by Elton, Ben
‘I texted, e’d and slid hard copy under his door, Calvin,’ Gretel replied, almost snapping to attention and saluting. She knew that Calvin valued nothing more highly than efficiency. He liked his girls to look and talk like hip, self-assertive, independent young troubleshooters but he liked them to do what they were told.
‘What the fuck is a morning room anyway?’ Beryl enquired, massaging her ass. ‘What happens to it in the afternoon? Does it disappear into another fucking dimension?’
‘It’s a room built and windowed in order to favour the morning sun, dear,’ Calvin informed her.
‘There! You see why I hate England!’ Beryl almost spat. ‘They have to build special rooms to make the most of the five minutes of watery piss-poor sunlight that shines on this shithole. In LA we can’t get away from the stuff. We build rooms to avoid the fucking sun.’
There being no reply to this, nobody attempted one and a silence fell. An uncomfortable silence as it was a very crowded room.
‘Where the fuck is Rodney?’ Beryl asked once more. ‘We came from LA, Calvin. He only has to buzz in from London. Stupid twat.’
Rodney Is Not Happy
Rodney was at that moment standing at the hotel reception desk and he was most unhappy.
‘So you’re saying you have two suites?’
‘Yes, sir. The Brunel and the Glenfiddich.’
‘Two suites?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And I’m in neither of them?’
‘No, sir. You have an executive room.’
‘An executive room?’
‘Yes, sir, with a view of the artificial lake.’
‘Oh well, that’s all right then,’ Rodney spluttered, the icy calm which he had been struggling to maintain utterly deserting him in the face of this damning affront to his status. ‘As long as I’ve got a view of the artificial lake.’
Rodney did not need to enquire who was occupying the Brunel and the Glenfiddich suites, he knew the answer as certainly as if he’d made the bookings himself. Beryl Blenheim and Calvin Simms. Of course they would be in the two available suites while he was in an executive room with a view of the lake.
A thought struck him.
‘Do the Brunel and Glenfiddich have views of the artificial lake?’ he asked, clutching at what in his heart of hearts he knew to be the thinnest of straws.
‘Yes, sir, of course.’
‘In which case my view of it can scarcely be considered a bonus, can it?’
‘I don’t understand, sir.’
‘No, I don’t suppose you do. Anyway it doesn’t matter,’ he said with the same weary sadness which Hamlet might have shown when considering the possibility that his uncle had murdered his father and was shagging his mother. ‘Where is the morning room?’
The receptionist explained that the morning room was in the summer house, which was situated in the middle of the golf course.
‘It’s a buggy ride, sir,’ she continued. ‘You can drive yourself, which is great fun, or some of our guests prefer to be driven by a qualified member of our hospitality team.’
‘A buggy?’
‘Yes, a golf buggy. Great fun. Although helmets must be worn.’
‘Do you know who I am?’
‘Yes, sir. You’re Rodney Root.’
‘Do you imagine that Rodney Root attends meetings in golf buggies?’
‘Well, uhm . . . you could walk, sir. It’s about a fifteen-minute stroll. Some of our guests prefer that . . .’
‘You think that I walk to my meetings, is that it?’
‘Well, I . . .’
Rodney banged his hand down on the reception desk in a manner which he imagined appeared commanding and decisive. There had clearly been a major cock-up and it was time he took control.
‘Is there access by road?’
‘By road, sir?’
‘Yes, miss, by road. We are all speaking English, aren’t we? I presume this summer house is regularly maintained and supplied. I don’t imagine all that is done by golf buggy.’
‘No, sir. There is road access but it means rejoining the A34 heading north, coming off at the next exit and doubling back. It takes rather longer than . . .’
But Rodney was already heading for the front door, beyond which he knew that the leather-lined comfort and appropriate status of his chauffeur-driven Mercedes was waiting.
Getting On with It
In the morning room Calvin had decided he would have to start.
