by Elton, Ben
‘Yo-oh!’ everybody said, except the Prince.
‘I won’t do it,’ he muttered. ‘This isn’t bloody communist Russia.’
‘Let me hear you say “OH YEAH!”’
‘OH YEAH!’
All afternoon Gary and Barry had been working the crowd, gathering them into groups to shout the name of the show, moving them about the hall en masse, getting them to wave, jump, twist and jive in front of huge banners bearing the Chart Throb logo. Anything, in fact, to imply that an almost impossibly large number of people were having the time of their lives and loving every minute of their Chart Throb experience, as opposed to five hundred people hanging around in an empty exhibition hall.
On the occasion when they had interrupted the Prince’s efforts to befriend Shaiana, Gary and Barry were attempting to tutor the crowd in the difficult job of physically spelling out the word C-H-A-R-T. The ‘C’ and the ‘T’ were pretty simple and the ‘R’ was doable, but turning the body into an ‘A’ was hard and an ‘H’ pretty much impossible.
‘Do the “H” with your fingers!’ Gary commanded. ‘Like the “W” sign for “whatever”.’
‘And then we all throb, right?’ Barry added.
‘Yeah, that’s it!’ Gary shouted. ‘We all spell out C-H-A-R-T then we all thro-o-o-o-b-b-b! Right!’
At the planning meeting the previous evening there had been some discussion as to how the crowd should be instructed to perform a throb. In the end the team had agreed on a sort of general agitation of the arms and body which everybody knew was not a throb at all but a shake, the problem with a genuine throb being that it was rather a ponderous and uniform thing and simply not good telly.
‘C-H-A-R-T thro-o-o-o-o-b-b-b!’ went the crowd, all shaking and shivering at the appropriate moment.
‘Thanks, you’re brilliant,’ called Barry.
‘Absolutely brilliant,’ Gary agreed. ‘Now let’s do it again!’
They did it four times, after which the crowd stopped throbbing and returned to their places in the queue.
Then the two camera teams covering the crowd scenes made their way over to the smaller, separate group, among whom Shaiana and the Prince were sitting. Emma came too. She carried a clipboard and looked rather harassed. Trent, in the vision control truck out in the car park, had just shouted at her that they were already an hour behind.
‘Can I have the Quasar please?’ Emma called out.
A muscular, confident-looking man jumped up from behind Shaiana.
‘Well hello, ba-a-a-a-aby!’ he said, grabbing his crotch and thrusting it forward. ‘You can ’av the Quasar any time you likes, princess, you nah wha’ Ahm sayin’?’
The Quasar spoke in a hybrid Euro-American accent that sat somewhere between Morocco and South Central LA.
‘We’d like a little chat on camera.’
‘Then the Quasar is ready to rock!’
‘Great,’ said Emma, smiling weakly, ‘that’s what we like to hear.’
Quasar bounded forward. He was dressed in skin-tight black jeans, Cuban-heeled snakeskin boots and a red silk shirt, which was unbuttoned almost down to his navel. Emma, followed by the camera teams, led Quasar towards the queue and placed him in among the crowd.
‘Why’re you picking him out?’ a couple of girls screeched. ‘We haven’t even been auditioned yet.’
‘You’ll get your chance, ladies,’ Emma called with exaggerated cheeriness. But she knew that they almost certainly would not. Most of the real Cling, Bling and Ming prospects had already been identified either from their application forms or by the teams of production staff patrolling the queues. Everyone else would, of course, be given thirty seconds or so in front of a junior researcher to avoid a riot but the chances of somebody showing sufficient weirdness, ugliness, desperation, tartiness, arrogance, emotional or intellectual dysfunction (or even, very occasionally, talent) at this stage to jump back into contention were not great. The National Exhibition Centre was not a cheap hall to rent and Emma and the other members of the hard-pressed production team had only a day in which to process the whole crowd, while at the same time attempting to pick up as many drop-in shots and pieces to camera as possible.
However tough a day Emma might be having, Quasar was loving his and he certainly did not allow the sullen resentment of the other contestants who had been bunched around him to dampen his spirits.
