What is that noise these taxis make? Like a mechanical panting dog.
I didn’t want to get a cab, but the production company has called me one, and I don’t want to lose face. I prefer to lose thirty-five quid instead. I doubt this cabbie will accept my Travelcard. Now we’re stuck in Camden High Street edging along at about fifty pence a metre. It’s busy, very busy – they should extend the congestion charge as far as … Belgium. Paris? No, Belgium. Sillier word – a mixture of belly and gum. Bilge and tum.
As always it’s fancy dress day round here. Dodgy people wearing dodgy clothes and selling dodgy stuff. We’re even stopped long enough for a Rasta, wearing the sort of hat that would make even Dr Seuss cringe, come up to the open window and say, dodgily, ‘Hash?’
‘Yes indeed, that’s what you’re making of your life!’ I would have said if the incident was on stage, unlikely though that would be. Although, it’s amazing what gets produced these days.
Barry Whitlow is a top TV executive at Rushwood Studios. He has an engaging Dublin brogue, which should mean he’s from Ireland, although I wouldn’t be surprised if he picked it up on a course he went on to make him sound more friendly.
On the phone he’s conspiratorial, always with a compliment to offer, like a winning uncle with a bag of sweets. Take your pick – ‘It’s a crime you’re not on television’, ‘You’re the best in the country at what you do’ and ‘I’m really excited about our meeting’. I should have listened to my instinct as well as the clicking of his keyboard, just audible under his sweet nothings, as he wrote to someone else at the same time as talking to me – his answers coming slightly delayed as if he was on some sort of satellite link-up. I’m guessing he’s not ‘excited’ about our meeting at all; at best he’s mildly intrigued. If he was that excited he wouldn’t have cancelled it twice already.
Well, it’s his constant slating of others that gives him away, others to whom you’ve seen him offer the same compliments. I guess I’m just a pie he wants to stick a finger in. In case I’m the next big pie, and then he’ll have a slice of me.
His PA, Farah, who has blonde flicky hair and a bare midriff, shows me past corridors full of photos of previous Rushwood successes. The Wilf Cartwright Show, Mansfield or Bust, the cast of Pop and the Weasel. She’s full of sunny chitchat; although I notice her default setting word is ‘cool’. In the same way Eskimos are supposed to have nine words for snow, Farah seems to have one word for nine different things. (‘Snow’ is probably one of them.) Her crop-top and exposed belly remind me of a pencil case with a sliding lid, that you can just push along to see what’s inside.
My new agent, Gordon (in the cold light of day I opted for a private investigator rather than a terrorist), has put me in touch with Barry. When we meet, his eyes are bright and expectant, as if he’s permanently ‘just discovered treasure’. We shake hands and sit down in what is the mini-living room part of his office – a couple of leather sofas in front of a coffee table where all the daily papers are laid out beside a few empty wine bottles.
‘Sorry, would you mind getting rid of those, Farah, we had a few drinks last night with Penny Bennett! We’ve just got a second series!’
‘Excellent,’ I say, hating myself as I do it, because I really loathe that show. But there’s something about Barry’s intensity and his ‘like me’ eyebrows that makes me want to please him.
‘Sure,’ says Farah, with the flicky hair, gathering the bottles, and then we both try not to watch her wiggle out the door. Then Barry leans forward with a lopsided grin. Last time I saw him was in a bar in Edinburgh when he was off his head on coke, his eyeballs and jaw wriggling about as if to try to escape the skin they were trapped in.
‘So what are you up to, mate?’
Over to me – now is the time to sparkle. So I try and make ‘not much’ sound as much as possible, recounting the tale of a Christmas gig where Roy Bracewell got pelted off with mince pies.
‘That’s funny!’ says Barry – as if he’d recently been appointed as the Supreme Judge of what’s funny and what’s not. ‘Oh, Spaz Benson sends his love by the way, I saw him yesterday about something.’
‘Send it back again,’ I say. Then add, ‘My love. Not the love he sent me, obviously.’
‘Of course,’ he replies, matter-of-factly.
That’s the third or fourth quippy little thing I’ve said in the last few minutes, but there’s hardly been a glimmer of recognition in Barry’s eyes, nor a trace of irony in his replies.
But just then he leans forward and comes to the point, elbows on desk, hands folded like he’s about to read the news.
‘Your Edinburgh show was funny too, Jerome … have you got any other ideas?’
Other ideas? I’d been putting that together for two years, so no I haven’t. But I can’t say that to him, a top TV exec.
‘Loads,’ I lie.
‘Oh excellent, fire away!’
He takes out a notepad and I speak before I think.
‘Something about, er, living in a … crane.’
‘Uh-huh. What happens with the crane then?’ he says, stifling an unlikely chortle.
Unfortunately, when I started the word ‘crane’ I didn’t actually know what I was going to say. It could just as easily have ended up as ‘crate’ or ‘cranberry juice carton’ but now I’ve got to run with it.
‘Well this bloke lives in it and he … does stuff. Builds things like … like buildings.’