Beryl was making his skin crawl and it was only the first day. The woman was an obnoxious bully at the best of times and her enormous success in the previous series (which Calvin himself had so carefully engineered) had gone horribly to her head. He had created a monster, a nightmare ego, and the brutalized buttocks and half-finished clitoris were doing nothing to improve her people skills.
Besides which, the atmosphere was becoming oppressive. The great crowd of production staff who had been bussed in from the unit base at the Newbury Ramada had already been sitting about for nearly three quarters of an hour. The coffee had been consumed, the pastries nibbled and the jolly greetings with which the room had earlier buzzed had long since fallen silent. Calvin was captain of a ship becalmed, and although his was a pretty docile crew every minute that ticked by put another tiny dent in his authority. If there was one thing that Calvin liked to be it was decisive, and there was nothing less decisive than hanging around. Everyone was waiting for him and he was waiting for Rodney. That was simply outrageous.
And he had been in such a sunny mood at breakfast. He had talked on the phone to Emma for nearly twenty minutes and loved every moment of it.
There could be no doubt now that Emma was his girlfriend.
Certainly she had continued to decline his invitations to return to work but they had seen each other or at least spoken every day since the morning coffee summit. He still needed to win her trust so that she would have sex with him but in the meantime, just as she had previously blurred his vision so frustratingly, she was now having the opposite effect. He was focused on his goal. Calvin was going through what was for him the almost entirely novel experience of ‘the early stages of a relationship’. Not since his dim and distant youth had he known such a process of personal discovery and deferred gratification. He had always enjoyed both sex and the company of women, but all his adult life he had experienced them only on his terms. He had associated with women who were interested in what he had to offer them and who were therefore happy to play entirely by his rules. Emma’s refusal to do the same was a new and curiously exhilarating sensation for him, reminding him of the innocence of youth.
It actually made him feel younger.
So far he had only kissed her. How weird was that? Usually he had scarcely even kissed them before they were having sex and now he had only kissed her. He had not even pawed her body, he had hardly seen any of it. He was planning seaside trips just to get her into a bathing costume. Weird. And for the most powerful man in TV, who was accustomed to getting whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it. Very weird. But also fun; strange, exhilarating, utterly unfamiliar fun.
Standing at the head of that crowded meeting room he wanted to talk to her some more. He would have liked to phone her right there and then. But he knew that she was busy in her new job, writing an article about the fledgling café society in East Finchley. And he had an incredibly busy day ahead of him, a day which he could not even begin because he was waiting for Rodney.
‘All right, let’s get started,’ he said decisively. ‘Rodney can catch up later.’
‘I doubt he’s caught up on the last fucking series yet,’ said Beryl.
Calvin turned to Trent. ‘Get on with it.’
Once more Trent took up his favourite position in front of the audiovisual displays.
‘Right. So, as you know, team, tomorrow we kick off in Birmingham. We’ll be seeing six of our proposed finalists, although two of them, Latiffa, our black girl with attitude, and Bloke, the boring o
ld party band, will be cut into the Manchester show, so, for God’s sake, Continuity, can you please be careful with Beryl’s jackets.’
‘We have Beryl in the beige Versace for Manchester day one,’ said the head of costume, referring to one of the enormous files which lay before her. ‘And the silver sheen Lacroix for Birmingham. Is that right, Penny?’
Sitting nearby was Penny, the continuity girl and hardest-working person in the room after Calvin. She too was surrounded by enormous files.
‘Yes, Versace Manchester and Lacroix Birmingham,’ Penny agreed.
‘Well, I hope you’ve done a proper deal this time so I get to keep the frocks,’ Beryl grumbled from the doorway, reaching for her cigarettes and her phone. ‘I’m fucked if I’m showcasing their rags for nothing.’
‘So,’ said Trent with forced good cheer, ‘moving on. We are also recording thirty-seven comic novelties tomorrow.’
‘Thirty-seven!! From one town?’ Beryl moaned. ‘You can’t possibly use thirty-seven!’
