“Go on, then. Fuck it. Fuck the expense.”
“Top man, Dec”
“I think it’s a good idea. I’m pleased with that. Old Declan’s still got it, eh?”
“Too right. You’re a newshound. You’re the Newshound of the Baskervilles.”
“What you’ve got to tell yourself,” I told them, “is that no one will be watching.”
“That’s one of your old pro tricks, right?” said JJ knowingly.
“No,” I said. “Believe me. Literally no one will be watching. I have never met anyone who has ever seen my show.”
The world headquarters of FeetUpTV!—known, inevitably, to its staff as TitsUpTV!—is in a sort of shed in Hoxton. The shed contains a small reception area, two dressing rooms and a studio, where all four of our homegrown programmes are made. Every morning, a woman called Candy-Ann sells cosmetics; I split Thursday afternoon with a man called D J Goodnews, who speaks to the dead, usually on behalf of the receptionist, the window cleaner, the minicab driver booked to take him home, or anyone else who happens to be passing through: “Does the letter A mean anything to you, Asif ?” and so on. The other afternoons are taken up by tapes of old dog races from the US—once upon a time the intention was to offer viewers the chance to bet, but nothing ever came of it, and in my opinion, if you can’t bet, then dog racing, especially old dog racing, loses some of its appeal. During the evening, two women sit talking to each other, in and usually about their underwear, while viewers text them lewd messages, which they ignore. And that’s more or less it. Declan runs the station on behalf of a mysterious Asian businessman, and those of us who work for FeetUpTV! can only presume that somehow, in ways too obtuse and sophisticated for us to decipher, we are involved in the trafficking of class A drugs and child pornography. One theory is that the dogs in the races are sending out encoded messages to the traffickers: if, say, the dog in the outside lane wins, then that is a message to the Thai contact that he should send a couple of kilos of heroin and four thirteen-year-olds first thing in the morning. Something like that, anyway.
My guests on Sharp Words tend to be old friends who want to do something to help, or former celebrities in a boat not dissimilar to my own—holed under the waterline and sinking fast. Some weeks I get has-beens, and everyone gets wildly over-excited, but most weeks it’s had-beens. Candy-Ann, D J GoodNews and the two semi-clothed ladies have appeared on my show not just once, but several times, in order to give viewers a chance to get to know them a little better. (Sharp Words is two hours long, and though the advertising department, namely Karen on reception, does its best, we are rarely interrupted by messages from our sponsors. The theoretical viewer is highly unlikely to feel as though we have barely scratched the conversational surface.) Attracting people of the calibre of Maureen and Jess, then, constituted something of a coup: only rarely have my guests appeared on the show during the same decade that they have appeared in the newspapers.
I took pride in my interviewing. I mean, I still do, but at a time when I seemed to be able to do nothing else properly, I hung on to my competence in a studio as I would to a tree root on the side of a cliff. I have, in my time, interviewed drunken, maudlin actors at eight in the morning and drunken, aggressive footballers at eight in the evening. I have forced lying politicians to tell something like the truth, and I have had to cope with mothers whose grief has made them uncomfortably verbose, and not once have I let things become sloppy. My studio sofa was my classroom, and I didn’t tolerate any waywardness. Even in those desperate FeetUpTV! months spent talking to nobodies and never-weres, people with nothing to say and no ability to say it, it was comforting to think that there was some area of my life in which I was competent. So when Jess and JJ decided that my programme was a joke and acted accordingly, I suffered something of a sense of humour failure. I wish, of course, that I hadn’t; I wish that I could have found it in me to be a little less pompous, a little more relaxed. True, I was encouraging them to talk about an unforgettable experience that they hadn’t had, and which I knew they hadn’t had. And granted, that imaginary unforgettable experience was preposterous. And yet, despite these impediments, I had somehow expected a higher level of professionalism.
I don’t wish to overstate my case; it’s not bloody rocket science, doing a TV interview. You chat to your guests beforehand, agree on a rough conversational course, remind them of their hilarious anecdotes and, in this case, of the known facts about the fictions we were about to discuss, as provided by Jess in her original interview—namely, that the angel looked like Matt Damon, he floated above the roof, and he was wearing a baggy white suit. Don’t fuck about with those bits, I told them, or we’ll get into a mess. So what happens? Almost immediately? I ask JJ what the angel was wearing, and he tells me that the angel was wearing a promotional T-shirt for the Sandra Bullock film While You Were Sleeping—a film which, as luck would have it, Jess had seen on TV, and was thus able to synopsize at considerable length.
“If we can just stick to the subject,” I said. “Lots of people have seen While You Were Sleeping . Very few people have seen an angel.”
“Fuck off. No one’s watching. You said.”
“That was just one of my old pro’s tricks.”
“We’ll be in trouble now, then. Because I just said «Fuck off». You’ll get loads of complaints for that.”
“I think that our viewers are sophisticated enough to know that extreme experiences sometimes produce extreme language.”
“Good. Fuckofffuckofffuckoff.” She made her apologetic wave at Maureen, and then into the camera, at the outraged people of Britain. “Anyway, watching rubbish Sandra Bullock films isn’t a very extreme experience.”
“We were talking about the angel, not Sandra Bullock.”
“What angel?”
And so on, and on, until Declan walked in with the cosmetics lady and ushered us off the air, into the street and, in my case, out of a job.
Jess
Someone should write a song or something called “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”. Something like, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They make you feel fucking bad.” Because they do. Especially your dad. That’s why he gets the rhyme. He wouldn’t like me saying this, but if it wasn’t for me and Jen, no one would ever have heard of him. He’s not like the boss of Education—that’s the Secretary of State. There are loads of ministers, and he’s only one of them, so he’s what they call a junior minister, which is a laugh and a half because he’s not very junior at all. So he’s sort of a loser politician, really. You wouldn’t mind if he was a loser because he shot his mouth off and said what he thought about Iraq or whatever, but he doesn’t; he says what he’s told to say, and it still doesn’t do him much good.
Most people have a rope that ties them to someone, and that rope can be short or it can be long. (Be long. Belong. Get it?) You don’t know how long, though. It’s not your choice. Maureen’s rope ties her to Matty and it’s about six inches long and it’s killing her. Martin’s rope ties him to his daughters, and, like a stupid dog, he thinks it isn’t there. He goes running off somewhere—into a nightclub after a girl, up a building, whatever—and then suddenly it brings him up short and chokes him and he acts surprised, and then he does the same thing again the next day. I think JJ is tied to this bloke Eddie he keeps talking about, the one he used to be in the band with.
And I’m learning that I’m tied to Jen, and not to my mum and dad—not to home, which is where the rope should be. Jen thought she was tied to them too, I’m sure of it. She felt safe, just because she was a kid with parents, so she kept walking and walking and walking until she walked off a cliff or into the desert or off to Texas with her mechanic. She thought she’d get jerked back by the rope, but there wasn’t one. She learned that the hard way. So I’m tied to Jen now, but Jen isn’t solid, like a house. She’s floating, blowing around, no one knows where she is; she’s sort of fucking useless, really, isn’t she?