‘Then book one. Don’t just fuck off.’
But I didn’t know I needed it until today – until the headache, the forks, the email, the briefcase, everything in a pile-up until the only answer was to break out.
‘I can’t; got some stuff to sort.’ It’s true. Everything I’m doing needs to be done – a list I didn’t even know existed till now. And I’m starting to see where it’s headed, see the boxes that have to be ticked, and don’t want to veer off course. I’m on a Segway, zooming towards the finish, shaking my fist at everyone.
‘You’re damn right you’ve got stuff to sort. Firstly, I had a call from Avon House. They’ve revoked your company membership.’
‘Good, no more pitching on sunloungers. It buggers up my back no end.’
‘It buggers up my business if you waste the perks I’ve worked so hard to get for you. Why have they booted you out, what did you do?’
I think back to this morning in the pool, which already feels like ages ago. ‘It involved a semi-naked man, and a violation of special privileges.’
He wrinkles his nose in distaste. ‘I don’t want to know. Anyway, you’ve got bigger problems. Your wine show. David Lyon-James has got cold feet.’
That pulls me up short. ‘What?’
Vince nods, fishing out his phone. ‘He called me this morning, then sent this email. He’s worried his vineyard won’t be seen in its best light.’
Reading the email, I harrumph. ‘He knew the deal. What’s changed?’
‘He watched Oz’s show.’
I read on, with growing annoyance. David, the owner of Chew Hill vineyard, the location for my latest production, has watched a series made by Oz Phillips called Would Like to Meat. It’s about young apprentices learning to be butchers – and shagging on the side. It’s a daft show, as many of Red Eye’s are, but it’s buried on an obscure digital channel, so I’m surprised David stumbled across it. He’s worried about the tone, wants reassurance that his show will be a classier number. I haven’t told him yet that our pitching title was More Than They Can Chew. But he certainly knows that a load of binge-drinking youths are going to descend on his estate to be taught a more refined way of quaffing booze. What does he expect?
Of course, he expects what we told him, which is that this will be a ‘meaningful journey’ for the cast and an education for the audience. It’s going to do for winemaking what Clarkson’s Farm did for agriculture. Beautiful West Country backdrops, rolling hills, the sun setting on ripening rows of vines. It will be all that, but obviously it will also be drunken twenty-somethings running amok, snogging each other’s faces off and knocking back pinot noir like it’s Ribena. I sort of assumed that, deep down, he knew it. Yet here he is, having a wobble. We need Chew Hill – it was by far the best place, and filming starts next month. I’ve already got a team down there setting up.
We can’t lose him. It’s a £1.2 million pound commission.
For a second, I actually care, then the shutters come down again. ‘Send someone else,’ I suggest, handing back the phone. ‘Petroc can go.’ Petroc’s good at talking people round, he’ll say anything to get a show made.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ says Vince, pocketing his phone. ‘It’s your baby. Besides, Petroc got some really good intel from his Astral1 lunch, and he’s working on that.’
I’m about to dig my heels in, steel myself to fight Vince on this pavement for my right to fuck off, when I remember my first visit to Chew Hill, in the autumn of last year. It was another beautiful day, and David Lyon-James took me and Flora, our assistant producer, out onto the terrace at the back of the house, looking out over the Mendip Hills. We drank a bottle of delicate sparkling rosé and, even though it was work, it was one of the few restful, pleasurable moments I’d had in months.
After various lockdowns, vainly trying to engage the twins in Google Classroom, juggling back-to-back Zoom meetings sitting cross-legged on the bed in the spare room, writing pitches while I made endless snacks for everyone, scrabbling to secure an elusive Ocado slot, pretending I was going for a run just to get out of the house, coming back to clear up all the mess and make dinner with whatever we had in the fridge, going to bed to have a million mad dreams (or sometimes nightmares) and then getting up to do the same things all over again, day in day out . . . It’s fair to say life had been a bit of a grind. Instead, there we were, sampling an award-winning wine, watching clouds move across a vast blue sky as someone friendly and knowledgeable explained the process of fermenting. The novelty of it was charming, and I suddenly feel the urge to sit on that terrace again, maybe try the barrel-matured Madeleine Angevine David mentioned.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘I’ll go. But you have to send me in a nice car.’
