“You,” said Seale, sucking on a tumbler rim-loaded with scotch, “you gutless nobody, your role is to hold their dicks while they piss their money into my fucking gob. By which I mean bank account! As a result of continuing viewership! TV is my foul bed now, understand? I make it however the fuck I like. We’re not here to give the people what they want.” He threw an ice cube towards the immense glass window that leered at the city street below like a whore on a corner. “Look out of that window. Don’t get up! Imagine you’re looking out that fucking window. You know how to imagine, you string of fucking turd? Come on, you’re supposed to be creative – create me a fucking scene outside that window and do it silently.” Four or five unpaid interns from City College, 16-17 year olds, were clustered around the other end of the table, scrawled notes and doodles on Pukka Pads spread out in front them, homework diaries, smart phones in brightly coloured skins and cases, Sprite bottles. He only used unpaid staff, made a point of it, had an arrangement in place with the council. A couple of them closed their eyes, trying to get into the role, to visualise the etiquette of the writers rooms and workshops they’d seen in films and play it now, about as convincing as their attempts to not cry or run out of the room and back to their parents or their course supervisors. This, this was real life. Seale leaned down, his lips an inch or so away from their ears, hissed “Wake the fuck up. I’m not not paying you to sleep on the job. Christ, you have to close your eyes to imagine, do you? You, the future of the creative industries? Jesus wept for all of our fucked futures!” He scraped all of the papers and pads and from the table and scrunched them into tight balls and fed them out of the window painfully slowly, the glass only opening a crack of a couple of inches because of safety locks, then picked each of the pens from the table and stamped on them one by one, a process lasting several minutes. When his phone rang he paused and took the call, then resumed the stamping when he’d finished, the whole thing in weird silence. “Out that window,” he said, rubbing four fingers quickly across his forehead to flick the gathered sweat off the sides, dried his fingers on his trouser thighs. “They don’t even know what they want. And you know fucking what? We tell the dumb cunts what we want them to want. Yeah? And what they want, and what we give them, is outrage, blame and grim mirth.” He counted the three off on his fingers as he recited them like sacraments cast in stone, the fundamentals of the media. “By the bastardy bucketload. Shit comes in threes. Keep them happy, keep them watching, keeps me in booze and bitches.”
He poured out another scotch and drank it down, poured out another and flicked the TV on. A repeat of Holiday Park Howlers. Some kid getting burnt on red-hot barbeque coals, skin charred right off down to meaty tissue. He sipped his drink and laughed, his whole body quivering with his own local success story. He muted the TV but kept it on, a couple of pixelated grotesques fucking in a static motor home; laughs were, he farted every time his balls moved. Lost some of the magic without the sound.
“This is priceless,” he said. “I am TV in this town. Look at me. Look! Do I fucking look like TV? The fucking answer’s fucking yes, cowards!” He swallowed the scotch down and staggered up from his chair, knocked a Bisley over, drawers open and stationery dumped out over the coarse carpet tiles, envelopes, whatever, and pissed pure foam into a huge plant pot in the one of the corners, could hear it seeping into the soil. The smell was fierce and mammalian. “All this” – vaguely gesturing around the room, at the screen, the felled Bisley, the drink, all of it – “is me. All this work, these shows, this audience. It’s for me. It’s business. Bottom fucking line. Hot wet cash in the hand. Slurp it up.” He made a slurping sound, sucking in, thrust his hips in a manner simulating sexual activity. “Tastes fucking lovely,” he said. He smelt his fingers, licked them even. “Smell that? That’s the smell of creamy cash. It’s money, it’s all money.” He sat down and drained the dregs of scotch from the bottom of the bottle, gazed into the empty glass. There were tears in his eyes. “Beeb was a fucking moral bastion,” he said. “Values that, values this – had values spewing out of its arse, for all the good that did it. Values, responsibilities, it’s all bollocks, it’s all… pointless.” He looked at the screen. Couple of women driving a red Nissan Micra over the Cliff Edge at West Runton. A tragedy really. He looked reflective, almost pensive, as much as was possible past the shit-eating half-grin. “People don’t want that now. World’s changed, nothing I can do about it. Shit just is.” He felt that rising sick feeling and thought he was going to puke but didn’t. Could taste it, feel it on his teeth backs. “Only responsibility we can have’s to ourselves, to making as much fucking money as possible before something else comes along and does it instead. We hold to two values and two alone: hatred and desperation. The only things that matter to the Great British scum. They made this,” he said, almost pleaded, a moment of intense, bilious, drunken focus. “That’s the order of things. Dumb comes before dumbing down. They made a market and I took it. I don’t feel culpable, I’m not and never claimed to be a fucking moralist. If you take any one thing away with you just fucking make it that, okay? They made this. People get the media they deserve.” He took his tie off, inspected it, great silk, power pattern, they called it, chevrons to somewhere, rolled it up, put it in his jacket pocket. The credits were running on Holiday Park Howlers. The clicking of the dry mouth of one of the interns was like a metronome counting down to unimaginable horror.
