by Elton, Ben
‘This is where I have to be careful,’ Calvin said. ‘The single and only point in the whole series where I’m vulnerable to losing control of the process is in the final episode, the episode where only three candidates remain.’
‘Well, yes,’ Chelsie agreed, ‘but does it matter by then? At that point we’ve either done our job properly and had a hit series with a must-see final which is the television event of the week or we haven’t. Either the nation’s tuning in riveted or we’ve fucked up. Why would you care who actually wins? You’ve always told us that record sales are becoming irrelevant these days. All you’re really producing is next year’s Christian Appleyard.’
‘Yes, that’s true,’ Calvin conceded. ‘Normally I don’t mind who wins the final and I’m happy to leave it as a clean fight with the three remaining contestants playing to their strengths. But this year I have a designated winner.’
‘HRH?’ Chelsie enquired.
‘Yes,’ said Calvin, smiling. ‘I suppose it’s obvious.’
Although Calvin was of course not going to reveal the nature of the deal he had struck with Dakota or the promise he had made to Emma, he was perfectly relaxed about Chelsie knowing something of his agenda. She was after all bound by the same gagging contract that every employee signed alongside the contestants and as to his motives, well, for the heir to the throne to win a TV talent show was still something of a coup, even in an age where people had become entirely familiar with celebrity in every possible compromise and contortion.
‘Who knows?’ Calvin said. ‘I might get a peerage.’
‘I’m afraid he doesn’t get to give them out any more,’ Chelsie pointed out. ‘The government sells them.’
‘Well anyway, I still fancy him to win,’ said Calvin. ‘Thanks, Trent.’
Trent had just entered with a pile of boxes from Pizza Express.
‘So what’s your plan, Calvin?’ Chelsie enquired, not bothering to bring Trent up to speed on the conversation. ‘If it’s a free vote without the judges getting the final call how can you ensure your man comes through?’
‘Yeah? Right,’ said Trent, attempting to look as if he knew what they were talking about.
‘Well, to ensure a particular candidate wins at the final stage,’ Calvin explained, ‘we have to make the two other candidates who reach the final with him less popular than he is. Therefore our job is to ensure that the most popular candidates are dropped before it gets to that point. If you want someone special to win in the final then you have to do your manipulating before it.’
‘Damn! They forgot the dough balls,’ said Trent, who had been distributing pizzas and salads. ‘Do you want me to run back?’
Calvin ignored the interruption, leaving Trent hovering helplessly at the door.
‘We know from reading the percentages of the telephone votes who are the big threats to HRH. There’s Troy, The Four-Z and Graham. Troy’s a good singer and he’s young, which of course is attractive . . .’
‘And illiterate, which also plays very well,’ Chelsie added.
‘Yes,’ Calvin conceded. ‘I put the whole reading thing in to big up the Prince but it’s a double-edged sword because it works well for the lad too.’
‘The Four-Z are going over pretty big too, aren’t they?’ Chelsie mused, studying the voting chart.
‘Yes, well, they’re actually very good, particularly the lead singer,’ Calvin admitted.
‘And of course Graham’s got the blind thing going for him,’ said Chelsie, ‘plus even if he can’t sing he’s a brilliant guitar player. It looks like the two we need to go through to the final with HRH are Iona and the Quasar.’
‘That’s exactly how I read it,’ Calvin said approvingly.
‘Me too,’ Trent added from the door.
‘So who do we dump first?’ Chelsie enquired.
‘Who do you think?’ Calvin asked.
‘Well, boss—’ said Trent eagerly but Calvin was having none of it.
‘Trent,’ he said firmly, ‘I’m asking Chelsie.’
‘From the chart it looks as though The Four-Z have the edge. They’re definitely the most popular act and getting more so each week, so they’re the most dangerous to HRH. Clearly we should tackle them first. That way, if we can’t bring them down in a week, we still have some time to spare.’
‘Chelsie,’ Calvin said gently, ‘we can always bring them down if we want to.’
The Four-Z were indeed hugely popular but their popularity was based principally on their leader, Michael Harley, who had obvious musical talent and huge personal charm. What Lionel Richie was to The Commodores, Michael Harley was to The Four-Z.
