Chart Throb (29 page)

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Authors: Ben Elton

BOOK: Chart Throb
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Sitting nearby was Penny, the continuity girl and hardest-working person in the room after Calvin. She too was surrounded by enormous files.
‘Yes, Versace Manchester and Lacroix Birmingham,’ Penny agreed.
‘Well, I hope you’ve done a proper deal this time so I get to keep the frocks,’ Beryl grumbled from the doorway, reaching for her cigarettes and her phone. ‘I’m fucked if I’m showcasing their rags for nothing.’
‘So,’ said Trent with forced good cheer, ‘moving on. We are also recording thirty-seven comic novelties tomorrow.’
‘Thirty-seven!! From one town?’ Beryl moaned. ‘You can’t possibly use thirty-seven!’
‘Yes, darling,’ Calvin chipped in with scarcely disguised impatience. ‘But as I have often explained to you before, you can’t accumulate if you don’t speculate. In order to get a handful of decent comic novelties we have to shoot a shedload and see what works. People clam up, people won’t play ball, more often than that people turn out to be utterly boring and neither comic nor novel. This is why we must spread our net wide or we will be left naked in the edit. We
could
do it over two days if you wanted but then, darling, you would have to stay here for a whole twenty-four more hours, something that I know you are not anxious to do.’
‘Too fucking right I’m not.’
‘In which case, perhaps we can proceed. Trent?’
‘Right. We start with Juanita. She’s Spanish and has a really funny accent.’
‘Oh, my fucking Christ!’ Beryl snapped. ‘A funny
accent
, is that what we’re reduced to?’
‘Worked well last year with the amusing Swede,’ Trent said soothingly. ‘And I think this one might work even better. She’s quite pretty and has a nice innocent face with a kind of a blank look about it. So the plan is to get her to sing something very sweet and plaintive like “Feelings” or “Yesterday” and you guys keep cracking up because her accent sounds really funny set against the deep, emotional lyric, but poor Juanita just looks around blankly because she has no idea what you’re all laughing at.’
‘Oh Christ,’ said Beryl.
‘And it just gets sillier and sillier because when one of you manages to stop laughing another one starts up and of course that starts the first one off again, and in the end you all really, really,
really
pull yourselves together to give the poor girl a chance but she does like one word, and bang! You’re all off again. It will be
so, so
funny. You guys are just
brilliant
at this stuff.’
‘I think I just lost the will to live,’ said Beryl.
‘Good. Loving Juanita,’ said Calvin, ignoring Beryl’s negativity. ‘Next.’
‘Katarina,’ Trent replied. ‘Sweet, pretty. Very amusing Ukrainian accent.’
‘Please!’ shouted Beryl. ‘
Another
girl with an amusing accent!’
Calvin was beginning to lose patience. ‘Yes. We’ve got three, we’ll do them one after another.’
‘Three girls with amusing accents!’
‘Beryl! How long have you been doing this show? We won’t
use
all fucking three.’
‘Unless we do an amusing accent
montage
,’ Trent chipped in.
‘Yes,’ Calvin conceded. ‘Unless we do an amusing accent montage. But we’ll probably only use the funniest one . . .’
‘Gotta be Juanita,’ said Trent. ‘She seems to have almost no ability to pronounce consonants at all.’
‘Whatever. The point is, Beryl, that by shooting three girls we have three chances at getting you and Rodney to fake a vaguely convincing hysterical laugh and even though we only use one girl we can use shots of us laughing at all three and edit together the best bits.’
‘Sorry, Calvin,’ Penny, the continuity girl, piped up. ‘I thought we’d decided that we’d definitely go with a funny accent montage. I have Beryl down for three different jackets for the three funny-voice girls.’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ Costume agreed and once more vast binders were opened up containing notes, drawings, catalogues and swatches of fabric. ‘One Beryl cossie for each girl with an amusing accent so we can place them in different towns. Also you and Rodney get green Irish rugby shirts because we have our “virtual” Dublin visit scheduled for St Patrick’s Day.’
