by Sue Townsend
He shouted into it, ‘OΚ, five hundred thou’ for Burt’s hairpiece, but that’s my final offer.’ He snapped the mobile shut, turned to me and said, ‘We’ll go for six shows in two days, terribly knackering, I’ll supply the bennies.’ More code speak – I feel alone in a parallel universe.
Wednesday June 4th
I rang Edna Kent this morning and asked her for the name and phone number of Barry’s agent. She gave me his name, but said his phone number was ex-directory. Then she divulged it anyway. There is a solidarity among us Ashby-de-la-Zouchians.
His agent is an American called Brick Eagleburger. I rang Mr Eagleburger and was immediately put on hold after a harsh-voiced American woman (a recording) said, ‘Hi, I’m Brick’s assistant, Boston. Neither of us is available right now, but if you’ll hold a moment we’ll be right with you.’ I was then played an excerpt from Porgy and Bess. I was singing along to ‘Bess, You Is My Woman Now’, when the same harsh-voiced woman broke in, ‘Hi, Boston Goldman here, how may I help you?’
I managed to stammer out that I was one of Barry Kent’s oldest friends, and that I required advice as I was possibly about to embark on a TV career. Boston said, ‘Sounds kinda exciting but Brick’s had closure on his client list since January 1st.’
I wasn’t sure what she meant and asked her to rephrase her words.
‘Since January 1st,’ she said, slowly, as though speaking to an idiot, or a foreigner, ‘Brick has had closure on his client list.’
‘So, he’s not taking on any more clients?’ I checked.
Boston sounded less friendly. ‘Congratulations! As your own talented Sir Cliff Richard would say,’ she joked, though with little humour, I thought.
Thursday June 5th
I rang Edna again and reported yesterday’s conversation. She told me that Boston was a failed stand-up comedienne. It explains a lot. Edna told me to persist until I got to speak to Brick himself. Savage has found out about Humfri’s tenure in the kitchen, and has ordered us to get rid of him. Large Alan has tipped him off that the health inspectors are planning midnight raids in the Soho area. Malcolm is distraught, he said tonight. ‘No ‘uman ever wants to get near to me, an’ I never get to touch another ‘uman. But Humfri, ‘e can’t wait to sit on my knee.’ Humfri is only interested in him because of the food Malcolm feeds him, on an hourly basis. I almost pointed this out to him, but I drew back from the brink.
Friday June 6th
Humfri now has another possession: a litter tray. In my flat.
Saturday June 7th
Phoned Brick, got Boston. To try to get into her good books I asked her if she had been christened Boston. She flew into a rage. ‘You’re assuming I’m a Christian, are you? British boy! That my mom and pop stood at the font in some f------ Midwest tight-assed Protestant church and christened me into the Christian community, eh? Is that kosher with you?’
I said that I was sorry if I had offended her. Though to be honest, dear Diary, I didn’t know what I was apologizing for.
I asked, once again, to speak to Brick; she once again put me on hold. I now know all the words to most of the songs from Porgy and Bess. I could give a recital.
Sunday June 8th
William rang me today. He wanted to know when I was coming up to see him. I said I wasn’t sure (which is true: I need to be in London for the Pie Crust negotiations). The kid droned on about somebody or something called Barney, then put the phone down abruptly before I could say a proper goodbye. I felt guilty for at least half an hour after his call.
Apparently Savage and Kim are reconciled. I only know this from reading the Taki column in the Sunday Times today. I’m personally very pleased: Kim is the only person who understands the stock-control data on the computer. Perhaps I’ll get those carrots I asked for days ago.
Wednesday June 11th
A bad day. At 2300 hours we were raided by the public health. It couldn’t have come at a worse time. Malcolm had brought the cat down from the flat and was cradling him in his arms, next to the dried goods store. Luigi, curse him, was on the draining board, sitting cooling his feet in the sink.
Savage and Kim were totally drunk and seemed to be under the impression that the public health inspectors, a Mr Voss (thin, pale) and a Ms Sykes (thin, tanned), were a showbiz double act.
A fine-tooth comb would have been a blunt instrument compared to the meticulous scrutiny that kitchen underwent during Voss and Sykes’ inspection. They left, eventually, at 2.30 a.m. after finding one hundred and twenty violations of the Public Health Act. Including traces of foot fungus in the sink.
