All to Play For (23 page)

“I’m going… to Harvard.”

“
Harvard
? Whatever for?”

“To study business management at the highest level in the world. Alongside the top – the toppest people in the world!”

“Really? How wonderful! The DG wants you to do this course, does he?”

“He is
desperate
for me to do it. He’s already done it himself.”

Catherine hugged him. She understood that this was the highest accolade imaginable. It would cost the BBC a small fortune to send him, and they would only invest that money in a person they were certain of.

“Is anyone else going on the course?”

He beamed at her again. “No!” and laughed. She hugged him again.

“Well done. Well done,
DG-in-waiting
!” They kissed, and then settled back. Chris poured the tea.

“I shall be away for ten weeks, I’m afraid. Will that be alright?”

“Of course, don’t be silly. We’ll miss you lots but we’ll be fine. When do you think you’ll go?”

Chris grimaced. “That’s the bad news. It starts on September 2nd.”

“We’re going on holiday that day.”

“I know.”

“Surely you don’t have to do it immediately?”

“I can’t leave it till next year. I’ll be too busy to go. They might send someone else. It’s too big an opportunity to turn down.” Chris stared at his tea.

Catherine’s face fell and she went limp as the full implications gradually sank in. No holiday. No relaxation. No conception. No husband, in fact, for ten weeks, and no doubt his work commitments would keep increasing if he was being fast-tracked to the top. The moment had passed for them to consolidate the family. They had missed that boat whilst running to catch another. She pondered in silence, dry-eyed, and realised the war was lost.

“Don’t worry darling,” Chris took her hand and squeezed it. “We’ll have a holiday. We can go for a fortnight in August, and another fortnight at Christmas. I told the DG – I told him straight – I can’t deny my family their holiday, and he agreed. ‘You’ve got to take care of the staff!’ he said.” Catherine smiled but didn’t care for this summary of her role. He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. “We’ll get pregnant, Cathy, just don’t worry about it. Please?” She smiled wanly and nodded. She snuggled down into his shoulder feeling suddenly exhausted, closing her eyes so he wouldn’t see her sadness.

“Tired darling? I’ll let you go to sleep. I’ll just go downstairs for a little while, look at some papers.” He kissed her head, extricated himself, and left her alone.

Chapter Ten

I managed to spin out my time at the independent production company for the best part of a year; it was entertaining to hear Maggie’s account of Drama Department politics from a comfortable distance, but eventually I had to return and engage with it all myself. I was recalled to Shepherd’s Bush with nothing definite to work on. With my thirtieth birthday behind me I was conscious of the need to move my career up a gear, and my ambitions were growing. Maggie’s brand of energy found the frustrations of development hell intolerable, so she got herself a job on
Casualty
and went off to Bristol to gain production experience.

At the time I was living in Archway, near the bottom of Highgate Hill, where Dick Whittington had his ‘turn again’ moment. I felt a certain empathy with him. I’d managed to get a mortgage on a tiny flat in a Georgian house, nothing very special but it was homely and in walking distance of Waterlow Park, Highgate Cemetery and Hampstead Heath. Three places I’d come to love dearly as a substitute for wild and woolly Wales. I might not have much time off, but being able to walk from my own front door and enjoy so much natural beauty in the middle of London was a great substitute. I don’t how people manage without it, I really don’t. You must go and see for yourself, if you don’t already know the area.

I lived alone as none of my boyfriends had been long-term enough to contemplate moving in with. You could say that was down to my bad experience with Steve, the director of the Newham Youth Theatre. I’d really fallen for him, and I was naïve enough to believe that he’d leave his wife for me. That’s what he’d told me, of course. Maybe he even believed it himself, until the crunch came. (Did he hell, I can hear you thinking. Okay, you’re probably right. He was just another fantasising narcissist. Or was he a narcissistic fantasist? I suppose he was like Bill Clinton: he did it ‘because he could’.) I learned my lesson, I was determined not to let another man make an idiot of me and I grew more and more independent. I earned my own living, paid my own way, owned my own flat, made my own fun. Sorted.