‘Shit, you’re right,’ Calvin conceded. ‘Well done, girls.’
The Irish audition day was dubbed a ‘virtual’ because the tightness of schedule meant that the three judges would not actually be visiting Dublin, so their ‘audition day’ there would have to be faked. This would be done by cutting together footage taken when Trent and Emma and the team had done their preselection in the city, coupled with shots of the judges taken in Birmingham but with Irish set-dressing. This of course presented a continuity nightmare for Costume, Hair and Make-up, and on this occasion also Props because the St Patrick’s Day complication meant that the prop man would have to slip a leprechaun gonk on to the table.
‘Either way, Beryl, you have to be there,’ said Calvin. ‘Now can we please get on? Trent. Skip the other girl with the amusing accent, I think we all understand the process.’
‘You got it, chief. Right, so after that we get through as many In and Outs as we can before coffee and then—’
‘Ugh,’ said Beryl. ‘You really don’t pay me enough, Calvin.’
Beryl hated the In and Outs. These were the hundred or so people summoned to each of the celebrity judge audition days, who could sing a bit but were neither bad enough nor good enough to be assigned their own character or story. They were there to fill out the holding area (so it wasn’t just Mingers and finalists) and to make up the montages of people shrieking ‘yes’ as they were put through to the second and third rounds, after which point it became possible to concentrate exclusively on the selected characters and stories.
‘Do you
really
need me for the In and Outs?’ Beryl pleaded.
‘Of course we do, for God’s sake!’ Calvin snapped. ‘We can’t just have you patronizing the Mingers and flirting with the finalists, can we? I’ll admit it is absolutely amazing the extent to which our audience is prepared to suspend its disbelief but there are limits, Beryl! We can’t just take the piss. Obviously we need to see the three of us interacting with contestants other than our chosen storylines.’
Beryl shrugged moodily. There were not many people in the world whom she would countenance ticking her off, but Calvin was one of them. Really it was just him and the man who sucked out her bottom.
‘Right,’ said Calvin. ‘Please carry on, Trent.’
‘Well, straight after the first break we set up a Beryl feature with Rodney.’
‘Who is not here so we’ll have to explain it all again to him.’
‘We have to explain everything to him three times whether he’s here or not,’ said Beryl.
‘Trent. Get on with it.’
Trent touched his keyboard and there appeared on the screen a buck-toothed teenage girl and a buck-toothed woman in early middle age who was clearly her mother.
‘Vicky Carter and her mum,’ said Trent. ‘Let’s hear from the mum first, shall we?’
Trent pushed the button and on the screen Vicky’s mum began to speak.
‘She’s just mad for it. She really is, I can’t hold her back. Always singing, all the show songs. There was never any question of her not going to stage school. Madam here was going to stage school and that was the end of it. “Mum,” she said, “I am going to stage school,” and that was the end of it! Judy Garland’s her hero, and Céline Dion.’
Trent pressed Pause. ‘And now the daughter.’
‘Mum never pushed me,’ Vicky said, leaping into life on the screen. ‘She just told me to follow my dream and believe in my dream and that not everyone is lucky enough to have a dream and that you have to have the courage to dream the dream.’
The room watched in some awe as pale, shapeless, buck-toothed Vicky Carter proceeded to murder ‘Over The Rainbow’, somehow managing to be a semitone flat on every single note except for the last one in each line, when inexplicably she went sharp.
‘Wow!’ Beryl said. ‘She is really quite awesomely pathetic.’
‘Isn’t she?’ said Trent proudly. ‘But really quite awesomely convinced that she can sing.’
‘How do they
do
that? It’s like their ears are on a different planet to their voices!’
‘And, of course, we will big her up as she goes in,’ said Trent.
‘Yes,’ Chelsie interjected, having been itching for a chance to jump in since the meeting began. ‘I told her mum I thought she was brilliant and that the judges would love her. I said I reckoned she’d make it through to Pop School at least.’
