Quintin Jardine: Screen Savers

There was a silence on the other end of the line. I guessed that Mark had finally figured out that I was ripping the shit out of him. (That’s like taking the piss, only a lot less gentle.) Or maybe it was the other way around, and he guessed that he had been well and truly rumbled. Across the room, Prim and Lulu, our secretary, were staring at me, each of them just a touch glassy-eyed.

‘God!’ His voice was suddenly choked. ‘What a brilliant concept. We’ve written the story-board for the commercial already, but I’m sure we can work that theme in; subliminally, of course. It’s much too sensitive for us just to go balls-out with it.’

I felt my eyes beginning to glaze over too. ‘Mark, can we get this conversation back on track, please?’

‘Yes, Oz, of course. I’m sorry; got a bit carried away there. Truly original creative thinking has that effect on me. Yes: the voice-over. Great news for you. Mr Barowitz, the CEO of Roxy Matrix, asked for you personally. Scots accents are very popular just now, but he didn’t know that. In fact, his wife, Ronnie, is a great fan of your wrestling programme, and she insists that you have exactly the right voice for the new commercial. And Mrs Barowitz has great influence over her husband.’

‘Let me guess, she’s a killer blonde and thirty years younger than him.’

‘Maybe twenty years, but you’ve got the principle right. She’s a power in the business. Mind you we didn’t just roll over and do what we were told. We at RHB and F are true professional advisers. We watched a couple of your shows before we accepted her idea. She’s dead right, you know; your voice and your industry persona are just right for the product. They’re called Rick and Ronnie Power, by the way.’

‘Mr Barowitz’ name wouldn’t be Richard, would it?’

‘How did you guess that?’

‘It just came to me. And how did you come to me? How did you get my number?’ There was an edge to my question, I still wasn’t anything like convinced by Mr Webber. I thought I detected a strong whiff of bullshit coming down the line.

‘I called the GWA. I spoke to Mr Matthews. He’s one of the wrestlers, isn’t he? He gave it to me.’ I made a mental note to have a word with Liam.

‘Look, as you said, let’s cut to the chase here. We’d like you to do the ad. Your part will take a couple of days; we’ll fly you down, and put you up in the Park Lane Hilton. .’

I decided to play it all the way. ‘Not me, Mark, us. My partner comes too.’

‘No problem. Now Oz, you’re not an Equity member, are you. I couldn’t find you on their listing. We have a house rule here that we only use Equity people; one of our directors was a member of the Cabinet and he wants to get back in, and there are still a few dinosaurs in our industry, so we don’t want to compromise him by landing him in the middle of a public union row.’ The words came tumbling out. ‘I can fix that, though. The work you’ve been doing on television qualifies you for membership, and I have a contact in the Equity office. I’ll place you with an agent too; we like to go through them. It’ll take no time at all.’

Mr Webber was beginning to lose his audience; the whiff in my nostrils was getting stronger.

‘As to the fee, I’ve looked at the budget and we can squeeze it up to fifteen.’

‘Fifteen?’ I repeated, a yawn in my voice.

‘Yes, fifteen thousand. Sylvester Burr, your agent, normally takes twenty per cent but, in the circs, I’ll beat him down to ten.’

The phone almost slipped out of my hand. I took a deep breath. ‘I see.’

There was a silence. ‘Okay,’ said Webber, at last. ‘We’ll pay Burr’s commission this time. That’ll leave you with fifteen clear. What d’you say, Oz?’

I did some quick thinking. ‘I’ll tell you what I say. Put it in writing inside forty-eight hours. No faxes; letter-head, signature in blood, all that stuff.’ I gave him the office address.

‘And you’ll do it?’ He sounded genuinely excited.

‘If it checks out.’ I started to hang up then changed my mind. ‘By the way, Mark,’ I added, ‘if Detective Inspector Mike Dylan is behind all this, tell him from me that I’ll have his nuts for desk ornaments. . they’d be too small for paperweights.’

‘Well?’ The question exploded from Prim, as I cradled the phone, and doubled over in pent-up laughter. ‘What the hell was all that about?’

When I could control myself, I told her. ‘You’re right,’ she agreed, at once. ‘It’s got Dylan’s stamp all over it. He probably recruited a young constable with a posh voice and gave him a script.’

‘There’s one way to find out.’ I picked up the phone and called the GWA office, on the west side of the city. It was mid-morning, so I knew that the superstars would be hard at work. The switchboard operator traced Liam Matthews in less than three minutes.

‘Mornin’ Oz, me ould lad,’ he drawled in his accentuated Oirish, slightly out of breath from his training session. ‘What’s up?’

‘Did you take a call a while back from a guy, looking for me, from an advertising agency called RHB and F or some such?’

‘Sure, and I did. Christ was he keen! What was up? Have you got his sister pregnant or something.’

‘Not as far as I know.’ Interesting. If Mark Webber was a Dylan stooge, he’d wouldn’t have needed to call the GWA for my number.

‘He seemed harmless to me, Oz,’ said Liam. ‘I wouldn’t have given him your number otherwise. No problem, is there?’

‘Not if he checks out. In fact, if he does, I’ll buy you a large drink.’

It checked out less than twenty-four hours later, when a special delivery letter arrived at the office, on the RHB and F letter heading, setting out the terms of my proposed engagement and signed not by Webber, but by the former Cabinet Minister himself. At that point, Prim and I began to believe. I replied, accepting of course, by return of post.

The letter from Equity, inviting me to join, didn’t arrive until the next day. ‘You. .’ Prim exclaimed, astonished. I had forgotten to mention that part of my conversation with the ad lad. ‘An Equity member? You’ve never done a day’s acting in your life.’

‘Maybe not, but this is a letter from Equity and it is offering me full membership.’ I scratched my chin. ‘I think it’s a condition of employment, so I’d better sign up.’ And that is how I came to be a member of the same profession as Dawn and her husband, the fourth most famous human on the planet.

We did the shoot two weeks later. I was given a week to learn my lines; which, as I saw at once, had been written in the same style as my standard ring announcements. The main differences were that I was off camera and that the money was fifteen times as good. . not that I had ever complained about the grand per weekend, plus expenses, that Everett paid me.

Mark Webber turned out to be a tall, gangling young man in a suit, a silk kipper tie printed with a piece of impressionist art, rimless spectacles, and a pin through his eyebrow: a designer ad-man if ever there was one. He knew his way around the studio, all the same, and knew how to flatter the director of the epic, Ismael Stormonth, a perfectionist with a strong egomaniac streak. If I was on fifteen grand, I wondered what his take was.

My highly paid gig was similar to my GWA role, in that I spent most of the time hanging around, building myself up for my big moment and watching the professionals, in this case the lighting people and the camera person, do their highly skilled stuff. Even after a year, I still thought of myself as an amateur in the television business.

At the end of the first day, I did a first run through of the script, perfecting my delivery so that it was in synch with the rough-cut of the film footage. The second day was spent in the edit suite doing voice-over after voice-over until at last, not just the prickly Ismael, but Richard and Ronnie Barowitz agreed that we couldn’t get it any better. Mark told me that it was unusual for the client to attend a shoot, but said that the Barowitzes had insisted.