Chart Throb

by Elton, Ben

  When the show had first begun, three seasons earlier, the camera crew had spent a substantial amount of time with the family, but as things progressed it became easier and easier to plan and storyboard the shows, until a tight professional working pattern had been established that was economical with both time and money.

  ‘I’ve scheduled an hour for Flossie,’ Arnold had said as he and the crew arrived. ‘We have three cameras, so she only needs to shit once and we can use three different angles to establish the three separate craps. We only need to tie you to the first one, Beryl, we’ll take the other two shits on close-up. Then we can use chocolate pudding to clean up.’

  Unfortunately the pig had refused to cooperate. The crew plus Beryl had been following the little pot-bellied creature as she wandered about for two and a half hours and still she would not defecate.

  ‘Look, I don’t have time for this,’ Beryl finally snapped. ‘You’ll have to use some stock footage, then shoot me cleaning up the pudding separately.’

  Arnold was dubious.

  ‘The whole point of you being here in your party gown, Beryl, is to tie you to the turd. If we have to shoot you and the turd separately we really don’t have a story at all. The audience is just too media-savvy these days. Remember when we got burned cutting in shots of Serenity snoring through an all-night family row and forgot to adjust the clocks? “All night” was clearly only five minutes and those shots are still all over the internet, making me look like a dick.’

  ‘Well, I can’t stand here all day waiting for the pig to shit!’

  ‘Stock footage is high-risk strategy, Beryl. I mean every shitting shot we have is out there. They are TV classics. We have them featured on a special bonus DVD. I just don’t think we could get away with using them again.’

  ‘I knew when we started this we should have gone with shitting dogs like the fucking Osbournes did.’

  ‘Please, Beryl, as if. The whole pig thing has so given you the edge. They’re much more rock ’n’ roll and their DNA is really close to humans’, which helps you with the mum thing.’

  ‘I don’t need help with the mum thing. I’m a fantastic mother. I’ve won awards.’

  Beryl Blenheim was extremely sensitive on this issue. No matter how hard she worked to establish herself as an iconic matriarchal figure and truly modern mum, she would for ever be handicapped by the fact that she had, for most of her life, been a man. Her offspring were not hers by blood, but Serenity’s, by a previous marriage. When Beryl had met her (his) wife, Serenity had been married to the owner of a chain of fried chicken franchises in Missouri, which Blaster Blenheim (as was) would patronize when swinging through the Heartlands on his Seventies Rock Revival tours. Blaster’s heart had been won by Serenity’s space-hopper-sized false breasts and ability (when drunk) to fart ‘The Battle Hymn Of The Republic’. Serenity, for her part, had been wooed by Blaster’s English accent and the fact he could get an entire red-hot chilli chicken into his mouth. They had run away together and Serenity had obtained a quickie divorce, having threatened her husband that if he forced her to sue for it she would claim infidelity and name a longhorn bison as co-respondent.

  Blaster and Serenity were married at the Love Me Tender Chapel in Las Vegas and in the years before his sex change Blaster had been a loving, if drunken, stepfather to Serenity’s twin girls, whom they had renamed Priscilla and Lisa Marie. Serenity had naturally been surprised when Blaster, in an effort to revive interest in his flagging career, had announced he adored fanny so much that he wanted one of his own, but being an amiable sort and completely fucked up on drugs and fried food she had gone along with the new arrangement. Priscilla and Lisa Marie had suddenly found themselves with two mothers, a situation which they were forced to deal with very publicly after Beryl (née Blaster), enamoured of her new role as housewife and matriarch and jealous of the success of other self-publicizing rock mothers, had taken the decision to place the entire family on reality TV. There weren’t many children who were forced, as Priscilla and Lisa Marie had been, to go to school knowing that the previous evening all their classmates had watched their stepmother demonstrating with the aid of a sausage and two new potatoes how she had had her dick removed.

  ‘Forget the pig,’ Beryl snarled. ‘Put some pudding down and I’ll discover it. Then stick the pig outside in a hedge and shoot her like she’s trying to hide.’

