For years, as long as I can remember, ever since my mother started needling about my roots, I’ve hated my hair. A really visceral, resentful loathing of my own follicles, which continually let me down. Firstly, of course, it’s grey. There are some people – striking, dramatic people – who can carry off grey hair, but I’m not one of them. I’d look like Miss Marple. I have to dye it. There’s no way I have time to spend four hours in a salon every six weeks, so it has to be a packet-job in the bathroom at home – as a result, all our tiles are flecked with Nice’n Easy Light Ash Brown. Is there a more depressing colour than ash brown? I’d love a more interesting hue, but red makes my skin look yellow, black makes my skin look dead, and blonde makes me look like a randy divorcee. Lastly though, what I really hate about my hair is its flatness. It does nothing, just dangles. Locks are everything, and I have always lamented mine’s lack of ambition – where other tresses wave or curl or spiral or bounce, mine just hang limply, like a basset hound’s ears. Of course, it’s my dad’s hair, which is why my mother despises it. In conclusion, my dream hairdo, in terms of dimension and vibrancy, is probably Marge Simpson’s, but in the meantime, the woman in the picture behind me looks pretty good. Different from me, which is key. The difference I’m feeling on the inside must be reflected externally. Time to change the DNA of my hair.

‘That,’ I say, again. That wonderful woman in the photo. She has wild, untameable ringlets sticking out in a halo around her head. Marvellous.

Petroc surveys me scornfully. ‘Seriously? It’s quite a style departure for you. Style exiting the building, in fact.’

‘That’s what I want.’ Catching Sasha’s eye in the mirror, I point at my lank, crisp thatch. ‘Can you do it?’

‘Sure.’ She shrugs. ‘But it’ll wash out.’

‘Just for today.’ I sit back, satisfied. ‘Don’t talk to me,’ I tell them. ‘Pretend I’m not here.’

So Petroc and Sasha start talking to each other as she washes my hair, about another hairdresser in the salon who Petroc dated who is now dating someone famous, which Petroc is livid about, and then I’m away, not listening any more, just drifting, as Sasha tugs and pulls with the tongs. Thoughts float across my brain like bubbles, ready to be blown away or popped. I think about my kids, safely tucked away at school, how I love school, taking care of them, for free, educating them and enriching them so that I don’t have to. I think about Robbie, in his office in Finzels Reach, managing portfolios and dealing with IP infringement or whatever it is he does. He rarely talks about work, rarely talks about anything really, except his passion for ruins, and sometimes the rugby. Unlike Petroc, who’s dated everyone, I have only had four boyfriends, and three of them were unremarkable. I was never one of those girls who went for the dangerous type; never understood the attraction. I didn’t go for dangerous anything. There was already enough to worry about without aligning yourself to romantic peril. And then another bubble sails past that looks like a suspect package, and I pop it quickly before it can open or explode, but it’s followed by another – the emailed guest list resurfacing, names, names, names – and I start to get hot again, like I was in the office earlier, but it’s probably just the curling tongs, which have a lot of work to do, and with a bit of slow and even breathing I’m all right again, and bubble-free.

When Sasha finally steps back, I refocus and study my reflection. It’s very, very curly.

‘I look amazing.’

Petroc wrinkles his nose. ‘You look weird. No offence to Sash.’

‘I look like Lady Marian in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves.’

‘But less attractive,’ notes Petroc, scrupulously.

‘It’ll wash out,’ repeats Sasha, as she whips off my robe.

‘I’ll never wash it again,’ I assure her, as I pay her thirty pounds. She looks completely indifferent, and I think I might be in love with her. Petroc drags me away, just as I’m wondering whether to book in another appointment at the weekend to get my head shaved just like hers.

‘Lunch,’ he says.

‘Aren’t you supposed to be meeting that Astral1 commissioner?’ Astral1 is a new channel with big ambitions and entirely unrealistic ideas about budgets.

Petroc smiles, hugging Lafayette, who snarls. ‘He cancelled! When it came to it, he couldn’t face trekking over to Bristol. The advantage of being out in the sticks!’

‘Did you tell Vince?’

‘Of course not. I’m going to tell him it went really well and that I got some excellent intel.’

Originally, I imagined I would have lunch on my own, because I didn’t want anyone seeing how quickly and inelegantly I can cram a burrito into my mouth, but I guess if I’m going to dine with anyone, it may as well be Petroc, who I’m fond of despite his terrible lockdown life choices. Not only did he get Lafayette, but he decided he’d had enough of the city and bought a derelict church in Batheaston that’s been a total headache – he should have stayed in his lovely Georgian flat in Montpelier. However, he’s certainly the most likeable of my fellow executive producers at Red Eye. Better than Oswald, the other exec, who’s bone-idle, bullies underlings and yet somehow has a bonus package that would pay for an evil trader’s house in Clifton.