‘Yes, darling,’ Calvin chipped in with scarcely disguised impatience. ‘But as I have often explained to you before, you can’t accumulate if you don’t speculate. In order to get a handful of decent comic novelties we have to shoot a shedload and see what works. People clam up, people won’t play ball, more often than that people turn out to be utterly boring and neither comic nor novel. This is why we must spread our net wide or we will be left naked in the edit. We could do it over two days if you wanted but then, darling, you would have to stay here for a whole twenty-four more hours, something that I know you are not anxious to do.’
‘Too fucking right I’m not.’
‘In which case, perhaps we can proceed. Trent?’
‘Right. We start with Juanita. She’s Spanish and has a really funny accent.’
‘Oh, my fucking Christ!’ Beryl snapped. ‘A funny accent, is that what we’re reduced to?’
‘Worked well last year with the amusing Swede,’ Trent said soothingly. ‘And I think this one might work even better. She’s quite pretty and has a nice innocent face with a kind of a blank look about it. So the plan is to get her to sing something very sweet and plaintive like “Feelings” or “Yesterday” and you guys keep cracking up because her accent sounds really funny set against the deep, emotional lyric, but poor Juanita just looks around blankly because she has no idea what you’re all laughing at.’
‘Oh Christ,’ said Beryl.
‘And it just gets sillier and sillier because when one of you manages to stop laughing another one starts up and of course that starts the first one off again, and in the end you all really, really, really pull yourselves together to give the poor girl a chance but she does like one word, and bang! You’re all off again. It will be so, so funny. You guys are just brilliant at this stuff.’
‘I think I just lost the will to live,’ said Beryl.
‘Good. Loving Juanita,’ said Calvin, ignoring Beryl’s negativity. ‘Next.’
‘Katarina,’ Trent replied. ‘Sweet, pretty. Very amusing Ukrainian accent.’
‘Please!’ shouted Beryl. ‘Another girl with an amusing accent!’
Calvin was beginning to lose patience. ‘Yes. We’ve got three, we’ll do them one after another.’
‘Three girls with amusing accents!’
‘Beryl! How long have you been doing this show? We won’t use all fucking three.’
‘Unless we do an amusing accent montage,’ Trent chipped in.
‘Yes,’ Calvin conceded. ‘Unless we do an amusing accent montage. But we’ll probably only use the funniest one . . .’
‘Gotta be Juanita,’ said Trent. ‘She seems to have almost no ability to pronounce consonants at all.’
‘Whatever. The point is, Beryl, that by shooting three girls we have three chances at getting you and Rodney to fake a vaguely convincing hysterical laugh and even though we only use one girl we can use shots of us laughing at all three and edit together the best bits.’
‘Sorry, Calvin,’ Penny, the continuity girl, piped up. ‘I thought we’d decided that we’d definitely go with a funny accent montage. I have Beryl down for three different jackets for the three funny-voice girls.’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ Costume agreed and once more vast binders were opened up containing notes, drawings, catalogues and swatches of fabric. ‘One Beryl cossie for each girl with an amusing accent so we can place them in different towns. Also you and Rodney get green Irish rugby shirts because we have our “virtual” Dublin visit scheduled for St Patrick’s Day.’
‘Shit, you’re right,’ Calvin conceded. ‘Well done, girls.’
The Irish audition day was dubbed a ‘virtual’ because the tightness of schedule meant that the three judges would not actually be visiting Dublin, so their ‘audition day’ there would have to be faked. This would be done by cutting together footage taken when Trent and Emma and the team had done their preselection in the city, coupled with shots of the judges taken in Birmingham but with Irish set-dressing. This of course presented a continuity nightmare for Costume, Hair and Make-up, and on this occasion also Props because the St Patrick’s Day complication meant that the prop man would have to slip a leprechaun gonk on to the table.
‘Either way, Beryl, you have to be there,’ said Calvin. ‘Now can we please get on? Trent. Skip the other girl with the amusing accent, I think we all understand the process.’