‘All we need to do is rebalance the band,’ said Calvin.
Calvin therefore sent Trent to inform the group that Michael’s prominence was becoming a problem with the public.
‘It looks egotistical, like you’re hogging it, mate.’
Michael was devastated. He was very much a team player so he was horrified that anyone might suggest he was being selfish.
‘What should we do?’ he asked.
‘You stand at the back and let the other three have a go. Particularly Jo-Jo,’ Trent said, naming the least popular of the other boys. ‘Rodney loves him. He’s convinced that the public want to see more of him.’
The members of The Four-Z were surprised to hear this, not least Jo-Jo himself, who had always considered he was a bit of a lucky passenger. On the other hand if Rodney, their ‘nurturing’ judge, was saying that Jo-Jo should come forward then that was enough for them. Rodney was a music expert, the boy band Svengali, popmaster extraordinaire, as Keely never tired of saying in her introductions.
‘OK,’ said Michael, ‘whatever it takes. What song do you think we should sing?’
‘“Cop Killa” by Public Enemy,’ Trent replied.
The group were again a little taken aback at the choice that had been made for them. They were all good church-going boys and their musical tastes were very middle of the road. Soul was about as funky as they got and they had certainly never considered covering any Hip Hop or Gangsta rap. Trent, however, assured them that Rodney was convinced it was time for The Four-Z to branch out, to get more contemporary.
‘He thinks you need to get more black,’ Trent explained.
‘But we’ve always sort of tried to be for everyone,’ Michael said. ‘We don’t believe in defining people by racial group.’
‘Ah, you see, there you go,’ said Trent. ‘Big mistake. Chucking away votes. There’s a vast audience out there that is totally unrepresented.’
‘You mean Hip Hop and Gangsta rap fans?’
‘Exactly.’
‘But aren’t they unrepresented because they don’t watch the programme?’
‘That’s the point, isn’t it? If you can draw them in then you unlock a huge constituency.’
The band were understandably dubious but had no choice other than to perform the song assigned to them. Having been greeted with the hugest cheer of the night, they proceeded to shock and alienate everybody by doing a Gangsta rap led by Jo-Jo, with Michael standing at the back scarcely participating. It did not go well. There were even one or two boos.
There followed the customary manufactured post-show ‘quarrel’ between the judges, in which Rodney was roundly condemned for having let down his act so entirely.
‘I cannot believe you let them sing that song, Rodney!’ Calvin sneered. ‘It was appalling, and you should get your head tested.’
‘The boys wanted to be more contemporary,’ Rodney replied, dutifully sticking to his brief.
‘You mean the boys were happy with that song?’
‘Yes, of course.’
The astonishment on the band’s faces at this point was not covered by the cameras.
‘I believe in allowing my acts to grow, Calvin, to make mistakes,’ Rodney continued.
‘Well, they certainly made one tonight.’
Calvin had also ensured that the other acts did their v
ery best that week. Knowing that The Four-Z were the biggest threat, he was leaving nothing to chance.
The Quasar, whose chirpy optimism and unashamed self-belief had originally been deeply irritating, was starting to become mildly attractive. Wearing only tight shorts and cowboy boots, he did a version of Right Said Fred’s ‘I’m Too Sexy’ which the judges pronounced ‘wildly entertaining’.
‘Quasar,’ Rodney gushed, ‘that was sheer brilliance. You owned the song, you owned the stage, the audience loved you, you deserve to be a big, big, big star and I know that you will be.’
‘Quasar,’ said Beryl, but so dripping was her voice with gruesomely flirtatious, croaky, mumsy, kitten-like sexiness even in that one word that Calvin moved the process instantly on, fearing that she was about to refer to her soon-to-be-completed female sexual organs and the welcome mat that would always be laid out for the Quasar.
Iona, who had been gaining ground each week because Rodney (on Calvin’s insistence) continued to insult her, sang ‘Amazing Grace’. She did this accompanied only by flute and acoustic guitar. This was an old Chart Throb trick to impress the punters, and it did.