‘Wha’appen, babes?’ he shouted at Emma, flexing his buffed muscles.
‘How are you feeling here today?’ Emma shouted back from behind the camera.
‘I’m feeling wicked!’ said Quasar. ‘Because I am a geezer!’
‘Are you the best, Quasar?’ shouted Emma. ‘Tell us you’re the best there is.’
‘I’m the best there is!’ Quasar replied dutifully.
‘Tell us again,’ shouted Emma, ‘but louder.’
‘I’m the best there is!’ yelled Quasar.
‘Can you do a little move with it? Uhm, grab at your trousers or something?’
‘You betcha, babes!’ shouted Quasar, once more declaring he was the best there was, but this time grabbing at his crotch, spinning round and then dropping to do the splits.
‘Fantastic, Quasar!’ shouted Emma. ‘Tell Calvin that you’re going to rock his ass!’
Quasar needed little encouragement. He stepped towards the camera, pulled his shirt completely open, pointed down the lens and said:
‘Calvin Simms, the Quasar is gonna rock your ass!’
‘That was great, Quasar,’ Emma assured him before ushering him back to his seat. ‘Good luck.’
Emma’s fingers were massaging the packet of Marlboro Lights that was wedged into the top of her cute hipster jeans. It would be a long time yet before she would get a fag break and the work was exhausting. Summoning up all her energies, she reapplied her fixed grin and referred once more to her clipboard.
‘Shaiana?’ she called out.
Nervously Shaiana identified herself.
Emma looked at her, remembering her application form. Emma didn’t always remember the applicants that she put forward for audition, but she remembered Shaiana. I am me, Shaiana had written.
And this was her.
During her university days Emma had been a volunteer trauma counsellor for the Student Union. Her distressing duty had been to lend a sympathetic ear to the victims of assaults, burglaries, harassment and occasionally rapes. Emma had looked into the eyes of many victims in her time and she knew the signs. But in her counselling days Emma had met victims after the trauma. Shaiana looked like a victim already, even though so far nothing had happened. She was a victim waiting to be assaulted.
Emma felt like a mugger but what could she do? Shaiana was television gold. She just wanted it so much. So much that she wrote it twice.
Gulping hard and feeling once more for the comfort of the cigarettes clamped to the spray-tanned flesh at her hip, Emma led Shaiana away.
Really, Truthfully, How Much DO You Want It?
‘Back in the holding area,’ the gorgeous Keely would say the following day when she arrived to film her links, ‘every hopeful has a song to sing, and lawks! We just can’t stop them singing it!’
Shaiana, who had been placed amid another group of hopefuls, sang ‘I Am Woman’ just as Emma had asked her to do. When it was over, the people around her applauded as they had also been instructed to do.
When the carefully staged impromptu performance was over, Emma took her place once more behind the camera to shout her questions.
‘How much does this mean to you, Shaiana?’ she asked.
‘It means everything to me, Emma,’ Shaiana replied.
‘Not “Emma”, Shaiana. Don’t say “Emma”.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’m not here.’
A shadow of confusion fell across Shaiana’s face. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I’m not here. Keely’s here.’
‘Is Keely here?’
A sudden excitemen
t gripped everybody standing nearby. Was Keely here? The real blonde beautiful Keely off the telly? So far the crowd had been bitterly disappointed not to have seen anybody from the show, not even Rodney, and now it seemed that the gorgeous presenter was in the building.
‘Keely’s here!!’ The rumour had crossed the floor of Hall E3 in a moment.
‘No!’ shouted Emma. ‘Keely’s not here.’
‘You said she was,’ an aggrieved voice shouted back.
‘Yes,’ Shaiana agreed, ‘you said it to me.’
‘Look, I’m just saying that I won’t be asking the questions on the actual show. Keely will be asking you the questions.’
‘So she is here?’
‘NO! No, she’s not . . . It’s just that we’ll record her later and . . .’ Once more Trent shouted into her ear-piece that time was slipping away. ‘Look, Shaiana, just say what I tell you to say, OK? Repeat after me, can you do that?’
‘Of course.’
