‘We’ve booked a suite at the Covent Garden Hotel,’ the publisher told me. ‘They’re taking him straight there from the studios. He’s contracted to stay in the room for a week and not talk to any other media. Stay with him till you have everything you need. We need the book by the end of the month.’
I arrived at the hotel at the same moment as my new client, although it was hard to see him in the crowd of minders, producers, stylists, publicists, managers and everyone else plus their assistants that was milling around him, all hoping for a little of the stardust to rub off. At that moment he was the number one story in the tabloid media having just won the biggest reality show that week and, more importantly, having won the hearts of several hundred thousand teenage girls who might be accurately referred to as ‘our target market’.
Reality television as we know it today started in the mid-nineties. There had been reality programmes before, such as Candid Camera, but the idea that the people who took part in the shows should become famous simply because they appeared on television screens was new. Some of the shows were linked to talent (Opportunity Knocks, Stars in Their Eyes, etc.), but increasingly they were based simply on whether the public liked the participants enough to want to watch them. If they wanted to watch them a lot then they would want to know more about them and there would then be other ways to merchandise both their looks and their personalities. One of the ways to do this was to write books about them or to get them to write books themselves. Most people lack the skills or experience needed to write books under that sort of pressure, and that is where we ghostwriters come in.
The young man at the centre of the storm in the hotel lobby looked happy but dazed and more than a little exhausted. Just a few weeks before he had been struggling his way through life at the bottom of the pile, much like everyone else, and now glossy, frothy magazine editors were offering him a quarter of a million pounds for a one day photo-shoot with a girl who was being swept along by the same reality television gravy train and they needed security whenever they were in public.
The publisher was allegedly shelling out similar money for the book – not to mention paying for a suite in one of the trendiest of celebrity hotels – then there were the music people wanting to get him into a studio and the rat pack of tabloid scandal-mongers and paparazzi scavenging around the lobby and in the street outside in search of any juicy scraps that might be chucked their way.
Once we were safely in the suite and the excitable young celebrity had worked out what a ‘concierge service’ was and had put a good few things on the publishers’ hotel bill, we started talking. It wasn’t long before it was obvious that he was not going to be able to concentrate for long enough amidst the constant interruptions and distractions, each one more urgent than the last. We decided on a new plan. His mum would tell me the story of his life, while he bounced round the room and occasionally ventured out for fresh air, only to return a few minutes later flushed with the excitement of being chased by the media and fans, and often clutching a fresh newspaper or magazine bearing some entirely fictitious story about what he had been up to since the end of the show.
‘I can’t have done any of this,’ he would wail at us, partly amused, partly appalled, ‘I’ve been stuck in here with you.’
Later, when the hardback book was in the shops and the publisher arranged a fanfare of publicity and interviews, an earnest journalist from one of the broadsheets asked him what it felt like to write a book.
‘I didn’t really,’ he said with the honesty which had so disarmed the show’s viewers, ‘this posh bloke came to the hotel with a tape machine.’
A few months later, when they were preparing to bring out the paperback, I went back for an update. By that stage the dust was settling on his overnight fame and he was living with his real girlfriend in a small one bedroom flat. Someone answered my insistent knocking at the door in what must have been their pyjamas.
‘They’re still in bed,’ I was told, ‘through there.’
There were so many people sleeping or sitting around in the living room that it was easier just to close the bedroom door and climb into the warm bed with them, tape machine at the ready once more.