‘That was an incredibly brave decision, Iona,’ Beryl cooed. ‘You stripped it all back, you let your voice do the talking and you owned that song. You sung like only a Scotswoman can sing and I can say that because I love the Scots and I’m a woman.’
Troy sang ‘Angels’, a song which rarely failed for anyone. Despite the fact that Troy knew the song backwards, having sung it a thousand times, Calvin suggested that he might like to take a lyric sheet on with him. Calvin had the director inform Troy that all the camera angles had been changed (due to safety regulations) and that Troy should refer to his lyric sheet at the end of each line in order to find the number of the camera he should sing the next line to. The result was that Troy spent the whole song staring at the sheet, desperately trying to work out which camera he was supposed to look at.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Calvin explained solemnly afterwards, ‘Troy wanted to do that song but he did not know the words. He therefore decided with incredible bravery that he would attempt to read them despite the fact that he cannot actually read. Troy, I salute you, for that alone you should win this contest.’
Next Graham did ‘I Can See Clearly Now’, which made Beryl cry.
‘For a boy who is blind, unsighted and cannot see to sing a song that is actually about being able to see showed so much incredible bravery and courage it wasn’t funny,’ she croaked. ‘I salute you, babes. You owned that song.’
Finally the Prince of Wales took everyone by surprise by singing ‘Do Ye Ken John Peel?’ ‘I should like to dedicate this song to all the foxhounds that have had to be put down since the hunting ban was introduced. People think it’s a song about love of killing foxes but really it’s a song about love of the countryside and I do think that’s important, don’t you?’
People didn’t. It was the first major own goal for the Prince of Wales and one that landed him in the bottom two of the popular vote alongside The Four-Z. This was exactly as Calvin had intended. He did not want the process of favouring the Prince to become too obvious and he had judged that ‘Do Ye Ken John Peel?’ with an introductory video package sympathetic to hunting would provoke sufficient negativity to place HRH’s rapidly growing popularity briefly in doubt.
‘If there’s one thing I know about the British public,’ Calvin said with confidence, ‘it’s that they don’t like cruelty to foxes. They hate it, they loathe it, they strongly disapprove of it. They don’t mind a twenty-piece bucket of KFC with a couple of Big Macs on the side and a nice big sausage made of mechanically recovered meat to follow, and they don’t mind the last cod in the western hemisphere being coated in batter and stuck in a deep-fat fryer, but they cannot and will not abide a couple of hundred posh snob snooties chasing a fox.’
Therefore the Prince faced The Four-Z in the sing-off at the end of the show. Once more Jo-Jo fronted up ‘Cop Killa’ and HRH sang ‘Do Ye Ken John Peel?’ and most observers judged that the fox killer got slightly more boos than the Cop Killa. However, the decision was down to the judges and during the final advertising break before the vote Calvin took Beryl into the hospitality room and instructed her to vote for the Prince.
‘You want me to vote for a fucking fox-hunter!’ she replied, absently sucking down a couple of oysters followed by two cocktail sausages and a mini Yorkshire pudding with roast beef.
‘Yes,’ Calvin replied. ‘Rodney is nurturing The Four-Z so he can’t and I want the Prince to stay in.’
‘Why? He’s a posh snob fox-murderer!’ Beryl replied, pulling a bit of gristle from her teeth. ‘I’m a mum, I’m one of the people, I’m the people’s mum, for fuck’s sake! I can’t vote for a fox-killer.’
‘And I am the producer of this show and I’m telling you to vote for the Prince.’
‘I won’t do it!’ Beryl shouted, and a piece of half-chewed rare roast beef landed on Calvin’s jacket. ‘I’m not voting for a fucking murderer. I’m an ambassador for PETA, for fuck’s sake! Anyway it’s fucking absurd, how can we possibly vote through an ageing fucking ponce against four gorgeous boys?’
‘Who have just sung “Cop Killa”.’
‘I don’t care. I won’t do it. I’m not voting for the Prince.’
‘If you don’t do what I tell you, Beryl,’ Calvin said firmly, ‘you’ll be gone from this show before the credits are finished.’
