Inconceivable (13 page)

Dear etc.,

W
ell, this morning was a pressure job all right, our postcoital compatibility test. Doctor’s orders. Shag and then straight round to the clinic to check the juices. Not much fun for the woman certainly but let me tell you it’s a horrible situation for the bloke who is called upon to provide the wherewithal. I mean it’s not ideal, is it? Sex on demand is tricky enough at the best of times, but in the morning, particularly after a big night at the Director General’s, it’s a very tough call indeed. The truth is we haven’t done it on a weekday morning in years, well you don’t, do you?

We’re not bloody students, are we?

Besides which, the whole problem was compounded by the fact that we slept through the alarm, dammit, and I happened to have a particularly early and rather important meeting.

Lucy says, ‘When don’t you have a meeting?’ But actually that’s not true. I am, in fact, often there at her beck and call. The point is when I am available to her she’s not interested. She’s only interested in presuming on my time when she knows I have other things to do.

So, what with the hangover (which I think I managed to disguise from Lucy), the earliness of the hour, and the impending meeting, instant and impressive erections were not massively in evidence.

Lucy tried to be nice about it but quite frankly she didn’t try very hard. I don’t think women have any idea how difficult it can be.

They think that because most men seem to have erections pretty much all the time we can summon them up at will. They do not understand that when it comes to dicks, the captain is not in control of the ship.

Lucy said, ‘I cannot believe this! Every morning you have a horn you could hang a bath-towel on. What’s the problem now?’

She simply doesn’t understand. I admit, of course, that on almost every other morning of my life I have woken up with an erection but that, and this is the point, is because
I didn’t need one
.

It really is unfair. Any bloke can get a stiffy when he doesn’t need one, and of course he almost always does. On buses; in the checkout queue at Sainsbury’s; anywhere, really. But what women do not understand is that these unasked-for horns are normally not bonking horns but useless, sexless, pointless, unlooked-for protrusions.

Anyway the point I’m making is that the dick has a mind of its own, considering itself entirely autonomous and impervious to orders from the bridge. This is something that women need to understand, something that they should be told by their mothers at an early age. The fact is simply this: trying to tell a knob what to do is the very last thing it will appreciate or respond to.

I’m going on a bit, I know, but the injustice of the situation moves me deeply. Anyway, we pulled it off in the end, so to speak, but it was a very, very close-run thing.

I did, however, manage to make my meeting, which I was pleased about because it was a special one, concerning as it did Nigel’s major new film-making initiative, an area in which considering my current standing with the Controller I cannot afford to screw up. Actually, I was rather excited about it. After all, film is film and we humble telly people do not normally get to dabble in so exalted a medium.

It was to be a ‘breakfast’ meeting at a posh hotel, I’m sorry to say. Whichever American it was who invented such a deeply uncivilized idea should have his eggs boiled, his muffins split and his pop-tarts toasted on an open fire. You can’t make sense of a meeting over brekkie! How the hell are you supposed to take anything seriously when you’re eating Rice Krispies? Or, worse, Coco Pops, which was what I had.

I can never resist the kids’ stuff when I eat in hotels. I always want to order sausage, chips and alphabetti spaghetti from ‘Sidney the Seal’s Jolly Menu for Whizz Kidz’. Well, let’s face it, that sort of stuff is normally the only thing that British hotels can actually cook. If you’re fool enough to order anything ‘steeped’ in a sauce or containing the words ‘jus’, ‘julienne’ or ‘trio’ you might as well diary in half an hour in the bog for the afternoon while you’re at it.

In fact this was Claridge’s, so all the posh nosh was probably superb and I could have ordered porridge or salmon or the full English but I’ve never been big on breakfast, and the smell of kippers and kedgeree before eleven quite frankly makes me nauseous. Fish for breakfast has always struck me as wrong, like having a croissant for supper or coffee in a pub. Apparently, however, fishie brekkie is the last word in traditional crusty, old English chic (‘chic’ I believe being the traditional spelling of ‘shite’), so Claridge’s of course offers it. Not for me, though, nor salmon and scrambled egg on a lightly toasted muffin. Let’s face it, how often in my life do I get the chance to have a bowl of Coco Pops?

Anyway, to ‘cut to the chase’, as people in film say, I was meeting some people from Above The Line Films.

I
do
beg your pardon, I was meeting
with
some people from Above The Line Films. One must of course speak American English when moving in film circles these days (sorry,
motion picture
circles) and since those circles are the ones in which my Controller wishes me to move, American English I must speak when I meet
with
all sorts of motion picture wankers, or, rather,
jerk offs
.

The people from Above The Line are very hip at the moment, the reason being that they recently made a film that some Americans quite liked. It’s an interesting thing about the Brit film industry (such as it is) that for all the gung-ho, Cool Britannia jingoism we spout about our cool new British talent, we judge our product exclusively on whether or not people in America go to see it. You could make a British film which every person in Britain went to see twice, plus half the population of the European Community, but unless at least five thousand Americans have also been persuaded to go the style fascists will judge it naff and parochial.

On the other hand, if we make a movie which flops everywhere and which
only
five thousand Americans go and see, the director will still be seen as a major burgeoning international talent. This is what the Australians call a cultural cringe. They used to have the same thing about us. In the sixties it was no good being big in Oz, you had to be big in Britain. They’ve dropped that now and concentrate on America like everyone else. I believe that some New Zealanders still see success in London as important but probably only the ones who supply the lamb to Marks & Spencer.

