by Nigel Planer
‘Do you think anyone would notice if we nipped out for a beer?’ I turned round to see big Mr Dukowski himself looking at me.
‘Only joking,’ he said, and laughed all by himself at his own magnanimity. One of his front teeth was missing. ‘How’re you finding it?’ he asked. And while I stumbled for an appropriate and believable expression of appreciation, he continued, ‘It’s better than last year’s, I think. More experiential. Mind you, I couldn’t really get into that possessions exercise.’
He reached deep into his tracksuit trousers pocket, which jingled with keys and change — seemingly groping around his balls — and took out what looked like a large carwash token, on which was embossed the words ‘Three Years’ and the initials NA. Narcotics Anonymous. Uh oh.
‘That’s my most treasured possession, but when it came to it I copped out, you know? I couldn’t bring myself to show anyone?’
He seemed to have caught the upward inflection disease from Julian.
‘Three years?’ he said proudly. ‘I keep it in my pocket at all times so that I can just hold it if I start to feel a bit, you know, wobbly?’
‘But you don’t mind showing me?’ I said. I was catching it now too. My remark did not seem to register with him.
‘Three years since I have had any kind of narcotic.’
‘Well, that’s very … impressive.’ But my voice trailed off with my attention, which was drawn over his shoulder to a man standing alone on the other side of the room. A man I recognized and whom I hoped would not recognise me. James Rhys-Evans. Until last month Head of Series and Serials at the BBC, and before that Head of Drama at Central. What was he doing here? I leaned my weight behind the large, shaven-headed, toothless ex-drug addict, using him as a shield. Rhys-Evans was standing, miserably eating from his paper plate. He must have only just arrived or been in the other group for the morning session, because he hadn’t been, in my workshop. I hoped it was the latter, because I didn’t want to be caught publicly airing confidences and sharing treasure with an important TV exec, however experiential the experience might be.
‘And they’re doing more on alcohol and drug-related problems this year, which is good,’ the shaven head went on, through mouthfuls of his second banana. It was he who had had the last of the brownie, too. It sat there on his paper plate, waiting for him to finish both bananas. I could see over his shoulder that Rhys-Evans had noticed me and was as studious as I was in avoiding a recognition of this if at all possible.
‘Oh, well. Body sculpting this afternoon. That should be good,’ said Simon Dukowski cheerfully, starting at last on the brownie.
Body sculpting with Julian turned out to be possibly my worst nightmare on legs. Also, they had reselected us into a larger group in the big hall, to allow more room for physical self-expression — something I tend usually to keep down to a minimum by choice — so I had to face up to Rhys-Evans and he had to face up to me.
I shouldn’t have been so worried, I suppose. He was not one of the five really big cheeses in television and he had just been made redundant, so he might be now a spent force, a non-person in a silk suit. An executive with nothing to execute. But those in power change jobs about once every eighteen months, so one can never be sure where they may suddenly re-emerge with added attributes, departments and even share-option schemes to boot.
Obviously, being an agent, I can’t name these heavy five grands fromages, let alone say what I really think of them, well, not until they fall from power anyway, and then one has to be pretty sure there is absolutely no chance of a rebirth from the ashes as head of some independent film commissioning body or what-have-you.
As an agent, one is part of that gagging throng who have a vicious claw at those in power as they plummet from favour, all from the safety of one’s own throne of non-commitment, of course. Actually, why should I care any longer? OK, there’s Stephen ‘Mr Indecision’ Ronson, there’s Matthew ‘The Pudge’ Praslin, there’s Peter ‘The Big Man’ Winner — we like him this season — there’s Jane ‘Give me a Crotch Shot’ Poke-Warner —we’ve all gone off her, too much of a self-publicist, not enough actual television being made — and lastly, there’s Sir David Frost, ‘Frostie,’ or Kellogg, as he’s known.