‘Good, let’s go . . . “I want this so much.”’
‘I want this so much.’
‘Louder, “I want this SO much!”’
‘I want this SO much!’
‘Brilliant. Now in your own words. Come on, tell me, really tell me. Bearing in mind just how much store the judges set by passion and commitment, come on, really, truthfully, how much DO you want this?’
And so Shaiana told the world how much she wanted it. How it was all she had ever wanted. How it was what God had made her for and that it meant just everything. Absolutely everything. It was her dream. Shaiana needed little prompting. With a gentle push from Emma, tears welled up in her eyes.
‘Everyone thinks I’m a nobody,’ Shaiana said. ‘I’m going to prove to them all that I’m a somebody.’
‘Yes. Yes, I’m sure you are, Shaiana,’ Emma said, her hand holding tight to the cigarettes at her hip as if fearful that if she once let go of them she might let go altogether and shout: No you’re not, Shaiana, you’re really, really not, with your desperate face and your not bad voice. You’re not a somebody, you’re just any old somebody, we all are. So run, babes! Run, before we break your heart.
More Maths
Quasar took the seat beside the Prince that Shaiana had vacated.
‘Quasar, geeza,’ Quasar said cheerfully.
‘The Prince of Wales,’ His Royal Highness replied.
‘The fresh Prince of Wales. Wicked! You Welsh then?’
‘Well, not really, no . . . you don’t really need to be from Wales to be prince of it. Isn’t that an extraordinary thing? It’s like my mother is Queen of Australia. I always laugh when I think of that, because she’s not a bit like any Australians I’ve ever met. Lovely people, of course. So down to earth. Don’t you think?’
The Quasar smiled a broad smile.
‘Oh, I gets it, yeah, babes,’ he said. ‘You is doing the whole lookee-likee thing. Wicked! West side! Ouch! Is you with an agency, geeza?’
‘Well, no, I don’t suppose I am really. I sort of bumble along on my own.’
‘Geeza, you is insane! There is big bucks in the lookee-likee biz, parties, singing telegrams. I ’as a babe who is a Jennifer Lopez, don’ look a bit lak ’er ’cept for ’er big bum but she makes a shitloada money anyways!’
Clearly the Prince had not the faintest idea what his companion was talking about but decades of experience of one-sided communications through which he had smiled and nodded had taught him to change tack rather than probe too far.
‘One simply has to be so careful,’ he often observed to his wife. ‘You only have to ask someone how nylon is actually made or what Hip Hop actually is and you can be there for days.’
The Prince looked about him for a moment before observing: ‘That was quite a show you put on there for the camera, young man.’
‘Well, you gotta big it up, geeza, innit?’ Quasar responded with a wide grin. ‘I reckon we is in, I mean I reckon we is through, which is well ’ard. You know wot I’m saying?’
‘Uhm, not entirely, no.’
‘They’s filming us, right? Like, you know, on our first day, man.’
‘Yes?’ the Prince enquired. ‘But surely that’s the purpose of the exercise, to cover the selection process – or perhaps I’m getting the wrong end of the stick.’
‘Geeza, check it out. There is ’undreds of us here, right? An’ we is all here for our auditions, right? But they is only filming a few of us in the queue, innit?’
A few metres away they could see Shaiana. She had been placed in front of a small group of applicants and this time she was singing ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’ while the people around her were being encouraged to clap along supportively.
‘Well, I suppose it’s inevitable that they can only film a few of us, Mr Quasar,’ the Prince observed politely. ‘They could not possibly cover everybody, there must be five hundred people here. One presumes they simply get what they can.’
‘You is crazy, geeza! What you talkin’ ’bout?’ Quasar grinned. ‘In’t you seen the show, man?’
‘Uhm, well, actually no . . . I thought I had but that was the X Factor.’
‘Where ’as you bin, geeza! That is so last year, babe! Chart Throb is where it’s at an’ you ain’ sin it?’
‘I know, it’s awful of me, isn’t it? I am a dunce. Apparently it’s being repeated on UK Gold too. I asked my equerry to tape an episode but he can’t work our Sky Plus any better than I can and the memsahib’s no help because she says she’d ban all television tomorrow if it was up to her.’
