Tilly Bagshawe - Friends and Rivals

The audience applause was clearly Ivan’s cue to acknowledge the camera with a nod and a smile. Instead he stared straight ahead, jaw rigid, beads of sweat clearly visible on his forehead. Catriona winced.

‘What’s wrong with Daddy?’ asked Rosie. ‘He looks awfully strange.’

Some heavy-handed make-up girl had gone overboard with the foundation, possibly in an attempt to hide Ivan’s nerves-induced pallor. The result was a ghastly, orange, waxen look that made him look ten years older – a plastic George Hamilton melting beneath the studio lights.

Isabella James sashayed down to the judging panel. ‘So, Ivan,’ she said chirpily, ‘how do you feel about meeting Talent Quest ’s very first live contestants? Are you confident we’re going to unearth the recording stars of the future?’

The camera closed in on Ivan’s face. For a few awful seconds he said nothing, frozen like a rabbit in the headlights. Then, at a nudge from Stacey Harlow, he belatedly looked up at the autocue.

‘Very confident Isabel … er, sorry, Isabella. The standard in the audition rounds was extreme. Er … Extremely. Extremely high. I’m sure our quest will be a success.’

You could have cut the awkwardness in the studio with a knife. Poor Ivan! Catriona couldn’t bear it. Not only had he fluffed his lines, but his voice sounded terrible, a flat, lifeless monotone. Ivan was a brilliant speaker, a natural raconteur. It was as if the camera had reached inside him and sucked out all his charisma, replacing her bright, brilliant husband with a wooden puppet.

She prayed he’d warm up as the show got under way, but if anything things got worse. The acts were mediocre, with the exception of one eleven-year-old choirboy who sang ‘Pie Jesu’ quite beautifully and without any accompaniment. But while the other judges joked with the contestants and bantered easily with the presenter, Ivan continued to parrot his lines lifelessly, his body and manner both as stiff as a corpse.

When it was over, Rosie stretched out her legs, scattering Quality Street wrappers all over the carpet. ‘I thought that boy was brilliant, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Catriona. ‘Wonderful.’

Perhaps the rest of the show’s viewers had also been too focused on the competitors to notice Ivan’s lacklustre judging performance? She did hope so. Things probably seem worse to me because I’m his wife.

‘What the fuck was that? Late-onset fucking autism?’

Don Peters, Talent Quest ’s executive producer, didn’t pull his punches when he saw Ivan after the show.

‘I know I wasn’t great,’ admitted Ivan, disconnecting his mic. Following Don into his office, he felt like a naughty schoolboy. ‘But it was my first live show.’

‘Not great? It was crap, Ivan. It was a fucking embarrassment.’

‘Oh, come on. I wasn’t that bad.’

‘You reckon?’ snarled Don Peters. ‘You wanna see the tape?’

Ivan didn’t want to see the tape. He wanted to go home, crawl under the covers and hide for the next six months. The irony was that he’d always assumed television would be so easy. Surely any monkey could stand up and read a few lines off a screen. He was so used to being around artists, performers who loved the stage and revelled in it like a drug, it hadn’t occurred to him that he might actually find a live audience intimidating. Nothing had prepared him for the stage fright he’d felt tonight: the sweating palms, racing heart and dry mouth that had crippled his performance. He’d made a fool of himself in front of twelve million people.

‘Look, I’m sorry, all right? I don’t know what happened. I’ll get it together next week, I promise.’

‘You’d fucking better,’ Don Peters growled. ‘You’re not irreplaceable, you know.’

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