The restaurant was closed down until all the work stipulated in the order had been completed.
Thank God I have another string to my bow with Pie Crust Productions.
Thursday June 12th
There is a new notice in the window of Hoi Polloi.
Closed by MI5 on the orders of Commissar Blair – due to the fact that Hoi Polloi is a libertarian stronghold.
Signed – Hon. P. Savage
Friday June 13th
Large Alan has offered Malcolm a job sweeping up sequins and feathers from the dressing room at the lap-dancing club. Free meals, £5 an hour, minicab home. Malcolm said he is going to think about it. Why?
Luigi is riddled with guilt as well he may be. His feet alone accounted for seventeen public-health violations.
I record the first three shows on Monday.
Saturday June 14th
My auntie Susan has been honoured with the prestigious Prison Officer of the Year award. It was presented to her by Jack Straw. She told my mother that Mr Straw said he intends to conduct an inquiry into lesbianism in prisons. ‘Among the staff or the prisoners?’ asked my aunt. She reported that Mr Straw blushed at the question, and turned the conversation to a safer subject: the menace of garden slugs.
Nigel called and asked if he could sleep on my settee over the weekend. He says that he is coming to London to be counselled by a group called Outings. They specialize in advising gay men and women on how to tell their parents they are gay. (Not that the parents are gay, of course. Presumably if the parents were gay they would know already. Though I suppose it is possible to be gay and not know. In that case, am I gay? I’ve been an admirer of Judy Garland for years.) I said I would allow him to sleep on the sofa (or settee, as he calls it) and I warned him about the storeroom decorative motif. He said he didn’t care so long as there was a spare shelf for his exfoliation skincare products.
Sunday June 15th
Nigel will be out all day, being advised by Outings. I told him that my aunt Susan, see above, told my grandma and grandad she was gay by saying, ‘I’m a lesbian, like it or lump it.’ ‘It was all over in five seconds, bar the shouting,’ I said.
Nigel shuddered and said, ‘Without an anaesthetic, how brave,’ as though Aunt Susan were an amputee.
I am surrounded night and day by the sex industry of Soho and by people whose lives are ruled by sex. Yet I am myself as chaste as a sea-horse. I think Justine has made a few ‘moves’ in my direction. I bumped into her at the Café Italia yesterday, and she spoon-fed me the froth off her cappuccino. She said she has heard a rumour that Savage and Kim are selling Hoi Polloi and setting up an oxygen bar, which sells fresh air to health freaks. Savage will blow the place up within days. He leaves burning cigarettes on every surface.
Nigel cut my hair, ready for the camera tomorrow. He said, ‘I won’t allow you to hit the screens looking like Princess Diana on testosterone.’
A moment after he’d started, I heard him take a sharp intake of breath and knew he’d spotted my thin/bald patch. I asked him to measure it, using the device on my Swiss Army knife.
He told me that the bald patch has a circumference of one inch. However, we worked out that if I use a strong hairspray and comb my hair in a southwesterly direction, my secret will remain safe.
Nigel has gone back to Leicester to tell his parents and Next about his lover, Norbert. Savage has given me notic
e to quit the flat. I will take him to the highest court in the land before I do so. Though I have to admit that a move back to Leicester seems more and more attractive.
Monday June 16th
Up at five, fed fish, changed cat litter, shaved, dressed, caught the tube to Shoreditch. An hour early, Pie Crust closed. Nowhere to buy a cup of tea. Streets full of mad men and women. Walked about. Felt conspicuous in three-piece and overcoat. Hoped wouldn’t be knocked over as had pig’s head in Next nylon tote-bag.
Belinda, Zippo and a hair-and-make-up artist called Zo, arrived together at 7 a.m. in black cab. Looked surprised to see me. ‘Have sent limo to pick you up,’ said Belinda. She very annoyed. She rings driver of limo on mobile. ‘Yeah, I know, the dick-head’s here,’ I heard her say.