‘Well, if you ’ad sin it, geeza, you would be hip to the fac’ that all the people who gets put through to Pop School ’as already bin seen in the queue, man! We seen ’em from the start. Like last year, the geeza what won the fucking final, man, he was there on the first show! He was there in the crowd saying ’e was gonna rock Calvin’s ass, right? Even though he was still only in the queue for ’is first audition!’
‘Uhm . . . I’m not sure I follow the point you’re making, Mr Quasar. If there is a point? I mean it doesn’t matter at all if there isn’t . . .’
‘That is the point, geeza! They ain’t filming everybody in the queue, is they? They ain’t even picking out one in fifty. How could they, guy? We’d be here till we was dead! But when Calvin an’ Beryl and that other prick choose the people what is goin’ through to the next round they’s always already been seen in the queue, right? They’s got shots of them right from the fucking car park, guy! On day one! Think about it, geeza. How would they know to film them if they ’adn’t already chosen ’em? We ’as bin picked! We is looking good.’
The Prince of Wales had been privately educated at great expense and had then gone to Cambridge, while Quasar had left school at sixteen without qualifications in order to become an exotic dancer. But it was Quasar who had done the maths.
Graham and Milly in the Car Park
‘The journey to stardom is never easy. But for some it’s much harder than others. Graham and Milly are two young singers with a dream. Nothing special about that, you might say, except for one thing. Graham has been blind since birth.’
That was what Keely would be saying, some months later and a hundred miles down the M6, in a sound recording booth in Soho as she voiced the narrative links for episode three.
Meanwhile the accompanying footage had to be shot and that was down to Emma and her little camera crew. Having ticked off Shaiana on her clipboard she had collected Graham and Millicent from the same area as the Prince, Shaiana and the Quasar and asked them to go back into the car park.
‘Why?’ Graham asked.
‘We’d like to see you arriving.’
‘But we have arrived. We’ve been here for three hours.’
‘I know but we didn’t see it . . . I mean witness it,’ Emma said, suddenly struck by the strange embarrassment of the sighted who find themselves using the word ‘see’ to a blind person.
Graham and Millicent returned dutifully with Emma and her camera team to
the car park of the exhibition centre. The moment she was outside Emma clawed at her cigarette packet, almost tearing the top off in her haste. The whole crew were doing the same; theirs was a high-stress occupation.
‘Right,’ said Emma, trying to speak and inhale at the same time. ‘We’d love to see Millicent leading Graham through the parked cars to join the end of the queue.’
‘What queue?’ Milly enquired.
Emma had been so intent on getting her Marlboro lit that she hadn’t noticed that the car park was now almost empty of people.
‘Where’s the queue?’ she asked a colleague, Chelsie.
‘Inside,’ Chelsie replied. ‘We’ve got them all in.’
‘Well, get them all out again!’ Emma demanded. She was not by nature a bossy or demanding person but Chelsie (who was new) had a rather supercilious manner. It annoyed Emma that she seemed unaffected by the urgency of their task. ‘They can’t turn up to an empty car park, can they? They have to join the queue! Haven’t you watched the programme?’
‘Yes, Emma, I have,’ Chelsie replied. ‘Which is why I tried to get them filmed when they actually arrived and we still had a queue out here for them to join, but you were off somewhere having a fag.’
Chelsie turned on her heel so there was no opportunity for Emma to reply even if she had wished to. Shortly thereafter the junior researcher returned leading thirty or so grumpy-looking contestants. Emma took one look at them and sent for Gary and Barry.
‘You’ll have to get them going again,’ she told the two would-be comedians. ‘This lot look like they’ve come for a lynching.’
Leaving Gary and Barry to remind the crowd that Calvin was watching them, that a true Chart Throb was never off duty and that they should see this as just another chance to shine on camera, Emma took Graham and Millicent to the far side of the car park.
‘All right, Millicent,’ Emma explained. ‘So you’ve just arrived in—’
‘But this isn’t our car,’ Millicent interrupted. ‘We parked in the disabled bay right by the front door.’