by Nev Fountain
‘You’re exaggerating.’
‘I wish I was. The last time I saw him was in 1990, on a location shoot in this very part of the world, where he had his hands around my neck and was being pulled off me by an extra dressed as a space gorilla. The production team found it very amusing. Some even joked that wasn’t the only monkey on Ken’s back during that shoot.’
Randall’s face had turned unnaturally pale; even whiter than his unnatural teeth. His smile, which hadn’t left his face since Mervyn had met him, stayed fixed, but it was definitely on autopilot. His eyes were full of terror. ‘We’re sure he’s going to be great. We’ll keep an eye on him. Hey, just remember. Doctor Who used a classic director on the new series, and he worked out superbly.’
Toast. Burnt crumbs.
CHAPTER SEVEN
They returned to the meeting room; Ken was staring at his script on the table very hard, as if trying to levitate it with the power of his mind. He looked up and saw Mervyn. His eyes blazed with a sudden fury. Then he composed himself, and returned to his script.
For the benefit of Mervyn, Randall introduced the other members sitting around the table. They greeted him with polite wariness. Mervyn didn’t blame their caution. In His Day, if anyone got introduced to the production team, and no one knew exactly what his or her job entailed, they inevitably spelled trouble. The names went by in a blur; Mervyn hadn’t a hope of remembering them all, but tried to squirrel a few of the important ones inside his memory.
There was Nick Dodd, the producer. He had grown the tiniest, most apologetic goatee Mervyn had ever seen, more of a hairy freckle than a beard. His tiny chin tuft, a watery grin, a crew cut and a polo neck jumper pretty much summed Nick up. He seemed a nice chap, but rather bland and shallow. The earring that dangled from his left ear was the brightest thing about him.
The executive producer, Louise Felcham, was also head of Product Lazarus UK (Drama). Mervyn had never met her, but he knew her by reputation. She was the bane of many a programme-maker’s life, because once she was appointed, nothing would ever get made. She was television’s equivalent of an unguided missile, an executive that bumped around broadcast media like a drowsy wasp, never staying in one job for more than six months, knowing that if she did she might be in serious danger of making a programme, or, more importantly, taking the blame for making one.
Her CV was littered with impressive award-winning shows that she had nothing to do with. They had either been commissioned before she’d arrived in a job, or she’d turned them down but got made anyway after they’d finally got rid of her. Mervyn thought it was extremely brave of her to sit there—a producer of her type associating herself with a television pilot that was actually being produced, with cameras and actors and lights and everything.
Louise’s hair was dyed a silvery-white, carelessly marked with a huge pink splodge on the crown. It protruded untidily from a hairband in a fine frizz, matching her mohair jumper in both colour and texture. With her spray of artificially coloured tresses, huge round glasses and pointy nose, she looked like a thing given at a funfair as compensation for not winning the goldfish.
The first assistant director, Bryony, was a jolly little thing who looked about 12 years old. She insisted on being called ‘Patch’ (‘Bryony Patch. Briar Patch. Geddit?’). She was from Newcastle. Her girlfriends back in the North East would probably have been disgusted at her attire as not an inch of bare flesh was on display. She wore a very sensible chunky jumper and jeans to keep out the cold.
Mervyn and Randall had obviously arrived in the middle of a discussion, which Louise was eager to resume.
‘Well as I was saying. Is there any way we can we make the pilot a bit more relevant to the modern audience?’ she said, idly examining her pencil. Louise had an inability to look directly at any living human being, preferring to stare at props, out of windows or through walls.
‘Well, I’m not sure what more Glyn can do,’ muttered Nick the producer. ‘We’ve already done a lot to make characters much more empowered; independent females with attitude, and “real lives”. They grapple with issues that affect modern women. We’ve already got one of the main characters wearing a space burqa, and another one’s going to be deposed in a mutiny on her ship because she went on maternity leave. It feels pretty relevant to me. What do you suggest?’