Later
Zo looks at hair. ‘Who did hair last?’ she asks. ‘Club-fingered friend with blunt scissors?’ Say yes. Ask how did she know. She rolls eyes and restyles hair so I look ‘1940s, like Hitler’. Say I don’t like Hitler hairstyle. Zo says, ‘Zippo, how 1940s d’you want him?’ Zippo and Belinda and Zo confer over my head. Apparently hairstyle has to reflect offal theme. War years, etc.
I’m sick of writing in Bridget Jones telegramese, so will revert to my natural free-flowing prose style.
‘Which is why I went for the Hitler,’ says Zo, who, it transpires, knows very little about twentieth-century political history. I pointed out to her that Hitler was a monster, responsible for starting the Second World War. ‘I didn’t do the history module,’ she says, defensively. ‘I dropped it for environmental studies.’
To Zo, and many of her generation, Hitler is merely the Old Brown.
We settled on a Dambusters concept for my TV hairstyle, ‘a sort of short back and sides with attitude’, as Zo called it. She warned me that I was going thin on top and recommended an American spray called Falshair, which settles on the scalp and gives the appearance of real hair. It is available on Cable TV’s shopping channel. She said it comes in seven colours, ‘including your colour – mouse with a hint of grey’. I remarked (quite coolly, given that my heart had almost stopped), ‘Going grey already, hey?’ Which made me sound like Jerry Seinfeld.
Zo said, ‘It’s only at a 2½ per cent ratio, but if you want to cover it up, there’s a product called…’
I didn’t take it in, dear Diary. It was one of those moments. I felt acutely aware of my own mortality. The swift slide towards the death of follicles, the breakdown of tissue, the hardening of some arteries, the narrowing of others. The piping voicebox of adolescence would return.
I have reached my prime without noticing it or enjoying it. I am only a few short decades away from being unable to cut my own toenails. Can I trust Mr Blair? Will the future National Health Service provide adult Pampers on prescription, should I need them? These thoughts flashed through my mind in a nanosecond. I was brought back to the present world by Zo asking me to close my mouth while she applied a heavy-duty foundation to my ‘acne-scarred’ face. Meanwhile, the lights and camera were being adjusted in the mock kitchen in a corner of the studio. I was introduced to my on-air ‘co-presenter’, an Indian man called Dev Singh. He had thick glossy hair, large brown eyes, eyelashes like black palm trees. The teeth! The lips! He said, ‘I haven’t closed my eyes for two nights. I’m so, so scared.’
I admitted that I was also a little apprehensive. ‘Oh, thank you, thank you for sharing that with me,’ he said. He then confessed to me that he was a strict vegetarian and that even the thought of handling offal made him retch. Belinda broke in and said, ‘Dev, you’re only here to look pretty. We don’t expect you to touch the filthy stuff.’
I asked Belinda what Dev’s exact role was to be, and pointed out that no mention had been made about me needing a co-presenter. ‘Yeah, well, we looked at your pilot tape again, and thought we needed to sex it up a bit,’ she said.
Thankfully I still had Cath. She had already prepared the ingredients and placed them in little bowls. She’d even cleaved halfway through the pig’s head for me. I changed into my whites, and Dev changed into a red silk shirt, and a pair of tight white Levi’s, and we staggered through a rehearsal, miming the cooking as we went. At the end Zippo said, ‘Cath, find us some raunchy-looking vegetables and fruit, there’s a love.’ She came back five minutes later with a bag full of carrots, cucumbers and melons, and dumped it on the worktop. ‘See what you can do with those, Dev,’ said Zippo. ‘Five minutes’ rehearsal, then we go.’
Dev moved among the suggestive fruit and veg like a magician practising a trick, then he looked up from his work and said, ‘Well, I’m ready, as you can see from the state of my trousers.’
Everyone in the studio laughed, apart from me, Cath, and Zippo, who was on the phone to LA arguing about the cost of Burt Reynolds’ just-woken-up wig.
I’ve had worse moments in my life – sitting in Casualty aged fifteen with a model aeroplane Super-glued to my nose was unforgettably awful – but being upstaged by Dev and his double entendres came quite near. As I was limo’d home, I was visited by a feeling of self-disgust. I have not written a single creative or poetic word for weeks. I have sold my soul for a mess of pottage.
Thursday June 19th
Justine asked me this evening if I was gay! I blame Pandora. I have been passionately in love with her since I was thirteen and three-quarters, and I am unable to give myself emotionally (or sexually) to any other woman.