Turning thirty was a bit of a surprise, I have to admit. It crept up on me. The whole cliché of being left behind because I was still single, plus the next milestone along the road being the appallingly old
forty
– it was too much. I worried myself sick for a day, and then realised that the only way to avoid turning into my unfortunate namesake Bridget Jones was not to care about it, so I set it aside. If the right man ever came along I would reconsider, but for the time being I was very happy with my career.

It was terribly important to me that I prove myself as good as anyone else. The BBC seemed dominated by posh people from the Home Counties, who would be terribly polite and interested in you for as long as they maintained eye contact, and then leave you feeling like a llama chewing on an apple they’ve unexpectedly shoved in your mouth. They acted as though you were fascinating, and then briskly moved on to the next exotic creature, however charming the encounter there was no doubt who was in charge. They were on their home ground. You weren’t. It didn’t matter which part of the UK you came from. The prevailing culture was that of the English ruling class. (It still is, but they disguise their accents.)

That’s why I didn’t want to work on stories about Wales. I didn’t want to be pigeonholed, I wanted to be a purveyor of fine drama, universal drama, not the obvious stuff. I didn’t want to be told I could have that little corner to myself whilst they – the men, the white men, the posh white men and women – got on with the important programmes. Do I sound chippy? Well, I’m sure you don’t expect me to apologise.

The BBC is always saying its role is to reflect the diversity of voices we have in Britain. Whether or not it fulfils that role is another matter. To me, it’s not just about voices, it’s too easy to interpret that as a range of regional accents. Now that posh people have stopped telling us accents are a sign of inferiority, they like to collect them; you hear that on Radio 4 all the time. How quaint, how historical, how amusing these old folk sound! Quick, tape them before they fall off the perch. Presenters always assume that the listener shares their point of view, that of observer/consumer. They never imagine listeners might share the subject’s point of view. The only people presenters really address are those just like themselves.

Point of view is a central issue in all things televisual, we even abbreviate it (POV). In theatre there’s only one, and that’s the audience’s, whether they’re arranged neatly in rows or wrapped around the stage. As soon as you start using cameras you have a complex situation. There are many different ways you can look at – and represent – your subject. It’s as big as moving from two dimensions to three. Perspective changes everything. Add in time (the fourth dimension) and you’re on the verge of losing any concrete sense of truth. Don’t quote me, but I believe they’ve identified as many as eleven dimensions now. Just trying to get my head around that leaves me reeling. It’s bad enough trying to write a novel with five main characters and lots of minor ones – trying to see life through all their eyes in order to build a rounded picture of a huge institution at a time of national change, trying to tell a story with depth and complexity, and make it a good read – to be perfectly frank it’s doing my head in. So many risks… confusion, obscurity, tedium, lack of point… what
is
the point of a story? What’s the point of this one, for a start? Well I’m not going to tell you half way through, am I? Obviously. Skip to the end if you’re bored.

Where was I? POV. I’ve changed mine as I’ve got older, like we all do. Getting older is a bit like climbing a mountain (stop me if I’m repeating myself). Your point of view keeps changing the higher up you go. At the start you can’t see a lot, but you’re focussed on the journey and you have a clear mental image of the summit, which you don’t doubt you’ll reach in due course. By the time you’re half way up you’ve accumulated experience and distance, and you can look back as well as up. You can also remember your initial POV and place it in the context of your present situation. I find that so interesting, don’t you? Did you know that scientists have made carbon fibre so strong that they’re now working on a cosmic elevator, an actual lift that will carry people miles up in space to an orbiting satellite, and it should be working by the middle of the twenty-first century? Imagine what our point of view will be like from there! Perhaps it will even lead to a new level of consciousness? Anyway, back to me and my brilliant career at the BBC.