‘I don’t do ideas,’ Louise snapped, ‘but it still seems a bit too “space” and not enough “now”.’ She examined the skirting board. ‘I’m wondering if we could touch on present-day Earth in a more direct way. I wonder if one of the Vixens could be a 21st century girl, plucked from her humdrum life and catapulted into space.’
Nick considered this. ‘That would be slightly problematic, as Vixens from the Void is set in the distant future and they are actually distant descendants of the human race.’
Louise gave the light fitting above Nick’s head a withering stare. ‘Exactly Nick, exactly. Which brings me to my second point. We obviously need to add a time travel element to it. Perhaps one of the Vixens owns a time machine and goes back in time, tracing her relatives like Who Do You Think You Are?, and she meets this young sassy girl and they could have adventures through time, something like that.’
Mervyn felt his soul shrivelling like a decomposing mouse. It was obvious they were saddled with that growing breed of television executive; the type with no imagination, no interest in television, and one single ability—to come up with ‘ideas’ that would be rip-offs either of films they’d watched recently or of what was successful on television that week. It was only a matter of time before she tried to make it into Harry bloody Potter.
‘That sounds a bit like Doctor Who,’ Mervyn muttered, a little too loudly.
Louise now seemed to be having a conversation with the tea things on the table. ‘Well I don’t need to point out that Doctor Who is very successful, do I? Anyway, I’m not the ideas person. I just think we should push the envelope on this one. Think the unthinkable and take risks. Why not make it a prequel? Maybe the Vixens could be learning how to be rulers of the galaxy in some big mysterious school…?’
‘Hello, hello, hello!’
A man appeared at the door, grinning so hard the edges of his mouth were touching his ears. His blue eyes stared intensely through tiny silver-framed spectacles. He was tall and lean and had spiky hair which had been flecked with blonde streaks. He wore a hoodie with a picture of a fish on it and khaki canvas trousers that bagged at the ankles. They covered huge wedge-shaped trainers.
In decades past, he might have been mistaken for a downmarket barrow-boy or an upmarket drug dealer, but Mervyn knew this was the quintessential look of the 21st century television writer. Mervyn guessed this was Glyn Trelawney.
‘Sorry I’m late, my lovelies, the bridge was down at Bristol and you were all entirely cut off for the morning!’
Well-drilled laughter saluted him. Glyn guffawed at his own joke, then laughed at hearing his own laugh, and then he guffawed again. ‘Look at all your lovely shiny faces! Isn’t it exciting? Fresh project! Everyone’s got that new car smell!’ His voice, thick and hearty, sounded weird because it was the only Cornish accent in the room
‘Glyn!’ said Randall, getting to his feet.
‘Randall my lovely!’ said Glyn, holding his arms wide.
Randall dived for Glyn and tried to give him a full power hug. Glyn neatly sidestepped the power hug, grabbed Randall’s face, and gave him a power kiss on both cheeks. Randall tried to fight back, aiming a power pat at Glyn’s shoulder, but Glyn was already moving on to his seat. The power pat became an ineffectual stroke sliding down Glyn’s back.
Having established that he was the dominant male, Glyn sat down at the head of the table, cranked open a bulging ring-binder and beamed around the room.
‘So what have I missed?’
Nick scrutinised his notes. ‘Louise was just suggesting that we have a time machine and a 21st century teenager in the show.’
Glyn barked with amusem
ent. ‘Oh what larks! Oh Nick! Louise is pulling your leg, you gorgeous numpty! Of course that’s not going to happen. How could it happen when there’s the finished script right there under your noggin?’
From the hurt look Louise gave to the water jug on the table, she was most certainly not joking and she most certainly did not think it was the finished script, but she said nothing. Everyone opened their scripts at the same page and started looking through together. Mervyn took a new one from the table (it was yellow). He’d brought the one they’d sent him in his satchel (it was green) but this one looked nicer and wasn’t covered in jam.
It occurred to Mervyn that he might have spent the last few days reading the script rather than watching cop shows. No, that was too dangerous. That might have tricked him into caring. He was too clever for that.