‘I want to go to Little Donkey.’ Bristol is full of lovely little cafés and restaurants, and today is a day to take advantage of them.

‘You’re so unsophisticated.’

I toss my ringlets. ‘I actually like food. Come on, it’s not far. We can discuss your imaginary Astral1 meeting en route.’

He takes my arm, then releases it as Lafayette snaps in outrage. ‘Lead the way.’

10

Petroc and I go way back – seven years, to be precise. I got my job at Red Eye aged thirty-nine, working on a new commission they’d just secured called Massive House, Micro House. The idea was that you’d take people who lived in huge houses, and people who lived in tiny houses and . . . swap them. I have no idea why. At least, I suppose the people who owned the huge houses would return home appreciating the extra space, but what was in it for the tiny house owners? It made no sense but I guess it was just a way of repackaging property porn. Anyway, it was a six-ep series, they wanted me to oversee it and it was my first executive producer role so I would probably have said yes even if it was called Murder House, Morgue House.

I spent the majority of pre-production trying to make sure most of the properties were in the West Country so I didn’t have to travel far. Vince kept putting his oar in because he wanted a Scottish laird to swap his Highland castle for a grotty Tottenham bedsit and I regularly had to explain his own format to him: the small houses weren’t necessarily shit, they were just small. We’d found a gorgeous beach-hut in Dorset that I wanted to move into myself.

Red Eye seemed pretty similar to many of the other production companies I’d worked at – a load of overpaid cynical white people at the top, and a smaller, more diverse team of underpaid minions doing the actual grind. As an executive producer, you’d think I was near the top, but in fact I’m more upper-middle. There are endless echelons of MDs and CEOs, CFOs and presidents and global heads and elusive chairmen of parent corporations above me, and what unites them is that they love meetings. They live for meetings. The more obscure the point of the meeting, the better. Utterly pointless is by far the best. I’ve lost count of the number of ‘catch-ups’ I’ve been invited to, where the subject line of the email was something like ‘Redefining Group Collective Strategy in the Post-Linear Era’. I’d be assured attendance was obligatory, sit through three hours of a PowerPoint presentation full of pie charts, and come out to discover that my entire production had fallen apart in my absence, requiring major firefighting to rescue it. Just as I’d finished picking up the pieces, another email would arrive: ‘Understanding the Creative Process through Team Building’. Frequently, I’d find myself invited to two different meetings at the same time – when I asked Imogen, Vince’s PA and general office assistant, what we were expected to do in these circumstances, she simply reorganized them so they were back-to-back. I’d often spend six hours of my day watching PowerPoint slides, and then hustle out to do my actual job. It made me so mad I wanted to scream.

But, of course, I didn’t scream. I just got on with it, staying late, starting early, bringing in doughnuts for everyone to curry favour. Massive House, Micro House got made; it managed nearly two million viewers which everyone thought was pretty good; the Guardian said it was ‘televisual baby purée’, which made Vince spit until Petroc reminded him that all publicity is good publicity. The channel recommissioned the series and Vince asked me to stay on to make it, which was a tacit admission that I’d done a good job.

However, second time round, he said that since it was an ‘up-and-running show’ I’d have more time on my hands, so he was giving me responsibility for his development team, a motley crew of misfits who’d been mismanaged for months. Development teams are the engine room of a TV company, responsible for coming up with the ideas for shows that the producers then make. It’s a very specific skill, and driving a team like that is a full-time job. I already had a full-time job producing shows and didn’t have time to come up with them too. But Vince said it like he was conferring a huge honour on me, so rather than refuse point-blank, I said thank you. Now I essentially had two roles, but since Vince didn’t believe in remunerating his staff adequately, I was never offered a salary increase or any other kind of perk. And since I was chronically incapable of standing up for myself, once again I just had to get on with it. My window intruder dream started up again which, on top of everything else, made me constantly teary, exhausted and on edge.

Three weeks in, Petroc found me crying in my new office. I wasn’t making a noise or anything, just silently weeping while I emailed the series commissioner of MHMH to tell her we’d found a fortified manor house in Fife and a gypsy caravan in Pembrokeshire. He caught me unawares, tears rolling down my face as I typed, and there was nothing I could do but hastily rub my cheeks with my sleeve.

