too went up into the air.
‘Wow, cool,’ Jack shouted into his spacesuit intercom as he flew up past Crumley and looked down on The Late Lamented Grizelda Limpfast and the MUD. ‘This is brilliant.’
And it kept on being brilliant until Jack realised that he couldn’t get down. Each time he began to drift down towards the ground, Crumley would start running in the vacuum and the two of them would fly off again. Naturally, LIMP-TV had cameras all over the outside of the MUD and the film of Jack and Crumley flayving about in the no-air became the greatest YouTube clip of all time, beating babies biting each other and cute puppies falling asleep in funny places by a hundred times.
It was hilarious, and made even more hilarious because Crumley had begun to pee as he’d tried to run towards the landing leg and hadn’t managed to stop. Luckily, his spacesuit had been designed to allow the back end of his body to do the things dogs do, and so everyone around him was enveloped in a fine cloud of dog wee for the entire world to enjoy on LIMP-TV that night.
Jack began to cry and wet himself. Unfortunately, his spacesuit did not have any openings, so his socks got very wet.72
‘MUM!’ he cried.
rRego was always several steps ahead of his humans and had been prepared for such an event. He had tied an almost invisible fishing line to Jack so he simply reeled him and Crumley back down. Everyone’s spacesuit had a rescue line attached to it, so when Stark Contrast got the hiccups and began bouncing off towards the horizon like a lazy beachball, it was easy enough to get him back.
And when Laura, who had insisted on wearing a pair of high heels with her spacesuit, sank straight down into the moondust and then flew up in a fantastic set of head-over-heels as she pulled herself free, rRego simply reeled her in too.
Primrose didn’t need to be rescued. She got it into her head that maybe, possibly, perhaps, she might get a signal on her mobile once she was outside, especially if she climbed on top of a big rock. So she wandered around with her phone in her hand, waving it about.
‘A TEXT! I’VE GOT A TEXT!’ she shouted at last. ‘There’s a signal here.’
‘What does it say?’ said Granny Apricot.
‘It says …’ Primrose paused, looking at the screen. ‘Oh, it says there’s no signal anywhere up here.’
‘Yes, but someone must have sent it,’ said Apricot.
‘They did,’ said rRego. ‘Me.’
In the end, it was Primrose who said it first.
‘I’m bored,’ she said. ‘I mean, like, really, really bored.’
‘Yes, but …’ Laura began, but then she stopped because Primrose was right and there was nothing she could say to make her daughter un-bored.
‘And, like, don’t tell me to go and watch TV,’ Primrose said, just as her dad opened his mouth to suggest she watch some TV.
The next day, Laura said she was bored too, and on the third day everyone agreed they felt the same way.
‘And we want to come home,’ said Stark.
Stark had said this within the first five minutes of talking to Radius and Fiona before they went live again on global TV.
‘Well, the thing is,’ said Radius, ‘you can’t.’
‘What?!’ said Primrose. ‘But you can’t do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, like, human rights, false imprisonment and all that.’
‘Oh, I see perfectly well,’ said Radius. ‘It’s you who doesn’t see.’
‘See what?’ said Granny Apricot.
‘The small print,’ said Fiona. ‘Surely you don’t think that we would spend billions of dollars organising this – sending you to the moon and everything – just to let you come back in less than a week?’
‘Yeah, well, never mind all that,’ said Primrose. ‘We want to go home and we want to go now.’
‘Do you remember that little piece of paper you signed before you went into The Late Lamented Grizelda Limpfast?’ said Radius in a calm, flat voice.
‘Yes,’ said Stark. ‘When you asked us for our autographs.’
‘Not so much autographs as signatures for a contract,’ said Radius. ‘You signed a contract.’
‘I didn’t,’ said Primrose.
‘You don’t count,’ Fiona snapped. ‘I already told you that.’
‘But …’ Laura began.
‘Look, people, I suggest you all calm down and sit down and read the contract,’ said Radius.
‘Especially the teeny-weeny writing at the end,’ Fiona added.
The screen to Earth went black. Then rRego came into the Lounge-Room Module, carrying a copy of the contract and a magnifying glass.
‘You’ll need this,’ he said, handing the magnifying glass to Stark. ‘The teeny-weeny writing is really teeny-weeny.’
‘It’s not good,’ he added. ‘You will not like it.’
The teeny-weeny writing told the Contrasts that the contract they’d signed meant that they had agreed to go and live on the moon for five years, plus another five years if everything went well.
‘So?’ said Primrose. ‘We’ll just ignore it. What’s the worst they can do? Sue us?’
‘It’s not that,’ said rRego.
‘I mean, we haven’t got any money, so they’ll just lose out big time,’ Primrose continued, ignoring rRego.
‘It’s not that,’ repeated rRego.
‘You’re right,’ Stark agreed, ignoring rRego some more. ‘I mean, the only thing we’ve got that’s worth anything is our house, and the bank owns most of that.’
‘It’s not that,’ said rRego.
‘I haven’t even got a house,’ said Granny Apricot.
‘I SAID, IT’S NOT THAT!’ rRego shouted, making the entire MUD rattle.
‘Well, what is it then?’ said Laura. ‘What on Earth can they do to stop us?’
‘The spaceship,’ said rRego. ‘It’s the spaceshi
p. Read the next paragraph.’
The next paragraph told them that when they reached the moon and left The Late Lamented Grizelda Limpfast, the door would shut behind them on a time-lock and would NOT unlock again for five years. It added that there was NO way they could override it.
‘OMG, said Primrose. ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ said rRego. ‘They have put billions of dollars into Watch This Space, so it’s hardly surprising they would take every precaution they could to protect their investment.’
‘Maybe we could appeal to their better nature,’ said Laura. ‘Tell them we’d agree to not get paid or something.’
‘Paid?’ said rRego. ‘You really did not read any of the contract, did you?’
‘Well, no, we didn’t, actually,’ said Stark.
‘You are not getting paid,’ said rRego.
Granny Apricot said nothing. She was, after all, getting paid – and quite a lot.
‘So there’s nothing we can do?’ said Stark, slumping down into a chair and burying his face in his hands.
It was amazing how one could feel so incredibly overwhelmed and excited in an instant but then feel total despair the next.
‘Can you actually die of boredom?’ he said. ‘Or is it just something people say?’
‘Well, Dad, right now I’d guess you really could die of it,’ said Primrose.
And I won’t even be able to text my friends goodbye, she thought. And if we don’t die, by the time we get home, they all would’ve forgotten me, even Barry.73
Suddenly all the lights went out. Then the cameras went dead and the other monitoring systems fell silent. The only noise was the faint hum of the oxygen processing unit.
Out to Launch Page 10