‘You got it, chief. Right, so after that we get through as many In and Outs as we can before coffee and then—’
‘Ugh,’ said Beryl. ‘You really don’t pay me enough, Calvin.’
Beryl hated the In and Outs. These were the hundred or so people summoned to each of the celebrity judge audition days, who could sing a bit but were neither bad enough nor good enough to be assigned their own character or story. They were there to fill out the holding area (so it wasn’t just Mingers and finalists) and to make up the montages of people shrieking ‘yes’ as they were put through to the second and third rounds, after which point it became possible to concentrate exclusively on the selected characters and stories.
‘Do you really need me for the In and Outs?’ Beryl pleaded.
‘Of course we do, for God’s sake!’ Calvin snapped. ‘We can’t just have you patronizing the Mingers and flirting with the finalists, can we? I’ll admit it is absolutely amazing the extent to which our audience is prepared to suspend its disbelief but there are limits, Beryl! We can’t just take the piss. Obviously we need to see the three of us interacting with contestants other than our chosen storylines.’
Beryl shrugged moodily. There were not many people in the world whom she would countenance ticking her off, but Calvin was one of them. Really it was just him and the man who sucked out her bottom.
‘Right,’ said Calvin. ‘Please carry on, Trent.’
‘Well, straight after the first break we set up a Beryl feature with Rodney.’
‘Who is not here so we’ll have to explain it all again to him.’
‘We have to explain everything to him three times whether he’s here or not,’ said Beryl.
‘Trent. Get on with it.’
Trent touched his keyboard and there appeared on the screen a buck-toothed teenage girl and a buck-toothed woman in early middle age who was clearly her mother.
‘Vicky Carter and her mum,’ said Trent. ‘Let’s hear from the mum first, shall we?’
Trent pushed the button and on the screen Vicky’s mum began to speak.
‘She’s just mad for it. She really is, I can’t hold her back. Always singing, all the show songs. There was never any question of her not going to stage school. Madam here was going to stage school and that was the end of it. “Mum,” she said, “I am going to stage school,” and that was the end of it! Judy Garland’s her hero, and Céline Dion.’
Trent pressed Pause. ‘And now the daughter.’
‘Mum never pushed me,’ Vicky said, leaping into life on the screen. ‘She just told me to follow my dream and believ
e in my dream and that not everyone is lucky enough to have a dream and that you have to have the courage to dream the dream.’
The room watched in some awe as pale, shapeless, buck-toothed Vicky Carter proceeded to murder ‘Over The Rainbow’, somehow managing to be a semitone flat on every single note except for the last one in each line, when inexplicably she went sharp.
‘Wow!’ Beryl said. ‘She is really quite awesomely pathetic.’
‘Isn’t she?’ said Trent proudly. ‘But really quite awesomely convinced that she can sing.’
‘How do they do that? It’s like their ears are on a different planet to their voices!’
‘And, of course, we will big her up as she goes in,’ said Trent.
‘Yes,’ Chelsie interjected, having been itching for a chance to jump in since the meeting began. ‘I told her mum I thought she was brilliant and that the judges would love her. I said I reckoned she’d make it through to Pop School at least.’
‘Yes, thank you, Chelsie,’ said Trent impatiently. ‘So obviously when you all laugh at her and reject her out of hand she’s going to be devastated, and the plan is that Rodney then goes a bit far. You know, makes some smart alec comment . . .’
‘Trent!’ Calvin snapped. ‘What smart alec comment? This is final planning. We make these decisions now!’
‘Well, we have it scripted, boss, but I thought we’d let him have a go first. You know he’s always talking about his own personal input.’
‘Yes, fine. And once he’s had his go, what’s he actually going to say?’
‘We thought, “That was so awful it took my mind off my haemorrhoids,”’ said Chelsie quickly.
‘Not bad. Not bad. Don’t give it to him until we do his close-ups or he’ll overrehearse it.’
‘I thought this was one of my features,’ Beryl complained.