Friday June 20th
Zippo rang me to say that they have edited the first three shows. Dev Singh’s contribution has been kept to an absolute minimum. That grotesque business with the cucumber and the pig’s ears has been edited out totally.
Zippo confided in me that they ‘are thinking of letting Dev go’. I said I thought that would be a wise decision. He asked me to fax him a list of ingredients needed for Monday’s recordings. I faxed him three recipes: Giblet Pie, Baked Bullock’s Heart and Economical Soup for the Poor. I was about to ask him if he would be interested in producing The White Van, but he said, ‘Got to go. Goldie’s agent is on line two. She’s asking for wig parity.’
Monday June 23rd
Pandora rang, and said, ‘If the News of the World ring you, say, “No comment”.’ She wouldn’t elaborate. It sounds ominous. We talked for a while about our parents’ romance, using a code: A was my mother, B was her father. Pandora said that C (her mother) had rung her up in tears, saying that she had found a Kit-Kat wrapper in B’s anorak pocket.
‘God!’ I said. ‘A eats two Kit-Kats a day. But why is C so suspicious? Why shouldn’t B eat a Kit-Kat?’
‘He’s boycotted Rowntree’s products since 1989,’ said Pandora. ‘Something about the working conditions of the cocoa-workers.’
‘They’re getting careless,’ I said. We agreed to review the ABC situation next week.
I went back to bed, still exhausted from yesterday’s recordings. I never want to see, smell or even touch offal ever again.
Dev Singh had not been ‘let go’, far from it. If anything he had been let loose! Everyone in the studio was convulsed with laughter at his tiresome antics – apart from me and Cath.
When he juggled with the chicken gizzards and caught them in the wok I almost walked out of the studio. However, I pride myself on my professionalism, so I called on my inner resources and managed to maintain my composure. Plus I threw in some literary aphorisms in an attempt to raise the intellectual tone. While demonstrating how to darken gravy, by the use of PG Tips, I quoted the following bon mot: ‘A woman is like a tea-bag – only in hot water do you realize how strong she is.’ Nancy Reagan said it first. As a mot it’s not that bon, but it impressed Zippo. I think.
In between shows, Zippo speed-dialled LA, sometimes switching to the conference phone so we were all party to his manic conversations about the (surely doomed) True Love film. Nathan Stag, the director of Love as they call it, screamed at one point, ‘Listen up, Zippo, there ain’t a wigmaker in the business who can make Burt Reynolds pass for
thirty-five years of age. It’s a mother f------ no-no.’
Offally Good! is offally bad. I will be a laughing stock.
Tuesday June 24th
Lay awake until 4 a.m., listening to the rain and worrying about the News of the World. I could worry for the Olympics and win a medal. Gold.
William rang me at 5.30 a.m. to remind me that it’s his birthday on July 1st. How do I tell an almost-three-year-old not to ring me before nine o’clock in the morning? I love the kid, but I wish BT had never invented automatic dial.
Humfri not seen for two days.
Wednesday June 25th
Read about President Clinton and the sex allegations. Everybody is having sex, apart from me. Even Malcolm is enjoying a carnal relationship, with Annette, a woman who sells the Evening Standard on the Strand. I went to observe her today, from the opposite pavement. She makes Ann Widdecombe look like Kate Moss. Her legging-clad thighs look like those redwood trees that Americans drive their cars through. However, she’s got a pretty face, and with a decent haircut would look OK.
I can always tell when Malcolm’s had a good mauling from her the night before. His face, neck and chest are covered in newsprint the next morning. Malcolm is convinced that ‘the Chinks’ have kidnapped Humfri and turned him into beef with black bean and ginger sauce. He claims that he once found a name-tag, ‘Fluffy’, inside a carton of takeaway chicken chop suey, in Wolverhampton in 1993. He went to the public health with the Fluffy tag, but the officials didn’t take him seriously. ‘I was on the Woodpecker at the time,’ he conceded, when I inquired about his general demeanour in the public-health office. ‘The stuck-up git called the filth, who chucked me out.’ It was obvious from his bitter tone that Malcolm still bears a grudge against the authorities.