Ben Elton - Inconceivable

It was to be a “breakfast” meeting at a posh hotel, I’m sorry to say. Whichever American it was who invented such a deeply uncivilized idea should have his eggs boiled, his muffins split and his pop-tarts toasted on an open fire. You can’t make sense of a meeting over brekkie! How the hell are you supposed to take anything seriously when you’re eating Rice Krispies? Or, worse, Coco Pops, which was what I had.

I can never resist the kids’ stuff when I eat in hotels. I always want to order sausage, chips and alphabetti spaghetti from “Sidney the Seal’s Jolly Menu for Whizz Kidz”. Well, let’s face it, that sort of stuff is normally the only thing that British hotels can actually cook. If you’re fool enough to order anything “steeped” in a sauce or containing the words “jus”, “julienne” or “trio” you might as well diary in half an hour in the bog for the afternoon while you’re at it.

In fact this was Claridge’s, so all the posh nosh was probably superb and I could have ordered porridge or salmon or the full English but I’ve never been big on breakfast, and the smell of kippers and kedgeree before eleven quite frankly makes me nauseous. Fish for breakfast has always struck me as wrong, like having a croissant for supper or coffee in a pub. Apparently, however, fishie brekkie is the last word in traditional crusty, old English chic (“chic” I believe being the traditional spelling of “shite”), so Claridge’s of course offers it. Not for me, though, nor salmon and scrambled egg on a lightly toasted muffin. Let’s face it, how often in my life do I get the chance to have a bowl of Coco Pops?

Anyway, to “cut to the chase”, as people in film say, I was meeting some people from Above The Line Films.

I do beg your pardon, I was meeting with some people from Above The Line Films. One must of course speak American English when moving in film circles these days (sorry, motion picture circles) and since those circles are the ones in which my Controller wishes me to move, American English I must speak when I meet with all sorts of motion picture wankers, or, rather, jerk offs .

The people from Above The Line are very hip at the moment, the reason being that they recently made a film that some Americans quite liked. It’s an interesting thing about the Brit film industry (such as it is) that for all the gung-ho, Cool Britannia jingoism we spout about our cool new British talent, we judge our product exclusively on whether or not people in America go to see it. You could make a British film which every person in Britain went to see twice, plus half the population of the European Community, but unless at least five thousand Americans have also been persuaded to go the style fascists will judge it naff and parochial. On the other hand, if we make a movie which flops everywhere and which only five thousand Americans go and see, the director will still be seen as a major burgeoning international talent. This is what the Australians call a cultural cringe. They used to have the same thing about us. In the sixties it was no good being big in Oz, you had to be big in Britain. They’ve dropped that now and concentrate on America like everyone else. I believe that some New Zealanders still see success in London as important but probably only the ones who supply the lamb to Marks amp; Spencer.

Anyway, long story short as Lucy would say, there I was, post deeply unsatisfactory shag, sitting at Claridge’s “doing” Coco Pops and kedgeree with three of Britain’s brightest motion picture talents. Justin Cocker, an estuary Oxbridge mid-Atlantic drawler who called the toilet the “bathroom” and asked if they had any bagels and lox. A snarling Scot called Ewan Proclaimer, who took one look at the Claridge’s breakfast room and said, “God, I fuckin’ hate the fuckin’ English. I mean they are just so fuckin’ English , aren’t they? D’you ken what I’m saying here?”

Also a pencil-thin woman called Petra. On the phone the previous day I had asked Justin Cocker if Petra had a surname and he said that if I needed to ask that question I did not know the British motion picture industry. Which is right, of course, I don’t. Which is why I work for sad old telly.

Weird meeting. Like a summit between people from different planets. The BBC being vaguely located on earth, and Above The Line Films being located somewhere far beyond the galaxy of Barkingtonto. The extraordinary thing is that they think that they are the ones who live in the real world. This is because the BBC is publicly funded and is hence some dusty old pampered 1940s welfare state relic which thinks the eighties never happened. Amazing how these days it’s hip to assume that the money supplied by vast multinational media conglomerates (writing off their tax losses) is somehow more tough and real and proper than that raised by the public for the purposes of their own entertainment.

Anyway, on this occasion licence fee money appeared to be good enough. (It certainly paid for the breakfast, anyway.) I told them that the BBC was interested in co-producing more films with a view to theatrical release prior to TV screening and that my special area was comedy. It seemed I had come to the right people. They said if I wanted comedy they had comedy. Real comedy. Not crap comedy, they assured me; not all that fuckin’ crap that the BBC passes off as comedy, not shite comedy, but sharp, witty, edgy, in-your-face, on-the-nose and up-your-arse comedy. “Two words,” they said, “Zeit” and “Geist”. In other words, “Tomorrow’s comedy today.”

Well, I can’t deny I was excited. This surely was what we wanted. I had only to steer this lot towards Nigel and my standing would again ride high. Ewan Proclaimer produced his script, the eagerly awaited follow-up to his film Sick Junkie , which had been “hugely successful”, i.e. some American critics liked it, although it was actually seen by less people than watch the weather on Grampian. Sick Junkie had been a career breaker for Ewan, but now he explained that he wanted to move totally away from all that stuff.

His new script is called Aids and Heroin .

“It’s a comedy about a group of normal, ordinary kids,” said Ewan Proclaimer, “all heroin addicts, of course. Probably Scottish, perhaps Welsh or Irish…”

“Although we’d shoot it in London,” interjected Pencil Petra.

“Well, of course we’d shoot it in London!” Ewan snapped. He was clearly not a man who liked to be interrupted. “Morag and I have only just got wee Jamie into a decent school… Now these kids survive on the edges of society, right? Dealing drugs, stealing, whoring, ripping off the social. The movie is a week in their ordinary mundane lives. They inject heroin into their eyeballs, they have babies in toilets, they get Aids, they try to raise veins on their private parts in order to inject more heroin, they kill a social worker, they have anal sex in exchange for heroin which turns out to be cut with bleach and kills them, they have abortions, they’re raped by gangs of English policemen…”

My head was spinning at this apocalyptic vision.

“Excuse me,” I risked an interjection. “I hope I’m following. This is a comedy we’re discussing here?”

“Total comedy,” Ewan assured me, “but real comedy, about what’s actually happening to kids today, not escapist English crap.”

It all sounded very post watershed to me, but you never know these days. Things are moving so fast I confidently expect to see them making bongs out of Squeezy bottles on Blue Peter . But anyway, broadcastable or not, I wasn’t having any of it. Well really, it makes me so tired. This never-ending diet of sex and drugs and urban horror that well-heeled highly educated young film makers seem to feel duty-bound to serve up as stone-cold naturalism. For heaven’s sake, I know that life is tough out there but not exclusively so. There are more adolescents in the Girl Guides and the Sea Scouts than there are teenage junkies, but nobody ever makes a film about them.