Now I’m brutal but I was never racist and I was never cruel. There are six million very emotive reasons why Hitler’s rule should not be eulogised but it’s happening anyway, as right-wing revisionists and hormonal teens wrap him in the doomed romance of a Twentieth Century Macbeth. They forget the death camps and fixate on the pageantry - which brings us to our current set of circumstances: a lone man sitting in a projection room watching Riefenstahl’s “Triumph Of The Will’. His name is Pip Lindberg. He presents a television chatshow. And Nazis get him hard.
They say he has a big heart. I’m sure he does. Probably in a jar, next to his collection of Third Reich crockery and a lampshade covered in human skin. I think back to that old nursery rhyme: “Slugs and snails and puppy dog’s tails. That’s what little boys are made of.” My mind turns to the constituent components of your average minor celebrity and I picture a poisonous doughnut: a viscous jam of ego and narcotics boiled inside a half-baked cake of ruthless ambition and Munchausenian self-delusion. Sprinkled with sugar, of course. And if you gorge yourself on the empty calories of celebrity? Well, you end up with a potbelly and a sticky face. Lindberg has both of these.
He wears gaudily patterned sweaters. He believes they make him more approachable. They don’t. He smiles wide and often, but never with the eyes. Whatever his intended facial expression, from faux shock to joyous rapture, those black orbs stay dead as a shark’s.
Tune in around midday, just after the televised executions, you can watch him in action. Smack yourself in the skull until you’re down to fifty I.Q. points and you might even enjoy it. There’s ex soap stars plugging spin-off series; sanitised, sub-tabloid gossip from no-listers who’ve found the limelight by flaunting their personality disorders on docu-soaps; a woman who’s overcome tragedy by biting out her own malignant melanoma; and to finish, a gay man butchering a classic song in a tortured cat yodel. It’s a world away from the world of serious journalism he craves.
“Don’t let it bother you,” he tells his reflection before each show. “What was it Marie Antoinette said? Let them watch crap?”
But tonight will be different. Tonight he has a real interview. With Ceesal.
Ceesal. He owed his initial popularity to the accidental invention of a rugby tackle called the Buttocks Of Steel and his continued success to the ability to fit an entire ashtray in his mouth whilst simultaneously lighting gaseous rectal emissions. He had that weird pathological thing of going to sleep in confined spaces, usually cupboards. He had wonky eyes and a tongue that lolled out of his mouth like a wilted sea cucumber. He was terminally stupid.
The New Ceesal stands straight-backed and handsome in the television studio’s Green Room. Bodyguards Big Tony and Mustapha pretend not to look as he clasps a kneeling woman to his groin. Is it Slutty Admin Girl? Well,her face is hidden but the technique seems familiar.
So, whilst our heroine works her way up the employment ladder in the time-honoured tradition, Ceesal smiles his sickening rictus grin and grunts like a repulsive, coiffured hog. It’s a less than beautiful moment in the world’s history but these things happen.
Inside an evil-looking car, and Malmot drives like a man possessed. His incognito status holds no sway with the station’s managers. They repeatedly reject his calls. His Asian chauffeur, relegated to the passenger seat, winces as pedestrians crumple beneath the limo’s reinforced wheels.
“Shut up!” Malmot screams to his silent passenger, glaring with absent intensity. The chauffeur knows better than to say anything. Malmot, squinting through a rain-lashed, blood-spattered windshield continues:
“Hell! Well, the way I look at it, the more people I run over, the more people get to eat meat tonight.” He laughs. “Still, no good to you, eh?! Not Halal!”
The chauffeur says nothing. He covers his eyes. He weeps silently.
Back in the Green Room, and Lindberg introduces himself to his guest.
“I know you,” Ceesal purrs. “Where do I know you from?”
“Eton, Prime Minister.”
“Well, I’ll be a… You’re right! It’s Pip “lindyhop’ Lindberg! I used to board with this bugger!” he tells Big Tony. And they celebrate with the one import that always find its way into the country: cocaine.
“Has anyone got a miniature alpine chalet?” Ceesal howls. “I’m about to turn my head into a snowglobe!”
Malmot storms through the main entrance, trench coat flapping like leathery wings. Reception may not know his name, but they know his face. They know his intent. They also know that the last person to stand in his way wound up in a gibbet, displayed at the Paedophile’s Gallery at London Bridge.
Now, the basis of politics, as you’ll know, is to take The Truth down a dark alley and beat it to a bloody pulp that thanks you for the privilege. So what Lindberg expects to get from Ceesal is beyond anyone’s guess. Some journalistic credibility, maybe? A little extra status? Perhaps some cast-off women (nothing new there). But whatever it is, it’s going to be interesting. The new Prime Minister is behaving in an increasingly hostile, increasingly unorthodox manner.
“Ten hours is enough for anyone,” Ceesal declares archly, testing Lindberg’s reaction. “We should decimalise Time. A hundred second minute would give us forty extra seconds, which means our current system loses us forty seconds a minute. That’s a lot of seconds and they all have to go somewhere. Don’t you think?”
“Indeed I do,” Lindberg answers. Enough cocaine and anything makes sense.
“So, where are they then?” Ceesal presses.
“Where are what?”
“All the lost seconds.”
“I’m not sure that I know,” says Lindberg.
“But you do agree that they’re missing?”
“Of course!”
Then you’re an idiot, thinks Ceesal.
Malmot enters, trailed by a gaggle of black-clad blonde women bearing clipboards. He has no idea who they are or where they came from. It’s harder still to work out what they do. Are they some form of locally occurring fauna? He waves his Daily Telegraph at them, discovering with growing glee that they can be herded like sheep.
Scrawny white men with childish hair and the mental age of teenagers mince to and fro, waving their hands, addressing everyone as ‘Guys!’ and screaming ‘Jesus!’ at the slightest hint of dissent. They seem to think their presence is important. Clearly, it isn’t.
Malmot stands silent, surveying the scene. The transition from Green Room schmoozing to interview proper is a blur he can scarcely comprehend. Who knows how these things happen? They defy conventional logic. He retreats into a fantasy world of possible evasive measures: a fire alarm? A drugs raid? Perhaps a good old fashioned incendiary grenade tossed into the director’s room? But the Media have a nasty habit of sniffing around when one of their own explodes into bright orange flame – it makes for such great television. By the time he sets about the relatively simple sabotage of the fuse box, the stage lights are on, the cameras rolling, the theme tune roaring, and Lindberg stands working Ceesal’s hand like a lifeboat bilge pump. They take their appointed places in black leather and aluminium chairs. Ceesal smiles like a Cheshire cat. Thank God the broadcast isn’t live.
The crowd settle in for an hour of easy, informal chat. No hard-nosed interrogative journalism here. Not with a daytime TV lightweight like Lindberg at the helm. No, expect, instead, to see the ‘human’ face of government; a potted biography, cosy stories about family and friends (a fiancé?) and a few subtle references to his modest upbringing and the dignity of the common workingman and woman. No real opportunity for divulging classified material. No real opportunity to go off on a crazed tangent. No opportunity to spout filth for its own sake.