Too Cold For Snow

furniture – to sip it appreciatively.
    Monday morning came and his heart was beating out a rumba of excitement. The woman who came to meet him in Channel One’s reception was a total glamour puss, perched precariously on the highest heels and radiating that superior confidence that comes from being a P.A. to power. Madeleine ushered him into a wood-panelled room with a couple of leather sofas that spoke of Sicilian vespers and Renaissance light. There was a large desk as a centre-piece and a cupboard full of awards. Rose de Montreux. Royal Television Society. BAFTAS. Investors in People.
    ‘Do sit down. Can I offer you a drink of some kind? Mr Fopp won’t be very long. He’s just with a Chinese investor.’
    Louis said he was fine and waited. When Arnie Fopp walked into the room he did so with a swagger. Louis knew that here was a no-nonsense type.
    ‘A pleasure to meet you. I feel as if I’ve known you a long time already. I have some of your works, you know. Three in fact, including “Narrow Man”.’
    ‘Narrow Man’ was one of Louis’ own favourites – a charcoal, figurative work where the eponymous subject seemed crammed in between the edges of the paper. He had huge hands like trenching tools. Louis still thought it might be the nearest he’d got to capturing the human condition. It was also the one he’d been most sorry to part company with. Mr Fopp had taste.
    ‘So what’s the idea you’ve brought me?’
    And so Louis settled into the luxurious embrace of the sofa and pitched his pitch.
    ‘You know there have been some big series about Welsh art in the past decade or so. Painting the Dragon and then the one where they created a virtual gallery and plonked it down in St Justinians on the Pembrokeshire coat. Well I have an idea where we bring the paintings to life…’
    ‘What, like an animation series?’
    ‘No, they’d be short dramas. We’d show how things were five minutes before the moment of a painting was captured and five minutes afterwards. We find out what the characters were thinking. Bring the story alive. Bring the dead people in the painting alive.’
    Fopp got it straight away. He proved it by getting his secretary to invite a man from finance and a man from contracts to meet them on the office verandah which looked out over the retail park. The carve-up of the BBC licence fee was in everybody’s sights. You didn’t need to be a greedy porker to want a slice of that cake.
    Over drinks and a half hour of the most delicious salacious gossip about local TV stars, Fopp said he wanted to offer Louis a chance to make a pilot. Not any old pilot, but one where there was more than adequate resourcing. He’d need a big drama-style budget, suggested Fopp, looking at the finance director who looked ill at ease, probably working out the cost of the rare olorosos being sipped.
    ‘Start on it soon, and we’ll be able to squeeze it under the wire of this financial year.’
    He mentioned a figure and it was as much as Louis could do not to choke on his sherry. This was a better result than Louis could have wished for. The last time he’d pitched a TV idea it was in a meeting with the undead, three cadavers in a room who only moved to say goodbye: leave your name in the wastepaper basket on the way out.
    Louis borrowed a mobile phone from his mate Keith so he could make the calls he needed to. Louis was in Companies House that afternoon, setting up a limited company which he called ‘Canvassing’. The finance director said he’d be able to front the development money within a week, so he’d need bank details by the weekend. Later that afternoon, in a daze of happiness, Louis met his bank manager, a beleaguered soul who always laughed at the extravagant inventiveness of his excuses: some burglars stole the cooker so I’ll need a new one was a favourite. Louis left the bank with a company account. When he got home he designed a logo on the Mac he’d borrowed from his long-suffering brother, printed off some letter headings and he was in business.
    The weekend meandered past just as surely as the rivulet of red wine ran down his throat, acquired from the office where the owner who gave him a VAT receipt for two cases of the stuff marked ‘office equipment’. On the Monday he had a meeting with a guy called Larry, who’d made two or three films. Louis liked his style, but most of all he’d been wowed by his gift for composition.
    ‘I’d like you to work on a project of mine.