Too Cold For Snow

Strategic Studies wanted a pacifist, a token pacifist to join their board and they invited Michael Foot because he was just about the most famous one around at the time – even though Bruce Kent was probably the pacifists’ pacifist – and he accepted. The Sun ran it under the headline ‘Foot Heads Arms Body.’ Marty was laughing as he sipped his powerful margarita.
    In the technical area the floor manager was saying his mantras, learned from a wise man in a tree house in Kerala.
    ‘The water lapping the mangrove roots is the sound of a safe place, is the rhythm of home.’
    He took a deep breath and walked into studio D to do the warm-up routine, the usual limp-as-lettuce gags followed by the health and safety drill. On air in ten.
    The director in the gallery looked at his watch. Almost an hour before he could get to a bar and shaft a lager and maybe, if his luck was in, pull one of the impressionable little vixens who worked in accounts. The production assistant sitting next to him was wondering if the small wager she’d had with Camera 4 would pay off. She’d predicted that tonight was the night Johnnie’s show would drop off the ratings graph. This run had been getting worse and worse and they simply weren’t getting the names. In this celebrity age, that was the kiss of death. And talking to a guy who flipped burgers for a living wasn’t exactly Big Brother in Buck House now was it? Melissa had told her this show might be better than she could imagine. Precocious bitch. All that Oxbridge la-dee-dah!
    The audience was a blue rinse brigade from some Women’s Institute up the valleys, who found Johnnie as shocking as the advent of menopause. It was always some Women’s Institute from up the valleys who arrived in buses that had seen better days.. They had to pay them to come, calling it a subsidy for the bus when in reality they were paying a tenner a head to fill the seats. There was also a smattering of younger folk who came of their own volition because they liked the scabrous humour of the host.
    The resident band, with its vertically-challenged musical director Billy Sharp struck up the familiar tune, marred somewhat by the fact that the trumpeter coughed during the middle eight, making a sound like some German sound terrorists.
    The floor manager counted down and in he walked, down the glass stairs with the fur-lined banisters in a zebra striped suit with pink chunky-heeled winkle-pickers, and did that mince of his that made him a gay icon to rival the Beverley sisters, all three of them. The biddies hooted and yollered, the youngsters bayed in appreciation.
    ‘Glamorous people, a good night and the warmest of welcomes to the show of shows. And if your name happens to be Graham Norton: go pinch other people’s ideas, you bag of spent fuck.’
    The audience went off like a firecracker, fake shock and real shock. For the TV audience the expletives would be bleeped out by a nimble-fingered vision mixer. It was all a part of living on the edge.
    A crash of snare drums. Marty appeared in a backlit window to the side of the stairs. He forced a smile through his mask of pinking embarrassment.
    ‘And tonight we have for you a self made man, a man of means, not a mean man. His name is Marty Sathyre and he’s the King Farouk of fast food, the top cat of takeaway and a genuine burgher of this town. More from him later but we start, where Billy?’ Spinning round to where his MD was just climbing down from his conductor’s wooden box.
    ‘I don’t fucking know ya knobhead.’ Said for the crowd’s sake. They loved insubordination.
    ‘So what have you got there. What are you eating on the sly?’
    ‘Shortbread.’
    The audience went off on one. They loved the predictability of the dwarf jokes – the ‘shortarse slot’ as some called it. He dismissed Billy with a hand gesture and looked at Camera 3.
    ‘Who wants to come up here and try their luck with Johnnie?’
    Three quarters of the audience had their hands up, but tonight they weren’t choosing at random. Dirk was a plant, there to add spice to Marty’s night of TV hell.
    The steadicam operator tracked him from his seat to his place in front of Johnnie’s throne.
    ‘And you are?’
    ‘Dirk.’
    ‘Not the most charming name but nevertheless you are the chosen one. Now kneel and kiss my winkle-picker.’
    Dirk did as he was told. Week on week they all did. After all there was a holiday in Rio hanging on the next few minutes.
    ‘What do