Ben Elton - Inconceivable

Dear Idiot

Rather an unfortunate development arose today workwise. And when I say “rather” what I actually mean is “unbelievably” and such a bugger coming so soon as it did after my Downing Street triumph.

I was sitting at work trying to read a treatment for a game show that had been sent in by Aiden Fumet on behalf of one of his acts. It was bollocks, of course, and depressing bollocks at that. Something about contestants having to identify their partners by smelling their socks and looking at their bare bottoms pushed through holes in the set. The bit they seemed most proud of was that the game would also feature gay and lesbian couples. This alone, the authors seemed to feel, made the idea important, alternative and at the cutting edge.

Anyway, I was just applying my “Loved it but seems more Channel Five to me” rubber stamp when the phone rang and Daphne told me it was someone called Tosser. Good, I thought. Tosser has always been a tiny bit patronizing with me and I’d been looking forward to telling him that I was no longer in the market for employment so he’d have to headhunt elsewhere. I relished this chance of informing him that as I’d recently been entrusted by the Channel Controller himself with the duties of executive producer to the Prime Minister, I was now feeling very comfortable at the BBC.

Sadly I was not to have this chance.

“Sam,” said Tosser, “love to come to dinner, old boy, except I’m going skiing. But as it happens I’m not sure the invite was intended for me anyway. It said ‘Dear Nigel’ on the note.”

Oh my God.

Oh my Goddity God.

I went first hot and then cold and then both hot and cold at once.

Wrong envelopes!

Such a basic farce plot! I would have seen through it in a second in a script and now it had actually bloody happened!

A man did not need to be Stephen Hawking to work out the permutations of the plot. If I’d sent the dinner invitation to Tosser Tomkins, then I’d sent my enquiry about leaving the BBC to…

Daphne took another call. I knew even before I had registered her hushed and respectful tone that the sword of Damocles was suspended above me. This would need very careful handling.

“Sam. The Channel Controller on line two.”

I made my excuses to Tosser. “In shit, Toss, got to go!”

And picked up the phone. Nigel’s voice was cold as a penguin’s arse.

“Sam, I have a memo here in which you address me as a tosser.”

“It was a mistake.”

“Yes,” said Nigel, “it certainly was, mate.”

He went on to assure me that he was flattered that I had thought to seek his advice about whether I should leave the BBC and intrigued that I wanted his opinion on whether I should “put myself about a bit on the job market since after all the independent sector is clearly so much more vibrant”. He thanked me for my consideration and promised to give the matter his fullest and most immediate possible attention.

Click. Dial tone. Bugger.

That was it. No goodbye, no mention of my dealings with Downing Street about which I had copiously emailed him.

Well, I couldn’t leave it there, could I? I rushed along the corridor to his office. Television Centre is of course famously circular and I was so flustered that I missed the Controller’s office entirely and had to run round the whole building again. I’ve done that before, of course, many times, but only when pissed and trying to find a Christmas party.

Responding to my urgent pleading (conveyed to him via one of his icy receptionists – he has two, flash bugger), Nigel allowed me into his office.

I can remember (just) that office when it was a friendly place. When the BBC really was a family. A family in which almost every member was a jolly uncle or an aunt. A family of fat boozy old time-servers who earned little and drank much. Men and women who went through their entire lives without once wearing a stylish garment or having a fashionable haircut. Who worked their way up the system, serving the public faithfully (if slightly unsteadily) from Floor Manager to Producer to sad old git in the corner of the bar who was too old and pissed to find his way out of the circle. Well, those faggy, boozy days are long gone and it’s probably for the best. None of those jolly old boys would last a second in a climate where there’s five hundred channels competing for the audience and the money’s all going to cable and satellite. Still, I can’t deny that, as I stood there trembling before my Channel Controller (who, I must say again, is two years fucking younger than me ), I found myself wishing that he was a fifteen-stone, red-nosed old bastard who would just tell me to bugger off and forget about it before commissioning another series of Terry and June .

“Look, Nigel,” I said, still dizzy and clutching at a Golden Rose of Montreux for support and nearly cutting myself on its petals. “This is awful, I wanted to invite you to dinner.”

He answered me with nothing more than a raised eyebrow.

“That note I sent you was meant for someone else. Simon Tomkins, you know, he was on the panel with you at last year’s Edinburgh Television Festival. He was the one who said the BBC was an ageing tart trying to flag down a curb crawler on the information superhighway.”

Well, it put the thing about calling him a tosser to rest but, beyond that, I’m afraid I had dug myself deeper into the hole.

“So what you’re telling me, Sam, is that this note dissing the BBC” (he used the word “dissing” even though he’s a thirty-six-year-old white freckly philosophy graduate from Durham University) “was actually intended as a job application to one of the foremost independent producers in the country?”

“Uhm,” I said.

Not good, but the best I could do at the time.

“Well?” said Nigel.

I was clearly going to have to do better than “Uhm.”

“Oh, you know, just a punt, Nigel, really more to see what sort of shape the independent sector’s in than anything else.”

He did not believe me even slightly.

“Uhm… did you see my emails regarding the Prime Minister? Tremendously successful meeting we…”

“Yes, I saw them,” said Nigel, and there our meeting ended save for Nigel assuring me that if I was at all unhappy at the BBC I had only to offer my resignation and he would consider it most favourably. He said he was disappointed, that he had always taken me for a company man (which I bloody am actually). He talked about the Beeb being a family, that it was not just a part of one’s career but a career in itself, a career that demanded some sense of loyalty.

Yes, Mr Nigel straight from Granada, bloody exactly, until the next time the Chief Exec at Channel Four resigns or Murdoch is looking for a bit of posh to give cred to the management “team” at one of his tabloid channels. Then the BBC will be a family all right, a modern dysfunctional family in which everybody buggers off at the first chance they get, with Nigel at the front of the queue.

Needless to say, dinner was not discussed.

Dear Penny

Got my picture of Gertrude today and was slightly disappointed to discover that it’s the same as the one in the Big Issue. You’d think they’d have taken more than one shot of her. Still, at least it’s a better print.

I do have to admit, Pen, that I’m just a little bit concerned that those less environmentally aware than myself (my mother, for instance) might consider my adoption of Gertrude as reflective of my hopes for a child. This is definitely not the case. The plight of the mountain gorillas is an international tragedy and my involvement in the issue is entirely political.

Book

Lucy has put a picture of a baby gorilla into a clipframe and placed it on the mantelpiece. She says we’ve adopted it. I’m now rather worried that her nurturing instincts are getting the better of her. Interestingly, the baby gorilla (whose name is Gertrude) is, in my opinion, the dead spit of George and Melinda’s Cuthbert, although possibly Cuthbert has more hair.