Of course there are far more important people behind this lot, accountants and shareholders and executives who wield the money power. But for the producers, directors, writers, actors, technicians, designers and, of course, agents, these five are the ones that matter, and don’t let any head of department or independent production company exec tell you otherwise. Any proposal to end up on British TV will have had to have passed across one of those five desks. So, if you have been turned down by one, you might as well go home. They don’t like taking each other’s cast-offs and they all read the same papers and they all eat in roughly the same places and they all, funnily enough, live in the same area of London, apart from Peter Winner, of course, who, seeming not to care how naff he looks, lives in a newly built home in Hertfordshire. We all love him for that. ‘Up yours’ he seems to be saying to the poncy privileged crowd. Mind you, we are fickle, we like him this year because he had such a success with Pointings, which gave so many of our clients work and won a clutch of awards.
Last year Stephen Ronson was fave, because he was new and he seemed to be commissioning new dramas like they were Pringles crisps. Now he’s faded from grace because of the Ice Cream in Barcelona fiasco, which actually wasn’t of his making; he inherited it, so it is totally unfair. We are fickle, it is unfair. Not that our nittering and nattering makes an ounce of difference. We are like a colony of mice, whose offices are joined by interconnecting passages beneath the floorboards, with occasional holes in the skirting through which we push young narcissists, blinking in the glare. Every specialized trade serving the industry is like this. Ask a make-up artist what she or he thought of Les Liaisons Dangereuses and they will say, ‘Terrible film, you could see the wig lace.’ Whereas a member of a camera crew will go on about the lens filters used, or mention the name of some new computerized editing technique, like ‘Harry’ or ‘Skid’.
‘Now, this afternoon I’ve stacked all the chairs away, so there can be no hiding in the wings, OK?’ said Julian, slipping out of his lemon-yellow cardigan and delicately rolling up his sleeves, ready for some kind of action. We had had to take off our shoes and put them round the edge of the hall. Unavoidably, Rhys-Evans and I acknowledged each other at the row of shoes. Neil was already in the centre of the room, swinging his arms by way of a warm-up. Alright for him, he was a performer, a thesp, a doer. There was no workshop on the schedule called ‘Persuading People to Do Things By Talking on the Phone’, so I was not to be in my element all weekend. Nor, I suspected by the look of him, was James Rhys-Evans.
‘OK, that’s good? A few deep breaths and relax and then I’m going to say a word, and what I want you to do is allow yourself to express your feelings about that word… through your body.’ Inverted commas again. ‘Just through your body. You can make noises and move around the room but not too much thinking, OK?’ Big joke. ‘Just let it come out through your body, like making a sculpture?’
I had that feeling when you climb up to the diving board at the swimming baths and it’s obvious the moment you get there that you’re not going to have the guts to do it. But you can’t just climb back down again in front of the whole school, so you compound the embarrassment by standing pointlessly a foot from the edge for the next twenty minutes.
‘And the word is …’ an elfin smile on his soft-skinned face, ‘the British economy.
That’s two words, I thought, well, three if you count the ‘the’. But the old professor guy, with his glasses restored, was already squatting down beside me and howling, in rather badly acted agony. Next please, daughter, I thought.
The Canadian started a low hum and his eyelids flickered. Obviously, for him, the British economy had something to do with transcendental meditation. Fair enough.
All around me, bearded
men were rising and contorting themselves. Their willingness to join in was disturbing. Lawyers, hippies and estate agents groaned and swore and wriggled in simulated pain on the floor. The collective gibberish rose into the echoey ceiling, like thunder breaking backwards. The individual noises ran into, one another, making an ugly and frantic non-stop bark. The British economy yapping in the rafters. So this was how men needed to change, this was what they wanted to change into. A bunch of naff amateur dramatics auditioning for the part of Caliban in an all-canine production of The Tempest.
Thinking only of the British economy, I curled into a ball on the floor and tried to blank out the deafening roar above. Neil was doing a sort of t’ai chi mime show; James Rhys-Evans had disappeared into the rugby scrum at the centre of the hall.
‘And … freeze?’ shouted Julian, clapping his hands together.
Simon Dukowski, the fat druggie, was caught on one leg and tried, meaningfully, to stay like that.
‘Now, I want you to think of the sculpture you have made of yourself? And, in your own time, slowly return to your normal position?’
The thunder was still roaring in my ears as Julian divided us down the middle for an expression-and-release-of-conflict-and aggression exercise.