‘You wouldn’t do it. You need me.’
‘I would and I don’t. I will not have my authority on this programme challenged, not by you, not by anybody. You will vote for who I tell you to or you will fuck off, Beryl.’
‘What about my integrity?’
‘Beryl, darling,’ Calvin said quietly through a big, broad, icy smile, ‘Chart Throb made you a proper star, it turned you from a novelty act on The Blenheims into a genuine cast-iron mainstream celebrity. Three times National Mum of the Year. Do you really want to throw that away over your integrity? Try to remember that you don’t have any integrity.’
Beryl nodded.
‘Oh, all fucking right,’ she said.
In the end the choice of song that Calvin had forced upon the boy band made it perfectly plausible for Beryl to vote as she did.
‘Look, I’m no fan of fox-hunting,’ she said, ‘people know that about me, but boys,’ and suddenly her eyes were brimming with sorrow, ‘I love you big time so much it isn’t funny, you know that. But how can I vote for you? It would be a vote against the British police force, it would be a vote for crime, it would be a smack in the face to every widow and orphan who has lost a hero in the line of duty. I’m sorry, boys, but killing cops is wrong even in the world of pop music.’
And so quite suddenly The Four-Z were rejected.
For a day or two or even a week afterwards Michael and his friends imagined that the dream might not yet be over. After all, how many times had the expert judges solemnly pronounced that they were stars? That they had huge recording careers ahead of them? That they were better than The Commodores? A new Jackson Five. Surely the ‘record contract’ that Rodney had regularly stated should by rights be theirs must now be forthcoming? Surely it had not all been unmitigated bullshit?
But it was. The world was full of good-looking lads who could sing and they were just four more of them (three not counting Jo-Jo). The pompous promises made on Chart Throb were valid for exactly as long as it took to utter them and so The Four-Z returned to the lives they had hoped to leave behind for ever.
Weeks Eight and Nine
Troy went out in week eight in a vote-off with HRH, who was still suffering from the hunting controversy of the previous week. Calvin manoeuvred Troy to the bottom of the pack by simply repeating the device of staging Troy’s song as if the lad was attempting to read the lyrics. The public had loved this manoeuvre the first time round but when Troy did the same thing again they reacted negatively to what appeared to be a clumsy attempt to manip
ulate their sympathy.
Calvin knew that Graham would prove a much tougher job to bring down. Graham had risen to a height of popularity second only to The Four-Z during the early live rounds and if he were allowed to get through to the final he would prove difficult to control. Week nine was therefore Calvin’s last chance to deal with him.
‘We need to turn people against him,’ he explained to Chelsie and Trent, ‘and the best way to do that is to stitch him up in the pre-show profile.’
‘How about using the fact that he dropped Millicent so easily?’ Chelsie suggested.
‘Good girl!’ said Calvin. ‘Exactly what I was thinking. We need to make him look selfish, uncaring and mean.’
‘Do you think we can do that to a blind boy?’ Trent enquired dubiously.
‘Of course we can,’ Calvin replied. ‘All the best villains in literature were disabled, look at Long John Silver.’
Trent was dispatched to the rehearsal room with a camera crew and ordered to manipulate Graham into incriminating himself. However, he returned disappointed.
‘He really likes the chick,’ Trent explained. ‘In fact it’s pretty clear he’s in love with her. What’s more, he knows he’s no singer either. I couldn’t twist him round at all.’
‘Let’s look at the tape.’
Sitting in an edit suite, Calvin, Trent and Chelsie watched the tape of the interview.
‘I don’t like to think of Millicent not being here with me,’ Graham had said. ‘If I’m honest, I truly believe she’s got the better voice, which makes me feel like a sad, selfish no-talent, like I don’t care about anybody but myself. Sometimes I just hate myself and don’t even want to win. I love Millicent and I always will. She’s always been my friend and respected me and not patronized me or treated me differently because I’m blind.’
‘You see?’ said Trent. ‘The bloke just won’t play ball.’
‘I think he will,’ said Chelsie.