He pressed into his eyes with a thumb and forefinger to clear some funk and rubbed his palm over his face and stretched and shook his head as if he’d just woken up or recalled his privilege and drummed his fingers on the table and grunted a couple of guttural chants out, part of an awful corporate posturing that synonymised commercial or business protocols with the necessary violence of an ancient lifestyle or the spiritual significance of ritualised trance. He clapped his hands together with great force.
“Right you slags, where the fuck were we. Ideas. I want an idea each out of the lot of you, one line, one fucking idea. Clear?” They nodded paperless. “Fucking go then,” he said, pointing at the first, a tepid gimp in a too-big suit that made him look like a drowning doll.
“Bar Fights,” the intern said, face flushing the colour of his acne as he did. “Fat blokes provoking fights in pubs and filming it on smartphones, narrated by Jake Humphrey.”
“Love it. Good. Two hundred budget.” The miserly and completely arbitrary nature of his budgeting was renowned in the industry, producing a real breadth of low quality output with huge potential for profits. “Fucking smartphone TV, aesthetic fucking wonder of the modern age. Next.”
“Car Boot Live – a real time chronicle of Aylsham’s Saturday car boot sale.” Kids hands and voice were shaking as he spoke
“Boy I can hear your fucking brain spunk, this is TV gold! Have you seen that fucking freak in the burger van works that car boot? That alone is a spin-off waiting to happen, travelling the county to low-grade public events in a stench of day-old spunk and grease, all perverse sex and racist soundbites a huge polystyrene boxes of grotesque food, congealed before its even cooled down. It’s ideal Norwich fare. Fuck, Freak in a Burger Van, sold like some fucking B-movie, posters, DVD specials, whatnot. So good. I am, I mean. It’s fucking character driven. We need characters. People love them, love to get behind and despise the poor pricks in equal measure, like that twat with the puppets. Hundred should cover that, few quid for tea and coffee. Borrow the rest of the gear from college. Next.”
“I’ve got Adventures in Sugar Beet Fields.” She was the only female and more than held her own round the table through a combination of complete detachment and psychopathic aggression. “A period romance set in the heart of the north Norfolk countryside, all buxom wenches played on the cheap by local landladies getting dry humped in the earth by thick oafs. Wrap a loose story around it. something like that.
“Fuck yes, love your ambition love. High time we had a drama.” He scrawled a name and phone number on the back of a business card. “Call this number, ask for Accruel. He’ll sort you out for costumes, cunt owes me at least two favours. Just sauce the whole thing up a bit, make it current, switch the dry humping for gang rape and the countryside for Mile Cross circa 1976, and you could be onto something very, very big. ‘Adventures in Car Parks’, or something. Give the arseholes something they can relate to. I’ll do you five hundred for that but I want change. Next.”
“Gut the Mustard,” said the fourth, a squat mean kid who refused to fear death. “Feeding very hot mustard to the very young until they cry.”
“Not bad,” he said, “not going to set the world on fire but it’s solid daytime TV. Get the schools involved, headteachers, dinner ladies, usual shit. Sponsored by our friends at Colman’s. Fifty quid. And finally.”
They all turned to the last intern, a milk white weed with near-translucent skin like something pulled out the broads by hooks and rods, great red rings around his lips like a corona where he couldn’t stop licking them in the cold weather, tufts of moustache – so flimsy it looked like it’d blow away if he sneezed – poking creepily from the valley of his philtrum, glassy eyes darting, his palms visibly moist beneath the LEDs.
“My notes,” he said, barely audible through the deafening expectation. “I had an idea, but it was written on my notes.” Seale had made a steeple out of his forefingers. He leaned back in his chair, then stood and walked to the corner of the room farthest from the failure, as though the presence of his very person were a curse or a communicable disease from which he wanted no risk of infection.
“Well remember,” he said, snarled really. “Fucking think. Fucking remember. It’s what your fucking brain’s for. Remember you worthless fucking cunt. One idea, one fucking line. Fucking think.”
“I can’t,” he said. “I’ve tried. I just… I can’t remember it. I’m sorry it’s just, it’s gone.” He swallowed very loudly and opened up his Sprite bottle. Seale ran towards him and yanked the bottle from his hand and poured the contents over his head, slapped him in the face with the empty green plastic, then slapped him again with his hand, pushed him backwards off of the chair. The other four interns stood up and clutched at each other and all jostled to the opposite side of the room, a couple of them crying openly.
“Get the fuck up,” said Seale. The kid did, and Seale shoved him down onto the table. “I’m fucking Caesar,” he said. “The fucking Caligula of the airwaves. Say it.”
“The Caligula of the airwaves,” the intern said, sobbing badly, kind of gnawing on the back of his hand.
“All of you,” said Seale.
“The Caligula of the airwaves,” they said in unison.
“Hail fucking Caesar,” said Seale, leaning down to growl it into the intern’s ear. He could feel his chin on his cheek. “Say it you cunt.”
“Hail” – the intern was gasping too much to speak – “Hail fucking Caesar.”
“Fucking right,” said Seale, pulling the intern’s trousers and boxer shorts off over his leather shoes, pulling his own fly open. “You’ve got a smartphone good tits,” he said to the female intern, arms folded over her chest, chomping on Juicy Fruit like it was the 80s. “So fucking film this. All New You’ve Been Reamed.”
He got to work.
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