I could just leave now. I could quietly get up, retrieve my shoes and go out of the room. But what would Rhys-Evans think? He showed no sign of wanting to leave. Mind you, I showed no sign of it either. It would have been foolish to show a sign of it, and now we were shouting at each other across a chalk line which Julian had drawn along the centre of the room. He was definitely getting off on this, probably wearing silk underwear underneath his neat, clean jeans.
‘You fucking arsehole, you never ever ever made me feel wanted.’ The thin redheaded guy seemed to be shouting specifically at me. He gave me full-on son-to-father eye contact. ‘You stopped me, every time, you … you …’ He began to tremble and cry. I couldn’t think of anything to shout back at him across the chalk line: it seemed a rather horrid thing to do anyway, poor little ginger.
He was sobbing hugely now and I became a little concerned. Various phrases rose above the din.
‘I am going to fucking kill you, I’m going to fucking kill somebody,’ recognizable to my left from Neil. ‘Push them into the water and drown them.’ He’d certainly got in touch with his anger this weekend, if that was what we were meant to be doing. I turned my attention away from the redhead and shouted, ‘You idiot’ to no one in particular. It would have been worse not to join in at all. People were red in the face, saliva spots flecked the chalk. The sound was like having one’s own private roadworks piped through headphones.
The Canadian was humming again. A man dressed all in green joined him, and then a few of the hippies. Over the top of the humming and the shouting, Julian screeched, ‘Yes, that’s good?’ More men started humming and then some wandered, like dazed bomb victims, across the chalk and started to hug one another.
Apart from one or two stragglers, it was almost all humming now, except for the redhead, who was beyond hope. He was quaking all over, and still the sobs continued, reverberating back off the rafters. I was seriously concerned for him now. Shouldn’t someone call a doctor? I hoped they had some professionals around to cope with this sort of thing. Two or three guys went to hug him. More joined them until he was lost under a scrum of shaggy love. I was jealous. No one hugged me.
James Rhys-Evans caught my eye and went to the other side of the room. There was no way we were going to do any bonding or what-have-you. Imagine his position next time he got his hand on the steering wheel of the entertainment station waggon. You can’t cut throats in a cutthroat world if you have been workshopping each other’s inner child the night before, now can you? We both knew that and respected it.
The redhead was lifted up on the shoulders of the bearded scrum and carried round the room. His sobbing had transformed itself into manic laughter now. Too manic. This was like a scene from a Peter Brook extravaganza, circa nineteen bloody sixty-eight.
The redhead needed help, I thought, and was not going to get it from Julian, whose smile seemed also to have become Gothic at its twitchy edges. I wondered if he was secretly videoing the whole thing for private perusal at home afterwards.
It’s questionable whether it was a changed man who crept down the stairs of Neil’s West Hampstead house into the chilly Monday morning. Definitely a man who needed to change his clothes. I’d been in the same corduroys and button-down shirt all weekend. The weekend experience had made me sweat and I hadn’t had a bath or shower since Friday morning.
My hair was mussed, and sleeping on Neil’s floor with a jacket for a blanket had left me creased, crumpled and stiff. I had woken with the Sunday-afternoon communal drumming still in my ears. It had joined the other sounds in the menagerie in my head: the urgent rustling of poplar leaves in the wind; the dangerous rushing of water; a baby — Grace, probably — crying as if on a tape loop; and now, of course, this mêlée of drumming, so syncopated as to make one homogeneous din, like the oversound in the swimming pool on schools morning:
‘Whwwrrrrroooaaahhh.’ I must remember to pay a visit to my GP.
I clunked Neil’s front door behind me and tottered uneasily on to the street, blinking in the light, although the day was grey. We’d ended up at Neil’s with wine and a bottle of vodka, not drifting into sleep until at least 4.00 a.m. The weekend had loosened Neil’s tongue and he told me things about himself I’d never known. Things I don’t really need to know. But he’d been quite funny, almost like I remember him before, and I had been happy to sit and listen, even when the orange juice had run out and we were drinking the vodka with tap water, or eventually straight from the bottle.