They’d gone barely five pages before Ken threw out a world-weary sigh.
‘Something wrong, my lovely?’ said Glyn brightly.
‘Oh nothing…’
‘Fine, on we go.’
‘Well it’s just… I’m not sure we need this huge dialogue scene while Arkadia and Medula are racing on these space surfboard things,’ whinged Ken. ‘Couldn’t they just say this stuff on the bridge of the spaceship? That’s the way we’d have done it on the old series.’
That’s the way YOU would have done it on the old series, thought Mervyn sourly. Some other directors tried to inject pace and interesting camerawork into dialogue scenes. Not Ken ‘point and cut’ Roche.
‘Perhaps we could cut the scene for reasons of time?’ Nick suggested.
‘Oh, you tink dat, do ya?’
Mervyn looked around. Who just spoke?
‘You tink dat?’
That was Glyn!
‘Is dat what you tink, Nick? Is dat what you tink?’
Mysteriously, Glyn had suddenly started speaking in a broad Scouse accent.He looked at Nick, eyes cold, all trace of friendly bumptiousness gone.
Obviously that was code for something horrible, because Nick suddenly jumped in like a referee stopping a particularly bloody boxing match. ‘I think the guys from Clockworks have some great ideas about how this is going to look and they think they can do something special well within the budget.’
The guys from Clockworks—the company charged with producing the special effects for the pilot—all nodded enthusiastically. The chief guy from Clockworks—the one with the loudest shirt and least hair—turned his laptop around to face everyone, and the production team ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ as tiny CGI figures slalomed their way through the upper atmosphere of a moon, dodging asteroids and comets. Ken barely paid any attention, afraid to look at the screen in case he caught a computer virus.
Glyn started laughing again, all trace of his sudden transformation gone. Everyone relaxed.
Mervyn was fascinated with the unofficial power structure in the room; quite different to what he was used to. In His Day, the producer was king of all he surveyed; there with an occasional executive producer sitting to one side, chipping in with advice and hints on how angry/pleased the suits were, then below them would come the script editor, then the directors, all the various departments—make-up, props, effects, costumes—and then finally the writer, sulking in his hovel somewhere far, far away.
The power structure here was upside-down. More interestingly, it was quite fluid. The writer was quite definitely at the top holding court, with the director, producer and everyone else in tow. There was no script editor, as far as Mervyn could see. Randall, the executive producer seemed subservient most of the time, but he occasionally came in with something like ‘I don’t think the suits at Lazarus would wear that,’ and everybody stopped talking about whatever they were talking about and moved on. Glyn included. Randall’s body language was relaxed; he held the purse-strings, so he chose to pick his fights.
After an hour of pleasantries the meeting broke up, with a reminder that the first cast read-through would be at two that afternoon. Mervyn bent down to put his script in his satchel, and when he straightened up he was nose-to-nose with Glyn Trelawney.
‘Mervyn! How lovely that you could join us!’ Glyn bellowed, pumping Mervyn’s hand energetically. ‘A legend in our midst! My goodness, the actual writer of “The Burning Time” and “Expiration Point” is amongst us! Who’d have thought! Inventor of the Styrax and the Gorgs! The man who put words into Medula’s delicious mouth! It’s fantastic with a side helping of lovely to have you on board.’ And then he went off, chuckling and guffawing and joking; slapping backs and rocking on his heels with boisterous laughter.
People poured out of the room after him, leaving Mervyn bemused and alone. Well, not quite alone. There was a young man in the corner, jotting notes in a loose-leaf folder. He was very thin, with long spindly arms and legs, jagged black hair and huge black boots. He looked like he’d been drawn by a five-year old. He looked up and grinned. ‘Hi Mervyn. Are you busy?’
Mervyn looked at around at the empty room, and then at the open door through which everyone had disappeared, ignoring him as they went. ‘I don’t seem to be.’
‘Great.’ The young man grinned affably. ‘Come on, there’s a pub down the high street with 50 different types of beer. Let me buy you a lager.’