‘Mmm.’
‘…and he has a cat called Ginger, who brings him breakfast.’
WHAT AM I DOING!!?
‘And they sing songs, sometimes. They’re in a band, in fact.’
‘A band? Now that’s funny,’ says the Supreme Judge.
‘Ginger and the Crane Twins.’ (Crane twins sounds like Kray twins – that was lucky.)
‘Twins?’
‘Yeah, but there’s only one.’
‘One?’
‘That’s the joke.’
‘Ah-hah, that’s funny!’
Idiot. Then he puts his pad down.
‘Well why don’t you write this up properly and I’ll have a look. Then maybe we could work it into a draft and take it to one of the networks. What do you say, mate?’ (I use ‘mate’ too, when I can’t remember someone’s name.)
‘Cool,’ I say, inexplicably.
Surely he can’t think what I’ve just said was a good idea? I’ve got lots of others like that. Peter Piffhead and His Amazing Talking Leg, The Ooolerminox Conspiracy, Beetroots Are Humans Too – see I can make them up all day long. Or maybe, just maybe I’ve stumbled on something brilliant!? Maybe my comedy subconscious, when put under pressure, has thrown up something of pure genius about a man and a cat living in a crane.
No. Definitely not. This bloke is either just humouring me or he’s a fool and I don’t want anything to do with him. There’d be a long way to go anyway – drafts, re-writes, meetings, lunches, pilots. First nights, chat shows, BAFTA award ceremonies. Calm down.
But what if idiots staff the networks too? It might actually get on TV! Yes. No, it’s crap! But surely this man is paid an enormous salary – he should know what he’s talking about. He’s just got a second series for Penny Bennett. Precisely, that’s terrible.
Come on, this is the cocaine-fuelled hothouse of television where anything can get made if you have enough contacts and self-belief.
We carry on chatting about who else is doing what, with lots of ‘Have you seen?’ and ‘Did you like?’ But each time I wait for his lead before venturing an opinion.
‘Do you know…’ such and such a programme he says.
‘Yes – remarkable,’ I reply ambiguously. And if I don’t know the person he mentions at all I say ‘…I think I know the name’ not wanting to look off the pace. But at least twice he looks unnervingly directly at me and says, ‘Well, I’ve heard good things…’
But I wonder if he has. He’s probably heard one ‘good thing’. Or just ‘a thing’. He’s another chameleon who somehow seems to have the power to make me want to change my skin colour as well. He probably didn’t even see my Edinburgh show. Everyone he knows is either ‘lovely’ or ‘a bastard’. No in-betweens. What am I? A fraud. Come on, be yourself.
That’s it! He hasn’t got a sense of humour has he? I don’t believe it – one of the judges in the beauty contest is as blind as a bat. He doesn’t get my jokes; he probably doesn’t get anyone’s jokes, all his opinions are ratings driven. Incredible.
I should’ve told him my other idea of a young writer who has had so many knock-backs he takes a TV producer hostage in his office, and then threatens to behead him live on the news unless he’s allowed to read out his sitcom. That would wipe the grin off his mask.
Just then I notice the tassels on his shoes. Two little leather pom-poms sitting meekly on top of his tan moccasins. I take this as a sign of weakness, and decide to express some of my own thoughts.
‘Is Penny going to finish each episode with a song like she did in the last series? I’m not sure it works.’
‘That was my idea,’ squeaks Barry in his best ‘I’m so hurt’ voice.
‘I could be wrong,’ I add hastily.
Just then Farah comes in to tell him his 12.15 is here. An appointment I suppose, not a train. (Perhaps he presses a button under his desk to terminate an interview he’s not enjoying anymore.)
‘We’ll be in touch soon,’ he says.
Yup, he’s withdrawing himself with the speed of a retractable plug into a vacuum cleaner. He extends a hand without looking at me. He’ll get Farah to phone.
‘Cool,’ I say again, to my increasing horror. I didn’t realise it was infectious. Now I’ve got a whole rash of them – ‘cool sores’.
‘Your taxi’s here,’ says Farah.
‘Cool,’ I reply helplessly.
She shows me back down the walk of fame, and then I stride across the foyer and straight into the glass door. Farah giggles and I do a Stan Laurel face to pretend it was deliberate. (You see, I can make people laugh alright, it’s just I don’t know where or when.)
I leave depressed that the Supreme Judge of Funny is so far out of touch with public opinion. Or is he? Need to get home, watch some Fawlty Towers videos and re-set my laughter gauge.
I’ve had a few of this type of depressingly baffling meetings now, and it’s slowly dawning on me that the talent behind the scenes is just as hit and miss as the talent in front. Their problem, of course, is that the gold they are looking for is not gold until someone else says it is, sometimes after a second or third series.
In the end I pay the fare, get out and walk. But not before the driver has pressed that special button which rounds it up to a random number well above the one showing.
Barry never sees a draft of ‘Ginger and the Crane Twins’. But not long after he goes on to be the controller of a whole TV station. Now that’s funny.