For eight years, he’d done both, commuting twice a week to do the acting, record the soap, and the rest of the time he was running around town, doing four, five, six, seven scripts a day. Television commercials, radio commercials, documentaries, spotty audiovisual work for spotty conference producers, even dubbing the occasional foreign film, although that was something like work.
One hilariously hectic day, he did eleven sessions, and if you’d asked him to name just one of the products he’d worked on, he wouldn’t have been able to tell you. They’d all run into one.
Eventually he gave up the Soap of the North, or it gave him up. They got a bit fed up of him turning up at the last minute before recording with, at best, a sketchy idea of his lines. So they wrote him out in a spectacular multi-car pileup, some thousands of teary Northern mums wrote teary letters to the producer, there were jokey little items in the TV columns, and that was that. He was free. Free to concentrate on the Voice.
And he’d done a lot of work along the way: what his drama teachers would call, in that weird phrase, “honing your craft,” which had always sounded to Victor like some grave, seamanlike ritual performed by pipe-sucking Torbay fishermen when it was simply too rainy to go out in their little boats.
So he had all the standard accents, and he had his character voices. Gerry the bloody Gerbil, for example. Later on, he’d pulled an occasional booking on a late-night radio satire show. And when he gave up the Northern soap, the producer brought him in as a permanent. He did a very good impression of the Prime Minister, a reasonable Margaret Thatcher (contradiction in terms), and the writers had latched onto his gay archbishop character straightaway and wrote him a one-minute sketch every week.
He was Victor the Voice and the microphone loved him.
But Harry Phoenix didn’t love him; Harry Phoenix hated him. And he hated Harry Phoenix. Lying back on the sofa which had been the cradle of Success, and which was now the coffin of Failure, he wondered fuzzily just how he could get back at Harry. The trouble was, Harry was armoured. Harry was more than Harry. Harry was a symbol. He was the flag bearer for a whole new generation of smart, cunning, get-rich-quick bastards who were the media equivalent of a futures trading-floor. Face it, he told himself, Harry’s too much for you. They all are. Victor the Voice is no match for Harry Phoenix, the Highflier. The Flame-Bird.
The slick, streetwise producer was stronger than the ex-Victor, ex-Voice. And now, there was more to worry about, here in the black night of the reception area. Because at the glass doors, there had appeared a huge insect, black and iridescent, which was staring through the doors with its one enormous glistening black eye. I’m worse than I thought, Victor said to himself. Now it’s the DTs. The End. He let his head roll back against the leather cushions and sighed a long sigh. The end of Victor the Voice. Harry had been right, up there in the studio, when he was finishing Victor off with the ice-cold efficiency of a professional hit man.
Harry Phoenix had said, “And don’t give me that Victor the Voice crap, Beattie, because it doesn’t wash anymore. He was Victor the Voice, now he’s just another broken-down voice man who does everything the same. Everybody’s heard everything he can do, we’ve all heard it all, and I want something different. This is a true-life — well, drawn from true life — story about shocking, bloody murder, for crying out loud. Jake and Wally gave it a narrative treatment, with a voice-over, because we don’t want to risk being over-sensational. (God forbid, thought Victor, that you should ever be thought that.) But the voice has to have fear and murder in it. I want to hear bloody slaughter coming through every syllable. And Victor can’t hack it. If you want to give him something, let him do the radio announcer’s voice, or read the tabloid headlines, if you like. There are lots of little bits in there. If you love him so much, let him do the sound bites.”
Beattie said, “I’m sure Victor can come up with the right tone of voice if we ask him. And anyway, this is not really the time to be having this conversation, Harry. With respect. We’ve got half the voice in the can and now you come in and tell me you don’t like it.”
Harry’s voice was full of razor blades. “With respect, Beattie, the only reason we’re having this conversation now is because I wasn’t told you were playing housemother to washed-up old voice merchants. Why I wasn’t told we can talk about some other time. But the fact is that we are having the conversation now, and I’m telling you the voice isn’t right.”
Beattie tried to speak, but Harry wasn’t having it. “Beattie, this is my baby. I’ve spent a good bit of my life bringing it up and you’re not going to kill it now. You’re not going to kill my baby. We’re late already on this thing. Transmission’s two bloody weeks away. The commissioning editor loves the rough cut, but we’re late. The lab’s biking everything round tonight, because I thought, I thought, you’d be ready to do a final sound mix. And you’re not. I tell you, Beattie, I’ve got a lot hanging on this. You let me down, and I’m dead. But then, if I am, love, so are you.”
Victor was barely conscious of this. He was trying to keep his red-hot ears from flashing like hazard lights.
Sound bites? Is that what Harry had actually said? Let him do some sound bites? He felt a wash of rage sweep over him. Who was this little arsehole anyway? A jumped-up little nothing who’d squeezed his way into the networks with a series of two-for-a-penny pop videos, had managed to sell this half-baked series idea to some half-witted commissioning editor, and now he thought he was Jack Warner or somebody.
Bastard. Frank had been right.
“A bit of scarcity, Victor,” Frank had cautioned. “Don’t do everything. You know what they’re like. They’re fickle bastards. You’re flavour-of-the-month one minute and then suddenly you can’t get arrested.”
He wondered when it had started to happen, his not being able to get arrested. Two, three years ago? Or perhaps it was during the recession. When advertising spending was the first thing to go, and suddenly the Swish people and the Grobbles people found that not advertising didn’t make any difference. Perhaps that was when the never-ending gush of work had slowed down and, almost overnight, become a trickle. The worst was that the trickle was work of a kind he would never have touched when he was Victor the Voice. Two-line radio commercials for regional stations, some industrial-training-film work. A talking book, for God’s sake.
He’d given up the flat in the Barbican and moved to Fulham, telling himself that it was the smart move. Retrench and reform. He’d sold the car. Who needed a car in the city anyway?
But the deeper problem was, when you were running around town from studio to studio, you needed something to give you a bit of a bump start in the morning, and then several somethings throughout the day, between sessions, to keep you going. Because after fifteen years of it, it was all so bloody boring. Mindless, even. So, he’d got into the habit of having a large scotch as a heart-starter before his first session, usually in the Intrepid Fox in Dean Street, and then several more as the day went on. And you can’t go on like that for long before it’s noticed.
“Easy on the sauce, Victor,” Frank Porteous had said several times. “I had a comment the other day. Nothing naughty, but you ought to watch it.”