Better Be Cheap
seemed to be the driving force in 90s broadcasting. As the free market dogma ran riot across the planet, all British public services – from schools to railways to hospitals – were made to function as businesses, proving their cost-effectiveness and creaming off profits for their new shareholders. The BBC’s fixed income forced it to fund its new digital services through internal cuts and extra sales. Staff, resource departments, development budgets – everything possible was pruned back hard, to two shoots above the root. Every department had to pay every other department for the services it used, in an endless round of internal market accounting in which only managers were allowed to proliferate. The need to attract additional funding and world-wide sales meant that no show would get commissioned without star names attached.

The Drama Department received a clear message regarding its new status within the corporation when it was given notice to leave Television Centre. The fifth floor of the doughnut was at the hub of the BBC; to work there was to be next to the beating heart of the organisation. Suddenly the management decided on a transplant. Drama was to make way for Sport, which was considered the new key to balancing the schedules and the corporation budget. There was a massive shift in attitude at the top of the BBC. The seventh floor no longer housed the finest specialists in culture and entertainment, promoted to guide others further along their own path; men like David Attenborough and Michael Grade. The new leaders knew little about making programmes, but a lot about politics and business management. A tabloid ethos began to creep in as the target audience grew larger and larger, and ‘dumbing down’ was a term heard increasingly from those who could see standards beginning to fall. The managers denied it, accusing critics of elitism and justifying their decisions with statistics. The irony was that the poor old Beeb desperately needed reform and modernisation in its working practices, no-one could deny that – but what we got was closer to napalm.

It seemed to me that the managers on the seventh floor were like a double-thick layer of icing on top of the doughnut, dripping down stickily over the entire building until everything wholesome in it was overwhelmed.

The Drama Department’s move was presented as a positive event, as there was much more office space available across the road. Half-concealed behind the tube station stood a four-block office complex which pre-dated double-glazing, air-conditioning, and even window blinds, although it did have its own canteen. The unexpected benefit was a drawing-together of the staff. With only each other to talk to, and a sense of rejection from the main hive, morale took a sharp dip and personal survival instincts kicked in. Some felt they had been exiled to St Helena, shamed for some unknown misdemeanour. Others relished the view from the sidelines, and redoubled their cynicism. Most just felt terribly sad, knowing that the quality of programmes would inevitably slip and slide until their distinctive values fell away, and BBC drama would end up no better than any other. It would be years before the viewing public would notice, since programmes take years to make. By the time they started asking what had happened to the quantity – and possibly the quality – of BBC programming it would be too late. The stable door would be safely bolted but the horse would have legged it over the horizon.

All that’s by-the-by. Now that I was no longer the up-and-coming youngster, I was determined to put myself on the map by producing a drama of my own. I had a great idea based on my experience of being a teacher – nothing to do with Wales at all. If I could squeeze it onto the development list and keep it alive I’d stand an excellent chance of being allowed to produce it. (First-time producers were more popular with the management than you might think, yes, you’ve got it – they’re a lot cheaper than experienced producers. In fact you don’t even have to give them a pay rise, there’s a jargon phrase for it:
acting up
. No doubt it goes back to Reith and the civil service set-up that launched the BBC in the first place, if not further back to the navy and the cat-o-nine-tails… we should be grateful they don’t use that, I suppose. I bet they’d like to.) So I was throwing my hat into the ring, risking my reputation and all that, a bad first film or serial could mean the end of your career. A prize-winning first film gave you at least three years of professional celebrity before you had to prove yourself again. (And then again, and again.) Everyone wants to win a BAFTA. You pretend you’re not bothered so that you won’t be crushed by disappointment, but we’re all human.

I nursed my great idea in secret until I’d picked my writer. I didn’t have the confidence to write it myself, not even the proposal. I needed it to look really good, to do the idea justice. I decided I wanted Jill Watkins to do it, so I met her in Crouch End where she lived, just a mile or two from my own place. We talked the concept through and she liked it. She was more than ten years older than me and had lots of experience of writing for mainstream audiences; with a son of her own she understood teenage boys, which was crucial to making the script convincing. She agreed to develop it for me on spec, I would be credited with the idea, and would then try to get it commissioned. She needed no persuasion, we shared much the same attitude to the story and felt it would be a very productive partnership. She promised to send it to me in a few days.