  ‘Once maybe but three times, Beryl? Three times you clean up the pudding but we never see the pig shit? That is so lame. This is our final programme of the season. If we’re to buy the fact that you’re late for the big dinner because three times you had to clean up pig crap then we have to see the pig shit with you in shot.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t happening, is it, Arnold?’ Beryl shouted, pulling on her Marigolds. ‘And I have a doctor’s appointment. So just lay down some chocolate fucking pudding and I’ll wipe it up.’

  ‘I just think that this is the most horrendous artistic compromise,’ Arnold protested.

  ‘Do it!’ Beryl replied, picking up her bucket and her Spray & Wipe.

  Just then, the pig shat.

  ‘Shit,’ said Arnold.

  ‘Did you get it?’ Beryl asked.

  ‘What do you mean, did I get it? I’m standing here in front of the camera. This is a reality TV show, Beryl, you can’t have the director in shot.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me like that. I sold forty million albums when I was a man!’

  Just as things were beginning to turn nasty the cameraman pointed out that Flossie was still hovering about admiring her steaming shit and that if Arnold gently edged himself out of the shot and Beryl then walked into it they could still tie the star and the pig to the turd.

  ‘That’s right,’ Arnold agreed, hurrying behind camera. ‘If we can get you, the pig and the turd in the same shot, we have our story even if we didn’t see her shit. So take two steps back . . . Is Beryl out of frame?’

  The cameraman announced that she was.

  ‘OK, Beryl,’ Arnold continued. ‘Step back in shouting, “I’m coming, Serenity . . .” then see the pig, see the big mountain of shit, curse the pig and clean up the turd.’

  It worked like a dream. The agency pig even cooperated by suddenly positioning her back end over her turd as if having just dumped it and then, as Beryl entered shot, turning round and sniffing it in what looked like a deeply satisfied manner.

  ‘Coming, Serenity!’ Beryl shouted convincingly as if reacting to some angry off-camera summons. ‘Don’t be so fucking impatient! You want me to look fabulous, don’t you?’

  Then she stopped dead and looked down at the pig in horror.

  ‘Flossie, you flea-bitten little ratbag. I’ll have you sliced up for bacon burgers.’

  And then with genuine abhorrence, for this was after all a real pile of shit, Beryl knelt down and cleaned it up. When she had done so she even had the presence of mind to coo at the pig in her famous sexy mumsy voice.

  ‘I forgive ooo, ickle Flossie-wossie.’

  When the shot was complete there was much joy and celebration.

  ‘We can dub on a beeping car horn later and shoot Serenity calling for you next week,’ said a jubilant Arnold.

  Then a small voice piped up.

  ‘Sorry, but I don’t think we can use it.’

  The voice was that of the continuity girl.

  ‘What do you mean, we can’t use the shot?’ Arnold cried impatiently, for it was the lot of continuity girls always to exasperate their directors by pointing out that supposedly perfect takes were unusable because somebody had changed hats or walked out of the wrong door.

  ‘Beryl had her rubber gloves on as she entered shot,’ the girl replied miserably. ‘I tried to say but you’d already turned over.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Arnold demanded. ‘She’s supposed to be cleaning up shit, isn’t she? You want her to do it with her bare hands?’

  ‘Well, no, but our story is that Beryl is on her way to the car when she discover
s the doo-doo. She’s even shouting at Serenity that she’s coming. Why would she be wearing rubber gloves to the Recoverers’ Ball before she sees that the pig has been to the bathroom on her floor?’

  There was an angry pause as everyone worked the story through in their heads and was forced to conclude that the girl was right.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Beryl.

  ‘Maybe she’ll do it again,’ Arnold said, but Flossie had already retreated. In the end they were forced to make what for Arnold was the heartbreaking compromise of shooting all three of Beryl’s cleaning shots using chocolate pudding – with no pig in shot at all. After that, Beryl rushed off to try to retrieve her cosmetic surgery appointment and one of her Mexican maids cleaned up the chocolate pudding and pig shit properly.

  The Other Bloke

  ‘Any messages, Maureen?’