‘It’s only half an hour away, I’ll send you in a fucking Uber Lux,’ returns Vince, which gives me a thrill, because that could easily feature in my One Day list. ‘You’re coming to this party later, right?’ he asks, as he orders the cab. ‘I’m saying it like it’s a question, but it’s more of a North Korean decree.’
My head pounds briefly, a reminder of the migraine and what really set it off. The wrap party. Imogen’s list. Viewing a show called Blind Dinner Date with TV’s great and good. I’d rather ride naked round Bristol on Vince’s Segway.
‘Absolutely,’ I say. ‘I’ll be there. You can count on me.’
19
I never meant to work in television; it was never my ambition. After university, what I really wanted to do was go back to university, start again as a first year, maybe just keep repeating the course until I got a first, which would probably take about twenty years of repeats, or do a different degree – anything to stay in my cosy little house-share in Leeds, where our biggest challenge was seeing how many bottles we could get through in a weekend, and continuing important experiments like finding out how deep dust could get, and how long you could leave a duvet cover unwashed.
After university, real life was such a letdown. Fuelled by Blairite bonhomie, I moved to London in the summer of 1997, because that seemed to be the expected relocation, what everyone was doing. But we all scattered in different directions and the city is so massive it felt like I was on my own there, grubbing a Dickensian living by day and crawling home at night wondering how all my uni friends could afford to go out. I temped for a bit, which was the most miserable experience imaginable. In one placement, I had to stand in a back room on my own, shredding paper. For seven hours a day. The company was based at an industrial estate in North-West London and there were no shops where you could buy food, so I would sit on the floor of my ‘office’ eating a packed lunch I’d made in the silverfish-riddled kitchen of the basement I was living in. Stale cheese sandwiches and a wrinkled apple, staring at the shredder. Sometimes I used to read the documents I was destroying, which they’d told me not to do, as they were apparently highly sensitive, but instead of top-secret redacted MI5 reports, it was just mind-numbing minutes from meetings about some sort of corporate takeover. Sometimes I wove the shredded paper into little mats. Once I shredded the bread from my sandwich, just for a change. One lunchtime, someone had left a newspaper on the table next to the shredder and, before I shredded it, I saw a job advert in it that began ‘DO YOU BELIEVE THERE’S SOMETHING OUT THERE?’ Stuck in that windowless room, I really wanted to believe it, so I applied for the role.
As part of my application, I had to write an account of my own supernatural experience. In my twenty-one years on earth, I’d never been aware of anything unearthly – not so much as a cold draught had troubled my sixth sense. But I was desperate to get out of the shredding room, which was opening up a portal to hell, so I wrote a story about doing a Ouija board at a hen weekend, and it spelling out the name of a boy who died in the house we were staying in. This was actually my uni friend Hima’s story; not only had I never used a Ouija board, but I’d never even been on a hen weekend. I called Hima for a bit of background in case they asked me more about it, but she said she could never talk about it again because a tarot reader told her not to.
The interview to join the team of Ghostly Goings On was at the production company HQ in West London, with one of their producers, Delia Smith. No, really, that was her name – she said it looked good on credits so she’d just gone with it, and was waiting for the real Delia to sue. Later, she married a man called Jason Partridge, and so became Delia Partridge and the real Delia never had to get involved. Anyway, Delia was a great exec – loud and gossipy, but got things done. She always wore a big feather boa as she said it got her noticed, made her memorable. I suppose it worked, as I frequently heard her referred to as ‘that mad bitch in the boa’, though mostly she was known as ‘Other Delia’, even after her marriage.
In my interview she asked me about my Ouija board story and then drilled down, which was what I was afraid of, so I told her I could never talk about it again, because a tarot reader told me not to. She hired me, even though I had no experience in TV research, no driving licence and no gumption whatsoever. Their tech guy taught me the basics of using a camera, and they sent me off in search of spooks, long before the days of health and safety, or due diligence, or any of the stuff that’s factored into production nowadays. Just me and my trusty Canon XL1, going into strangers’ houses, hoping they were scary.