‘Yes, thank you, Chelsie,’ said Trent impatiently. ‘So obviously when you all laugh at her and reject her out of hand she’s going to be devastated, and the plan is that Rodney then goes a bit far. You know, makes some smart alec comment . . .’
‘Trent!’ Calvin snapped. ‘
What
smart alec comment? This is final planning. We make these decisions
now!’
‘Well, we have it scripted, boss, but I thought we’d let him have a go first. You know he’s always talking about his own personal input.’
‘Yes, fine. And once he’s had his go, what’s he actually going to say?’
‘We thought, “That was so awful it took my mind off my haemorrhoids,”’ said Chelsie quickly.
‘Not bad. Not bad. Don’t give it to him until we do his close-ups or he’ll overrehearse it.’
‘I thought this was one of
my
features,’ Beryl complained.
‘It is,’ Trent replied eagerly. ‘Because when . . .’ He glanced at his notes.
‘Vicky,’ Chelsie managed to say before he could find the name.
‘Yes. Vicky starts to cry . . .’
‘She’ll do more than cry,’ Chelsie added. ‘She’ll protest, she’s a right cocky little madam, the mum’s brainwashed her. She truly believes.’
‘Right, so when Vicky cries and protests,’ continued Trent, trying not to look too annoyed at his pushy subordinate, ‘you, Beryl, leap to her defence, right? We can see you know she’s crap but she’s brought out your mothering instincts . . .’
‘This is good,’ said Beryl, pleased. ‘You know I want a lot of that this time, Calvin. Lots and lots of “everybody’s favourite mum” stuff from Keely, it’s one of my strongest features. Half my advertising revenue comes from it.’
‘We’re on it, Beryl,’ said Trent. ‘What’s Keely’s voiceover script here?’
A young man, one of seven scriptwriters present, spoke up from the back of the room.
‘“Meanwhile it looks like Rodney has gone too far,”’ the writer quoted, ‘“and big-hearted supermum Beryl has gone all clucky over Vicky.”’
‘Good. Excellent,’ said Beryl, beaming. ‘Loving “big-hearted supermum”, more of that, please. Maybe I should have some mugs made up?’
‘Glad you like it, Beryl,’ said Trent, beaming also. ‘So you tell Rodney to stop and he won’t, he repeats his haemorrhoids gag and you go and hug Vicky and tell her that she has every right to follow her dream if she wants and Rodney laughs and—’
‘I throw the water over him!’
‘Yes!’ said Trent. ‘You throw the water over him.’
‘Love it!’ said Beryl. ‘I’m going out for a fag.’
Sat Nav
Rodney had returned to reception.
‘I need the postcode.’
‘Pardon, sir?’
‘The postcode for the summer house. My driver has to key it into his sat nav.’
‘I can give you directions, sir.’
‘I don’t need your directions, miss, that’s why we have sat nav, to eliminate human error.’
‘They’re very simple.’
‘Exactly. Unlike the sat nav in my Merc, which is rather complex and sophisticated and uses the same software as the American military. Could you get a missile through a window in Baghdad?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Well, the US military can and my sat nav has access to the same satellite information as they have. Not simple. Not human. Incapable of errors. Please give me the postcode immediately.’
‘I’ll just get you a letterhead, sir.’
The receptionist followed Rodney out into the car park and handed Rodney’s driver a comp slip with the information printed on it.
‘I don’t
believe
this,’ Rodney commented.
He was then forced to wait while his driver keyed the postcode into the dashboard computer of the car.
‘Route being calculated,’ the sat nav voice assured Rodney, and his driver steered the car out of the manor’s imposing gates and on to the A34.
‘Where possible make a legal U-turn,’ the voice added shortly afterwards.
That section of the road was a dual carriageway, so it was not possible to turn immediately. The driver was forced to continue for some miles up the road before the next exit provided an opportunity to turn back.
‘Continue on to the next exit,’ said the voice.

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