  Rodney Root was trying to sound casual and relaxed as he strolled into his Berwick Street office. As if it was all the same to him either way; messages, no messages, whatever, he was far too big a fish to worry about whether anybody wanted to communicate with him. Sadly, the truth was the opposite. Rodney was not busy, he was not in demand. He knew it and Maureen knew it, but the fact was never acknowledged. It was the elephant at the dinner table of their professional relationship. Rodney had spent nearly two hours over breakfast at Soho House, delaying his arrival at the office until almost 10.30am, in the hope that by mid-morning something interesting might have come in. He had eaten a full English fry-up, sausage, bacon, black pudding, soda bread and two eggs, putting on countless kilos he could ill afford, and for what? Nothing. Nothing had happened.

  ‘Your dress suit is ready at the dry cleaner’s,’ his faithful secretary told him, attempting to make this innocuous piece of information sound urgent and interesting.

  ‘Right. Good. Very good. That’s good,’ Rodney replied, as if his suit’s condition was all part of a larger game plan and everything was falling into place nicely.

  ‘And Iona rang. She wants you to call her.’

  Rodney’s face darkened. If there was anything worse than no messages, it was a message from Iona. Nothing excites a man less than the object of a passion spent, particularly one to whom many promises were made and a shedload of guilt is attached. Rodney had come seriously to regret his affair with Iona Cameron, which had blossomed so publicly after Iona’s band, Shetland Mist, had been ignominiously ejected from last year’s series of Chart Throb. Rodney had been, briefly, deeply infatuated with the pale young Scottish girl and, like many infatuated men before him, had made something of an arse of himself. Lost in the rosy haze of love he had publicly announced that, despite Beryl’s bullying contempt and Calvin’s studied lack of interest, Shetland Mist would surely be stars and that he, Rodney Root, pop Svengali and the ultimate rock ’n’ roil insider (as Keely habitually referred to him), would make it so. Rodney’s gushing pronouncements on live TV of faith in Shetland Mist’s talent had been accompanied by an equally clear and slightly toe-curling enthusiasm for Iona’s personal charms.

  ‘Iona’s a gorgeous, gorgeous girl,’ he had said with tears in his eyes. ‘And she deserves to be a big, big star. She will be a big, big star. She should have a contract, she will get a contract. The whole band will have a contract and Iona will be a big, big star.’

  ‘And you’re going to make that happen, are you, Rodders?’ Calvin had teased wickedly in the time-honoured manner of judges’ banter.

  ‘I shall make it so,’ Rodney had replied pompously. ‘These kids deserve better than you and Beryl have given them and I intend to see that they get it.’

  Iona had been absolutely thrilled with Rodney’s gushing attention to her and also of course his passionate and highly public commitment to her band. After all Rodney had once been a big recording star, one half of The Root and The Branch, an early-eighties techno pop outfit which had scored a respectable number of hits and had even charted once in the States. Admittedly Rodney had been the less celebrated member of the team. In those days techno duos had often been made up of one nerdy instrumentalist who stood almost motionless behind an assortment of keyboards occasionally depressing a key, and a flamboyantly homosexual vocalist who strutted about in various PVC outfits grabbing all the limelight. Rodney, as the songwriter, had ended up behind the keyboards while The Branch, who was, in fact, a heterosexual lorry driver from Aberystwyth (whom Rodney had recruited via an advert in Time Out), pulled on the pink plastic hotpants.

  Rodney’s virtual anonymity within his own band had been a source of massive irritation to him for nearly twenty-five years but nonetheless he had once been a star of sorts, and he had gone on to write a number of identikit hits for various boy bands before sinking into complete obscurity in the mid-nineties. His career had been given a second lease of life when Calvin asked him to become a judge on Chart Throb. Calvin had hoped to find a genuine pop manager who had actually developed real recording careers, but unfortunately all the real players in the industry had got wise to the dissatisfactions of playing second fiddle to a charismatic bully and Calvin had had to settle for Rodney.