He told me that originally, before he’d met his partner Karen — the trick cyclist, that is — he’d been bisexual. And a funny story about himself in the back end of a pantomime cow in Southend in I 977 which featured a knight of the theatre in it somewhere. It had stopped the buzzing in my ears for an hour or so.
There were about fifteen people at the West End Lane bus stop and I joined them with my jacket collar turned up, hoping that nobody in the business would be heading for Soho this early in the morning and clock me in my current dishevelled state. Hardly a good advertisement for Mullin and Ketts, nor indeed for those in the representational field in general.
I began to get nervous. The time was ticking noisily by, the drumming noise was growing. I needed a distraction. A cab came round Dunlever Road with its yellow ‘For Hire’ light shining invitingly.
I hailed it, feeling like a heel, leaving them all standing there in the cold. Guiltily, I acted looking at my watch again as I got in, so as to deflect their imagined evil thoughts towards me, and slumped back into the seat.
‘Women. Huh. They axe for money, they say it’s for the children, but I tell you, how much goes to the children, eh? You see?’
‘Well, it’s very hard for women these days, you know,’ I replied, glad for the internal wash of sounds to stop.
‘First she take you, know what I mean? And then it’s your wallet. You end up with nothing. I tell all men in my cab now, never get married.’
‘But it’s fair enough for the man to share in bringing up his children, isn’t it?’ I shouted back over the traffic noise.
‘I tell you. The Child Support Agency, man, it worse than the poll tax, man. The money don’t go to the woman, it go to the Government. They take all. All.’
‘Yes,’ I shouted. ‘Yes, you’re probably right.’
‘I tell you this advice: go to prostitutes. It’s cheaper in the long run and it’s more convenient.’
The cabbie let out a brassy and wheezy laugh, repeating ‘more convenient’ several times and flashing his gold teeth in the rear-view mirror. It turned out he had thirteen grandchildren to help support, and a fancy woman he saw once a month.
‘I tell you, my wife, she got no complaints, as long as I don’t put her money down.’ He laughed again.
We parted quite jovially and I had spent the last tenner from my wallet. I’d have to go to a cashpoint later on, but right now I needed a full valet service before the women arrived.
And then, a rather dated comedy sketch happened.
The taxi had dropped me at the junction of Wardour and Meard. I clonked up the crooked stairs, bursting for a piss and aching for a coffee, or three. I undid the double lock and swung the door.., and… I’d come to the wrong office. It’s the oldest gag in the book, isn’t it? From Alan Bennett’s ‘Visiting T.E. Lawrence’ monologue, to Noel Edmonds’ House Party. Even Jeremy Planter has used it on at least two occasions: build up a sketch with jokes and misunderstandings, then tag it with the ‘You’ve come to the wrong house, mate, you want number twenty-seven over the road’ routine. Often used in Walter Matthau movies about infidelity in the 1960s, as a matter of fact.
In front of me were three large empty rooms with — apart from one computer — empty tables and desks in them. I checked the keys, stupid, they had opened the door for me, for crying out loud. A fourth desk, through a glass-partition door, still had phones and answer-phones and in-trays and out-trays, and framed posters lined the walls in there, but in the main rooms even the corkboards were bare. Silence. Total silence. The lack of noise rang hard in my head. The walls were dirty white without anything on them. The place was bare, like a newly converted flat for sale, but there was no estate agent with me now. The red light on the answer-phone on the fourth desk blipped silently with messages. I counted them. Eighteen blips. I let out a short laugh involuntarily and pulled aside the curtain to the kitchenette. It was still a cluttered shambles in there. The camp bed roughly folded against the wall where I had left it on Friday evening, the coffee cups unwashed up, the sugar-spill still stuck to the drainer. This was Mullin and Ketts but with the innards ripped out. The main rooms seemed much larger and airier now empty. Had we really had this much space? It had always felt so cramped, so cosy. I walked through the glass-partition door to where the fourth table with the answer-phone was. This was my office. Nothing in here had been removed. My room seemed inappropriately cluttered, its reassuring homeliness like a night-watchman’s den at a loft art gallery.