Anyway, long story short as Lucy would say, there I was, post deeply unsatisfactory shag, sitting at Claridge’s ‘doing’ Coco Pops and kedgeree with three of Britain’s brightest motion picture talents. Justin Cocker, an estuary Oxbridge mid-Atlantic drawler who called the toilet the ‘bathroom’ and asked if they had any bagels and lox. A snarling Scot called Ewan Proclaimer, who took one look at the Claridge’s breakfast room and said, ‘God, I fuckin’ hate the fuckin’ English. I mean they are just so fuckin’
English
, aren’t they? D’you ken what I’m saying here?’

Also a pencil-thin woman called Petra. On the phone the previous day I had asked Justin Cocker if Petra had a surname and he said that if I needed to ask that question I did not know the British motion picture industry. Which is right, of course, I don’t. Which is why I work for sad old telly.

Weird meeting. Like a summit between people from different planets. The BBC being vaguely located on earth, and Above The Line Films being located somewhere far beyond the galaxy of Barkingtonto. The extraordinary thing is that they think that
they
are the ones who live in the real world. This is because the BBC is publicly funded and is hence some dusty old pampered 1940s welfare state relic which thinks the eighties never happened.

Amazing how these days it’s hip to assume that the money supplied by vast multinational media conglomerates (writing off their tax losses) is somehow more tough and real and proper than that raised by the public for the purposes of their own entertainment.

Anyway, on this occasion licence fee money appeared to be good enough. (It certainly paid for the breakfast, anyway.) I told them that the BBC was interested in co-producing more films with a view to theatrical release prior to TV screening and that my special area was comedy. It seemed I had come to the right people. They said if I wanted comedy they had comedy. Real comedy. Not crap comedy, they assured me; not all that
fuckin’ crap
that the BBC passes off as comedy, not
shite
comedy, but sharp, witty, edgy, in-your-face, on-the-nose and up-your-arse comedy. ‘Two words,’ they said, ‘Zeit’ and ‘Geist’. In other words, ‘Tomorrow’s comedy today.’

Well, I can’t deny I was excited. This surely was what we wanted.

I had only to steer this lot towards Nigel and my standing would again ride high. Ewan Proclaimer produced his script, the eagerly awaited follow-up to his film
Sick Junkie
, which had been ‘hugely successful’, i.e. some American critics liked it, although it was actually seen by less people than watch the weather on Grampian.
Sick Junkie
had been a career breaker for Ewan, but now he explained that he wanted to move totally away from all that stuff.

His new script is called
Aids and Heroin
.

‘It’s a comedy about a group of normal, ordinary kids,’ said Ewan Proclaimer, ‘all heroin addicts, of course. Probably Scottish, perhaps Welsh or Irish…’

‘Although we’d shoot it in London,’ interjected Pencil Petra.

‘Well, of course we’d shoot it in London!’ Ewan snapped. He was clearly not a man who liked to be interrupted. ‘Morag and I have only just got wee Jamie into a decent school…Now these kids survive on the edges of society, right? Dealing drugs, stealing, whoring, ripping off the social. The movie is a week in their ordinary mundane lives. They inject heroin into their eyeballs, they have babies in toilets, they get Aids, they try to raise veins on their private parts in order to inject more heroin, they kill a social worker, they have anal sex in exchange for heroin which turns out to be cut with bleach and kills them, they have abortions, they’re raped by gangs of English policemen…’

My head was spinning at this apocalyptic vision.

‘Excuse me,’ I risked an interjection. ‘I hope I’m following. This is a comedy we’re discussing here?’

‘Total comedy,’ Ewan assured me, ‘but
real
comedy, about what’s
actually
happening to kids today, not escapist
English
crap.’

It all sounded very post watershed to me, but you never know these days. Things are moving so fast I confidently expect to see them making bongs out of Squeezy bottles on
Blue Peter
. But anyway, broadcastable or not, I wasn’t having any of it. Well really, it makes me so tired. This never-ending diet of sex and drugs and urban horror that well-heeled highly educated young film makers seem to feel duty-bound to serve up as stone-cold naturalism. For heaven’s sake, I know that life is tough out there but not exclusively so. There are more adolescents in the Girl Guides and the Sea Scouts than there are teenage junkies, but nobody ever makes a film about them.

I finished my Coco Pops in a marked manner, resisting the temptation to drink the chocolatey milk out of the bowl, and rose to leave.

‘Well, thanks for explaining your idea to me, Ewan,’ I said.

‘Unfortunately the BBC is not in the business of funding cynical tales about drugs and prostitution which purport to reflect everyday Britain merely so that the fashion junkies who make them can swank about at Cannes and then bugger off to work in the States the first chance they get.’

‘Look, bollocks to the English bullshit,’ Ewan Proclaimer replied.

‘Do you want the picture or not?’

‘Ah dinnah,’ I said in what I hoped was a Scottish accent, although it almost certainly wasn’t. Then I took up the bill and left the room feeling proudly self-assertive. I may not be able to write myself but I can at least protect the public from the self- indulgent witterings of those who can’t either.

By the time I got back to Television Centre I had worked myself into a right old self-righteous lather. The first thing I did was to get Daphne to take down a sarky fax telling Above The Line Films where they could shove it. I had no sooner finished doing this and was contemplating a calming game of
Tomb Raider
on my PC when Nigel called and summoned me to his office.

I trudged along the circular corridor convinced that this was it, that the long-awaited shafting was about to be administered. It seemed obvious that Nigel intended to get rid of me before the Prime Minister’s imminent visit (set for this Saturday) so that he could take all the credit himself. As I entered the hallowed office, however, it seemed that I was wrong. Nigel was positively beaming at me and actually asked if I wanted a coffee.

‘Sam!’ he said. ‘I just heard you did breakfast with Above The Line and met with Justin, Ewan and Petra.’

I was about to protest that I had only been following orders but he gave me no choice.