The main lesson Other Delia taught me was: Make It Happen (one of the great tenets of TV production). Do whatever it takes to get a show off the ground. Tell people what they want to hear, don’t take no for an answer, railroad, dissemble, charm, evade, get them to put it in black and white, don’t you put anything in black and white, and don’t worry too much. Just get it on camera, and it’ll all come out in the edit. A TV producer needs shameless brass neck, rhinoceros hide and chutzpah.
Obviously, I had none of these things. Early on, I was constantly hung up on, doors slammed in my face, emails ignored, and every night I cried myself to sleep worrying about what I was expected to do. But the alternative was the shredder, so I had to get on with it. Fudging my way through, I clumsily climbed the career ladder, but the truth is, unlike Other Delia, I’m not a great executive producer. I find it hard to delegate, and end up doing everything myself. It feels like an imposition to say to someone ‘Would you mind doing this job we pay you to do?’ so I end up doing most of the jobs we’re paying them to do, running myself ragged in the process. My teams have a ball because now I bring in please-like-me bagels instead of doughnuts, and they never have to go the extra mile – I always go there for them. I have my mother to thank for that – don’t be a bother, be a good girl, you push the trolley.
I also find it hard to lie to people, which always seemed to be a requirement of the profession. Not because I mind about lying, I just mind about being found out. Petroc and Oswald make all sorts of wild promises they can’t possibly keep, with a sublime disregard for the fall-out. Whereas I’m always thinking three – or thirty – steps ahead, worrying about the consequences. So I lie, but without the necessary conviction. People smell it on me and retreat, hanging up the phone, slamming the door.
I know I haven’t done the greatest job with David and Chew Hill, because I liked him, and thus found it even harder to maintain the vague web of deceit we needed to secure his involvement. Oz would have looked him in the eye and told him that the series was guaranteed to win a BAFTA, because we had an internationally renowned director on board, when in fact it’s Tristram Barnes, responsible for masterpieces such as the distinguished talent show Grease Me Up, the acclaimed celebrity journey Titty-Ho to Twathats and the esteemed documentary My Post-Prison Party. It’s hard to talk up a filmmaker whose biggest hit featured an ex-con called Mad Dog Matty having a knees-up with his feral family in Burngreave. As such, my equivocation didn’t seal the deal.
One thing I am good at, though, is post-production. I’m great in the edit, love sitting in a darkened room, taking a shoddy bit of footage and making it sing. Like gathering the shredded pieces of paper, weaving them into a smooth glossy sheet full of revelation and intrigue. A tweak here, a cut there, a sound bed there and hey presto! A story is told. I can do the lying and dissembling and charming, but only if it’s locked in an edit suite. Because that’s the other tenet of telly: nothing you see is real. It’s someone looking at a wasteland, painting an oasis. We can turn a villain into a hero, and vice versa. David’s worried he’s going to be the baddie, and now I’ve got to persuade him otherwise, whatever it takes.
I often think about Other Delia and that show Ghostly Goings On; the path it set me on, what it led to, the steps ahead I didn’t see coming. Because in many ways, I’ve been haunted ever since.
20
My Uber Lux is a Mercedes driven by Danny, who, on learning my profession, is keen to tell me all that’s wrong with it. We’re entering a shitty age of television, apparently – everything is dross and we should be ashamed of the pap we produce. I find it extraordinary how much of this pap he’s managed to watch, because he seems to have an opinion on everything from I’m a Celebrity… to Line of Duty, via News at Ten and Gogglebox.
‘Don’t get me started on the soaps,’ he says, as we edge our way out of the city. It’s still early afternoon, and the traffic isn’t too bad. We should make it to Chew Hill well before three o’clock.
‘All right, I won’t,’ I reply, checking my phone. Another missed call from my mother. I text my sister Maz: Baby Jane keeps calling, what’s up? and then devote myself to gazing out the window, trying to ignore Danny’s drone. I like being driven around in cars; it makes me feel like a VIP – protected, anonymous, conferring responsibility for my life onto someone else. It’s the same in hotels and restaurants – someone else is doing all the hard work, taking on the load, aiming to please. There’s something about crisp white sheets and tablecloths that makes my internal winch slacken, like the opposite of a contraction. However, despite the Lux-ury of this vehicle, my driver’s infernal monologue is getting on my nerves.
‘The trouble with these daytime quizzes is—’
