Sophie Hannah - A Game for All the Family

Back to Ben Lourenco, whom I hope nobody has forgotten. Ben played the heroine’s friend who pretended to be her abusive ex-boyfriend. It was for this role that he won Best Supporting Actor. It drew him to the drama world’s attention very forcibly, and so naturally he was grateful to Freddii Bausor, without whom he would be no more than a household dimple that everyone recognized but no one knew by name.

At the BAFTAs that night were two fairly eminent bods from a TV company called Factotum Productions, Donna Lodge and Justine Merrison. Donna was the managing director of the company and Justine was the head of development. This meant that, together, they were responsible for coming up with ideas for what programs and films to make, and deciding which actors they would like to be in those ideas.

Donna Lodge took one look at Ben Lourenco and decided he would be perfect for a drama series they were trying to get off the ground. The development of this drama had hit the rocks somewhat because Donna and Justine couldn’t agree about it. (My source was not allowed to tell me much about the project, as it has still not hit our screens and perhaps never will.)

It had started off very high concept, but then Donna had worried that the concept was too high, too big a risk. Would viewers buy into it? Would the BBC, ITV or Sky commission it? Donna was in favor of removing the high concept before “pitching” the drama, which means offering it to channels that might put it on. Justine disagreed. Without the high concept, the show would have no content, she argued. Imagine pitching James Bond as an idea, except, because it’s pretty implausible that he’s such an amazing, death-defying spy, you make him not a spy at all. Instead, he more convincingly wanders around his kitchen, sometimes making toast and sometimes just listening to a spot of news on the radio, but generally being a character full of depth rather than one hampered by a plot.

When Donna Lodge saw Ben Lourenco claim his award at the BAFTAs, she leaned over her champagne glass and said to Justine, “Ben Lourenco would be perfect .” Silently, Justine thought, “Perfect for what? A lead role in a drama about a man who mooches around?” To make it worse, the setting of the drama and its title remained unchanged from the original idea that Justine had loved, so this show was set in a place that everyone associates with lots of amazing stuff happening, and this made it even worse that nothing amazing was going to happen. The title was suggestive of upheaval, mayhem and redemption, all three of which had been removed from the “treatment”* (*synopsis). Imagine a movie set in the world’s most notorious prison, called The Cells of Horror and Hope , in which the inmates are quite content and civilized and the guards are suspiciously lenient and humane, and you might begin to perceive the scale of the problem.

Justine Merrison was pessimistic, to put it mildly. But Donna Lodge was her boss, and she couldn’t think what to do. Most people who had fallen out with Donna had not subsequently fared well in the TV industry, and Justine suspected this was no coincidence. She didn’t want to have to leave her job, and couldn’t think of a way to discuss her unhappiness with Donna that wouldn’t involve screaming at her to stop being such an imbecile.

Ben Lourenco was the first good idea Donna Lodge had produced for a long time, so Justine said yes, hoping this might be the beginning of Donna coming to her senses. The lead role in the drama-free drama was duly offered to Ben and he accepted it, though he humbly asked if he could have some creative involvement in the idea’s evolution. “Of course!” Donna gushed.

Justine was astonished when Ben voiced her concerns, almost word for word. “We need a stronger hook, I think,” he said. “I mean, we’ve got six hours of drama to fill. I think my character’s potentially interesting, but something needs to be driving him. I mean, ideally we’d have a strong story of the week and an overarching narrative as well.”

“What a fantastic idea, Ben,” said Donna, to Justine’s astonishment.

Justine cleared her throat and said, “You mean like . . . ,” and then she described her and Donna’s original idea, the high-concept drama, as if it were entirely new and had only just occurred to her.

“Yesss!” said Ben. “That’s wonderful. Exactly that sort of thing.”

“Well, let’s go with that, then,” said a radiant Donna. “Justine and I were thinking of something along those lines at first, but we worried it was too high risk. But actually, we should pitch what we’re passionate about, not what we think they want, right?”

“Right,” said Ben.

“Right,” said Justine.

And in a flash, everything was back on track. Justine hated Donna more than ever, but in a way she knew she would enjoy and make a fun hobby out of, not in a seriously problematic, miserable way. The main thing was that the show was back on—the proper show, in its ideal form. Or, rather, the pitch was back on. Who can tell what the channel controllers will say yes to?

As it turned out, the pitch never made it to the inbox of the head honcho of any channel. Why? Because of Freddii Bausor. Or, it might be more accurate to say, because of Freddii Bausor’s enemy, the woman who used to be the wife of Fred Bausor, as Freddii was known before her operation. This former spouse, an American historian called Carine Hartwell who had dumped Freddii after her surgery, went to the police and claimed that Fred had frequently battered her and done all kinds of other unsavory things to her during their six-year marriage. Several of her close friends said they had known about the abuse. But just as many other people who had also known the married couple said that it was absolutely untrue. One friend said that Freddii had once tearfully confessed to being violent and unable to help it. Another said Carine Hartwell had announced many times that she was going to break Freddii if it was the last thing she did. Yet another claimed to have heard her verbally draft a plan that involved pretending Freddii was a wife-beater and rapist. In the end, it boiled down to everybody’s word against everyone else’s.

With all these contradictory accounts buzzing around, the press and the public, who all wanted to be able to bray in a particular direction and had no idea which one to pick, were obliged to look further than what everyone was saying, so they looked at the work of Freddii Bausor and Carine Hartwell. Here is what they found:

Freddii: detective shows featuring grotesque murders and psychopaths who pretend not to have committed them. One TV movie about a woman who believes seven pounds of extra weight renders her unloveable, and who lies about having once had an abusive partner.

Carine: one scholarly tome about Christian missionaries in Malaysia.

Most interested parties decided* (*completely kidded themselves) that the above comparison of works was pretty conclusive. In the television industry, many prominent producers, actors and directors let it be known that they completely believed Carine and would never work with Freddii or partake of her cultural artifacts again. This seemed to be the dominant opinion. Famous stars of screens big and small started to tweet infographics to one another: endless rows of little gray men and then, huddling together for warmth, two small red men in the corner. The gray men were supposed to be all the men accused, and found guilty, of doing unspeakable things to women, and the two red men represented the tiny minority of men who’d been wrongly accused.

Endless heated exchanges took place on the internet about whether it was insulting and transphobic to apply a guilty-and-innocent-men infographic to Freddii, who had never been a man in anything but physique.