‘I feel that way whenever I email Channel Four,’ was all he said. He’d come to ask if I knew a particular producer he was thinking of hiring, so we had a brief but enjoyable bitch about various people we’d worked with, and then he asked if I wanted to go for a ‘snifter’ later. During a marathon drinking session in the pub around the corner, he provided eye-opening details of some of the sexual encounters and punch-ups at previous Red Eye parties, including a Christmas lunch that ended in arson, gave me the lowdown on company finances (‘completely shot’) and told me off for the doughnuts.

‘You’ll get a reputation,’ he warned, signalling to the barmaid.

‘As what?’ I mumbled, through a packet of salt and vinegar crisps.

‘A crowd-pleaser,’ he replied.

‘Isn’t that a good thing? To please a crowd? Like, Lady Gaga or Beyoncé?’

‘More like Vera Lynn putting out for the armed forces,’ he said. ‘You want to sharpen up your act.’

Drunkenly, I confessed about my new appointment, which Vince had never announced because he knew it was a dubious management decision, and I’d never mentioned, because I was too embarrassed to admit I’d been coerced into doing two jobs for the price of one. As he listened, Petroc’s lip curled, making me more ashamed than ever, but all he said was ‘Leave it with me.’

I thought no more of it, mainly because my memories of the evening were hazy, but the next day, Vincent came to my office and said he’d had a rethink, and that he’d decided to hire a proper head of development instead. In fact, he asked me to do the hiring for him, which was another thing on my plate, but this was more of a swiftly dispatched amuse-bouche instead of the hellish feast with a long spoon I’d previously been condemned to endure. I went for a woman called Naomi Horowitz, who was terrifyingly clever with a finger so on the pulse it was pretty much tapping directly into the vein. But, of course, she was very much in demand, and decided to take another job at the BBC, so instead we ended up with Ian Gittings, whose finger is pretty much circling his own arse crack, but at least he’s nominally in charge and I’m left to get on with my actual job, which is making programmes and watching PowerPoint slides.

A few weeks later, during another post-work drinking session, I plucked up the courage to ask Petroc if he’d had anything to do with Vince’s change of heart. He grinned and tapped the side of his nose.

‘I told him I’d heard on the grapevine that Light Fantastic were looking for a new head of development.’

I squinted into my drink, puzzled. Light Fantastic was a hot new indie run by an ex-ITV commissioner who specialized in big-budget entertainment shows. ‘Why did that make him change his mind?’

‘Because to find a new head of development, standard procedure is to go round all the other indies finding out who their HoD is. Which means that eventually they would have come to you.’

For a long time, I didn’t say anything, just ran my finger around the rim of my glass. ‘Thank you,’ I said eventually. ‘I owe you one.’

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘One day I’ll call it in, and you can repay the favour.’

I didn’t forget what I learned that night. First, Vincent didn’t want to lose me, and second, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. I assumed that to get what I wanted, I’d have to storm around, making a scene, chucking my toys out the pram. And because I couldn’t do that, I thought I was stuck. But sometimes, you just have to know what buttons to push. Quietly, in a darkened room, flicking a switch here and there, to get the precise cut you want.

11

Little Donkey is the best burrito joint in the world because they have a long bar with about four hundred and eighty-three different fillings, and you can put them all in a tortilla which they roll up really tight so it fits everything in. They can always fit it in. Usually, I don’t allow myself to go there because, firstly, lunch breaks don’t exist at Red Eye – you eat a limp canteen sandwich at your desk, spilling crumbs between the keys of your computer, or fight over a warm tray of sushi in a meeting. Secondly, I suspect the calorie content of their burritos is verging on bacchanalian, and despite the fact that I adore eating and am really good at it, I started restricting myself when I hit forty. It’s just something I felt I had to do (because my mother told me to), like waxing my chin and applying anti-ageing hand cream before bed. But not today. Today is outside the normal rules; today nothing counts; today I will have my fill.

We queue up. I order a Stuffed Donkey Special, which makes Petroc massage his temples when he sees how much is packed in there. He orders a salad, which is a total waste. We sit outside because of Lafayette, who insists on perching on Petroc’s knees. I look at my burrito nestling in its wicker basket and sigh in anticipation. I might actually start dribbling if I don’t eat this immediately. An al fresco lunch! How decadent. We’re next to Clifton Arcade, a pretty, bustling row of shops with a great vibe. I’m bringing my own great vibe, it’s all groovy.

Shaking out my napkin, I lay it carefully across my trousers before taking my first bite. God, it’s wonderful. Chewy and umami, morsels loitering around my tastebuds, caressing them with their beautiful rich flavours. I am going to eat the hell out of this. Might have another one after, like a burrito chaser. The second mouthful is even better than the first, building on the salty, piquant tang – I cup my hand under my chin to catch the falling fragments and cram them back in. Yum yum.