Ben Elton - Inconceivable

Dear Sam

A sort of half-exciting thing happened at work today. It started off very exciting, but then got slightly less so. I was just completing a particularly difficult level of Tomb Raider on my PC when Daphne looked in and said that the Director General’s office had been on and would Lucy and I care to go to dinner at Broadcasting House!

Well, would I ? All thoughts of Lara Croft’s extraordinary bosom fled my mind instantly. I mean the DG’s dinners at BH are legendary. He has cabinet ministers, captains of industry, footballers, bishops, everyone . But never , to the best of my knowledge, has a lowly executive producer of broken comedy and sitcom been invited. I did once go to his Christmas drinks, but it was only the once and, anyway, there were at least two hundred people at that and it was only drinks. This was dinner! Dinner at Broadcasting House, the Ship that sails down Regent Street! What an honour! The DG must have heard of my trip to Downing Street. I doubt he could have missed it: I’ve talked about it loudly in every single nook and cranny of the Corporation.

Anyway, for whatever reason, we’d been invited. We were “in”. I nearly stood to attention when I told Daphne to accept!

“When is it?” I said. “I’ll cancel everything. If my mother dies, she dies alone.”

“Tomorrow night,” she said.

Slightly disheartening. Obviously an invitation at such short notice means we’re to be fill-ins for somebody who has jacked. Still, I thought, I’d never have expected to have been asked at all, so even being a replacement is an honour.

Then the phone rang. It was George.

“Guess what?” he said. “Melinda and I got asked to a DG’s dinner for tomorrow night! Incredible, eh, what a coup! Obviously we’re a fill-in for somebody who jacked but, still, pretty amazing. The appalling bugger of it is we can’t go! Melinda just can’t get a sitter she trusts. There’s only two sitters in the world it seems who aren’t mass murderers and they’re both busy. I’ve threatened divorce but she won’t budge…”

“When did you get your invitation?” I asked.

“Yesterday, late afternoon,” said George. “I rang the DG’s office first thing this morning to say we couldn’t do it. I could scarcely believe I was actually turning down the Director General this morning. I suppose in a way it’s pretty cool.”

After George got off the phone I tried not to be miffed. “Who cares?” I thought. “So what if I was second choice?” We were still going to dine with the…

And then Trevor rang.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he said, “but Kit and I got invited to have dinner at BH with the DG and we can’t go! His office rang first thing this morning. It’s for tomorrow night so obviously we were to be the replacement for someone who’s dropped out, but all the same! Pretty amazing, eh? I had to ring them back half an hour ago to decline. It was like pulling teeth but there’s no way Kit can break his rule.”

Kit, sadly, is HIV positive and although he’s doing incredibly well and you would never know he carried the virus he does have to be careful about over-exertion. He and Trevor have a strict rule that they have only one social occasion a week.

“And we used it up having you to dinner,” Trevor said, and I must say that I didn’t much like his tone, the clear implication being that he and Kit had been insane to waste their precious entertaining time on us when there were far more impressive prospects just around the corner. We parted slightly coldly.

So there it is. Lucy and I are to be the replacement for a replacement for a replacement. Nonetheless we are going to dinner with the DG, which is not to be sniffed at. I’ll have to make sure that Nigel hears about it. He can hardly sack me if I’m friends with the PM and the DG.

I spent all day expecting Keith Harris to phone and say he’d had to turn down an invite from the DG because Orville has a cold.

Tosser also phoned me today. No chance of a job with his company, which was a bit dispiriting, I must admit. I had thought, vainly, that he’d jump at the chance of recruiting me, that I’d be rather a prestige signing for his company. You know, top BBC man and all that, but obviously he doesn’t think so. “The BBC is just another player,” he said to me, which is a bloody ridiculous thing to say considering the BBC is the largest broadcaster in the world and he has a floor and a half in Dean Street. Quite frankly, I suspect him of only giving work to gorgeous young women with pierced bellybuttons and small tattoos of scorpions on their shoulders; there certainly seem to be a lot of them employed at his office, though that might just be coincidence, I suppose.

Dear Pen Pal

I’m writing this having just got back from dinner at Broadcasting House. The Director General was hosting one of his evenings for the great and the good so obviously we’d only been invited to pad out the numbers (Sam did some spying and it turned out that the Editor of the Daily Telegraph had jacked at the last moment. Sam said other people had been asked to fill in before us, but he was very vague about who they were, very important people he said).

Anyway, when I say we had dinner with the Director General we barely actually spoke to him, of course, being at the other end of the table, but it was still very nice. BH really is a fantastic building, even though some idiot or other ripped most of the Deco out in the fifties and replaced it with the interior of a Soviet prison. Nonetheless it still feels special to walk in through those same doors that Tony Hancock and Churchill and Sue Lawley have walked through before you.

Of course actually having dinner there (served by very smart staff) is particularly magical, it takes you back to another age, like the twenties or something. You start with drinks in a sort of antechamber and then go through into a marvellous dining room, all wood lined and shimmering crystal. I got sat next to a bishop who was very nice, and a junior member of the shadow cabinet who was not. He immediately made it quite clear that he was not happy at being seated next to a mere “wife” and, what’s more, a mere nobody’s wife to boot. I swear that as the swine came through and spotted his place-setting (with me already sitting next to it) his face actually fell! Unbelievable. He couldn’t even be bothered to make the pretence of being polite. He actually grimaced.

We attempted smalltalk for about a minute.

Me: “So you’re in the shadow cabinet? How fascinating. Although I always imagine that being in opposition must be very frustrating.”

Swine: “Hmm, yes. So your husband works in television comedy, you say? I really don’t think that any of that rubbish is funny any more. There hasn’t been anything remotely decent since Yes, Minister.”

After that he completely ignored me until the cheese, by which time he was pissed enough to try a bit of bored flirting in a lazy, patronizing, off-hand sort of way.

Swine: “I expect with you both being in showbusiness there must be terrible temptations. Do you ever get jealous? Does he?”

I wasn’t having any of it. “What a strange question,” I said, not only hoitily but also fairly toitily and turned back to the bishop, with whom I was getting on like a house on fire. He must have been ninety-three if he was a day and he was telling me about his hobby, which was collecting eighteenth-century Japanese erotic art! Extraordinary! Where does the church get them? What’s more, whilst describing a porcelain figurine of a naked ninja (in rather too much detail), he squeezed my leg under the table! The randy old goat. What is it about men? They’re pathetic. A couple of drinks and they start sniffing about like dogs. Sam was scarcely being any better than the bishop. He was sitting next to this tart with extraordinary knockers (not entirely her own, I fancy) and I could see him just ogling them. I mean at first he’d at least tried to be discreet, although I knew what he was up to, of course, all that reaching for the salt and passing the bread. Sad, really. And after a few glasses of wine he just gave up any pretence at subtlety and started simply staring at them with his tongue hanging out. I mean it couldn’t have been any more obvious if he’d said, “Phwoar! Look at the jugs on that!” I’ve no idea who this overly boobed slapper was, she was only about twenty-three or four and clearly a second wife to someone, but I didn’t find out whose. I looked for a man with a smug smile on his face but there were too many contenders. It may have been the shadow cabinet minister. On the other hand why would a man with a girl like that be flirting with me? I’m not exactly spectacularly blessed in the knocker department.