Mervyn had no idea who the man was, but it wasn’t the first time he’d been approached by someone who assumed Mervyn knew him or her; usually a fan that’d met him three times in an autograph queue. In their world, Mervyn now counted as a favourite uncle, to be hugged and patronised.
Still, a drink was a drink.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The pub walls and ceiling were groaning under the weight of lobster pots, fishing nets and bits of boat hanging from the rafters, all tools of ‘yer good honest working man’. Mervyn wondered if, in a hundred years, pubs would hang wheelie bins and rusting call-centre headpieces from their timber frames. While the man went to the bar, Mervyn took the opportunity to glance at his folder. Apparently, he was Steve O’Brien and he was a freelance writer for SFX magazine. A journalist. That was good to know. He must be on his guard.
Steve returned with surprising speed; carrying two glasses of yellow fizzy nothingness. ‘There you go,’ he said. ‘Authentically fermented in an aluminium vat by American neo-Nazis. None of your home-brewed Cornish rubbish.’
Mervyn looked around nervously at the regulars, some of whom were looking directly at them.
‘Don’t worry; they won’t kill you for criticising their beer. But they might have your eye out for saying Ginsters pasties are better than the home-made ones.’ Steve straddled a stool and burst open a bag of crisps.
‘So Steve,’ said Mervyn casually. ‘What’s your role in all this?’
‘No role as such. Purely observation. I’m writing a diary of the making of the making of the Vixens from the Void reboot for SFX, complete with accompanying blog.’
‘Sorry, the making of the making? I think you had one too many “making ofs” in that sentence.’
‘I’m afraid you heard right. I’m not on Product Lazarus’s “preferred publication list”. They prefer to talk to the international titles like Rolling Stone. So I can’t shadow the production team. But I can shadow the production team behind the making of the fly-on-the-wall documentaries that will appear on the DVD.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. I’m learning far more from them than I ever would from the production team proper. My lot hate the proper lot with a hot passion. There’s nothing more dispiriting than filming people making proper telly, and most of them are quite bitter about it. Lots of naughty gossip. So how about an interview from you? You know the kind of thing, “The old guy looking at the kids playing with the toys he had when he was young”—that kind of angle would be cool.’
‘If you like. I won’t say anything very interesting, I’m afraid.’
‘I sincerely hope you won’t. That would be very bad.’ Steve started to roll himself a cigarette. ‘It’s my job to stay on friendly t
erms with the production team, keep things sweet so I get regular access to the stars and the filming. Let the fanzines and the internet blub and swear about continuity errors and betrayal of some mythical legacy; it’s up to the magazines to report, inform our readership, and, if it turns out to be the worst thing ever made and gets canned, then we can say how shite it all was.’
‘You don’t seem very enthusiastic about the project.’
‘Oh no, on the contrary. I really hope it’s going to succeed. If it does it’ll be like new Doctor Who all over again. I’m looking forward to celebrities suddenly remembering they’re lifelong fans and getting the names of the characters wrong… Newspaper columnists explaining to us about Vixens from the Void and getting all the facts arse about face… New fans enraging the old fans by liking things that they’re not supposed to like…’ He chuckled to himself. ‘Lots of fun in store.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Mervyn.
Steve was being cheerfully frank, but Mervyn was still wary. He knew all the journalistic tactics; he’d been interviewed many times by the tabloid press when Vixens was riding high in the schedules, hoping to squeeze out the latest plot detail from him, or even a detail about an actress’s latest squeeze. He remembered one of their favourite tricks was being matey, buying him drinks, being his best friend and throwing him gossip about other shows, other actors, other writers in the hope that he’d join in. It was important to remember at all times that journalist’s opinions don’t matter; it would be his words that would get recorded and printed in the newspapers the following morning.
‘So,’ said Steve. ‘What do you make of Glyn Trelawney?’
Mervyn was instantly cautious. ‘Well, he seems very nice. Very positive, very enthusiastic, very jolly. A bit like…’
‘Go on…’
‘Well, a bit like a Cornish Russell T. Davies, really.’