  Rodney and Iona had embarked on a very public affair which in the early weeks went as far as an OK! magazine cover shoot with heavy hints of an engagement to follow. Rodney’s ardour, however, had soon evaporated. What was Iona, after all? A struggling part-time singer who worked in a shop. During the brief explosion of publicity that had surrounded Shetland Mist’s appearance as Chart Throb finalists she had seemed glamorous and fresh, a real star and a fitting consort for an important man such as Rodney. But the life of an instant celebrity is short indeed, and within weeks Rodney found himself attached to a woman who added nothing to his equation but herself, which he was quickly tiring of. Apart from anything else, she was not half so cute without the Chart Throb costume and make-up department’s constant attentions. During the white heat of the Chart Throb finals Rodney had scarcely seen the object of his passion apart from when she was performing with her band or being filmed for the inserts. It was this television creation that he had fallen in love with. Poor Iona looked very different when dressing herself in the bedroom of Rodney’s penthouse flat while he lay in bed staring at her critically over the dome of his middle-aged spread. Suddenly Rodney noticed the tricky legs, the slightly asymmetrical boobs and the droopy bottom. Suddenly the Scottish accent that he had briefly found so musical and charming was saying things he didn’t want to hear.

  ‘My ma and da are coming to London, can we take them to dinner? The band has a gig at the Islay Folk Festival, everybody’s really hoping you can make it.’

  The Islay fucking Folk Festival! Islay was six hundred miles away.

  Love had quickly died and irritation set in, irritation that this rather ordinary girl, with an ordinary life and an ordinary family, had gatecrashed his important and busy existence. Rodney quickly concluded that he did not want her in his life and he most certainly did not want her in his bed. She was suddenly turning him off as violently as she had briefly turned him on. So he dumped her.

  ‘I just think we were both a little mad there for a while,’ he told her. ‘This was never truly meant to be.’

  Iona had taken it with dignity, although she was devastated, having imagined that she loved him.

  ‘Will I still see you?’ she asked. ‘Will you still be helping us out with the band?’

  ‘Of course,’ Rodney assured her. ‘Of course, of course, of course. I believe in you guys . . . although sadly I can’t make Islay.’

  All that had been last year and was now for Rodney a deeply embarrassing memory. He had done nothing for Shetland Mist and probably couldn’t have done much even if he had tried. Contrary to the Chart Throb myth, Rodney was not the ‘hitmaker of pop’ and with the best will in the world success is not something that can simply be invented. Iona still occasionally tried to contact him – after all, he was still technically their manager, a job he had announced for himself during the OK! magazine interview – but Rodney never took her c
alls.

  ‘Nothing else?’ he enquired airily.

  ‘Well,’ Maureen replied, ‘I had an email from the agency dealing with the marketing for Tesco. They are interested in using you in an advertising campaign.’

  Rodney lit up like he’d swallowed a light bulb.

  ‘Tesco? The supermarket?’

  ‘Yes but . . .’

  ‘The biggest supermarket chain in Britain? Thirty per cent of UK retail? Currently masterminding an audacious attack on Wal-Mart’s supremacy in the USA?’

  ‘Well, yes but . . .’

  ‘For God’s sake, woman, why didn’t you say so before? I would love to work with them. I’m exactly what they need, I’m loved, trusted, down to earth, instantly recognizable. Tesco and I would be a terrific combination . . .’

  ‘Rodney, it isn’t just you that they want.’

  Instantly the light inside Rodney dimmed. He should have known, of course. Had it been genuinely good news Maureen would have called him the moment she had got it; instead she had buried the message behind his dress suit and a call from Iona. And why? Because Maureen was well aware that an offer where they did not want just him was worse than no offer at all.

  ‘They want the three of us?’ he said, unable to conceal his disappointment.

  ‘Well, that’s certainly their base-line position . . .’

  ‘Do they want me to approach Beryl and Calvin?’

  ‘They have written to them separately but . . .’

  ‘They’ve received no response and so they’ve decided to try going through me?’

  ‘Sort of . . . Reading between the lines I think that’s the position.’

  Why? Rodney simply could not understand it. He was one of the three judges. He got as much air time as the others, he was in all the promotional clips and press releases. Yet Beryl was advertising everything from toilet cleaner to haute couture, Calvin was too busy but could probably get himself elected Pope if he wanted to, while he, Rodney Root, hitmaker of pop, Svengali of Denmark Street, was offered nothing.