Ben Elton - Inconceivable

I asked her if she was excited about going to the studio. The look of astonished contempt she gave me would have scrambled an egg.

“Oh yeah ! Right, as if ! Like I’m really going to get excited about going to a crap kids’ show. Yeah, right , that’s really likely.”

I could not have felt more withered if I had been a sultana. This girl made me feel like a piece of one-hundred-year-old shit. I was grateful that I’d done my duty by Lucy on the previous evening because this child was in danger of un-manning me entirely. I did my best to engage her interest, which was, of course, fatal.

“The Prime Minister will be there.”

“The Prime Minister is a meat-eating fascist.”

“Grrrl Gang will be playing live.”

“Grrrl Gang are crap and sad. They don’t even sing on their records because it’s all done by a computer, if you didn’t know.”

“I’ll introduce you to Tazz.”

“Tazz is a moronic duh brain who wouldn’t have got anywhere if all the sad old men at the BBC didn’t fancy her.”

I thought this was extremely unfair. Tazz is an excellent presenter and a lovely girl. Yes, it’s true that she’s fairly gorgeous and does indeed have the factor that in showbiz is traditionally called “something for the dads”, but there’s far more to her than that. Being consistently perky for three hours on a Saturday morning is more difficult than a lot of people think. It takes real talent.

“Don’t you like Livin’ Large , then?”

“Oh yeah ! Sure, as if ! Livin’ Large is crap.”

“Well don’t come, then.”

“No, I’ll come, I suppose .”

And so we went. Kylie, like most young people of my acquaintance, wanted it both ways.

We got in the car and Kylie sorted through my tapes, rejecting every one with pained groans of contempt before turning up the radio full to prevent further conversation. Actually I wished that Lucy had been with us to see her. Kylie has always been such a nice little girl. Lucy tends to see her as an example of the joys we are missing out on by being childless. Up until now I have agreed with her on this point. Kylie’s dolls, her love of stories, her obsession with all animals has always been just so cute (a word I hate), but that’s what Kylie was. We went on holiday with them the Easter before last and it rained all the time. Kylie spent the week lying on her tummy in front of the fire reading the entire Narnia saga. It was a lovely thing to see and Lucy and I had wished she was ours. Well all I can say is that if ever we do have one she can go to a boarding school for the grumpy pubescent bit, because it is not attractive.

Anyway, back to my disaster. Whatever Kylie might have felt, I personally was very much looking forward to the morning and meeting Tazz. She really is gorgeous and quite simply every bloke in the country fancies her. Heterosexual blokes, that is. I realize that these days it is not done to presume that people are necessarily heterosexual. Although, quite frankly, if I was gay I reckon Tazz would turn me around, but then I said that to Trevor and he said, “Well, does Leonardo di Caprio turn you around?” To which the answer is a very big “No.” Quite frankly, I think that Leonardo di Caprio looks like Norman Lamont. It’s just that Tazz is so perky , the most pathologically perky girl on television, perky beyond all reasonable human expectations, a living, breathing perky force. She is also, I’m told, very nice, and a real enthusiast about things like Comic Relief. Besides all this, she wears tiny little crop-tops and microscopic little skirts which for somebody like me who spends his time at TV Centre talking to plump, grumpy, unshaven comedians about whether they can say knob before nine o’clock is a very welcome change.

This morning, rather disappointingly, Tazz was wearing trousers. Probably a directive from Downing Street. I don’t think the PM is an ogler, but he’s only human, for God’s sake. Many a strong man’s eyes have twitched downwards to check out the knicker triangle when facing Tazz on the “Hot Seat” sofas. The word is that even Cliff Richard took a peek. The last thing Downing Street wants is the PM caught having a perv on a twenty-two-year-old’s gusset.

Having such a gorgeous girl presenter is an essential part of kids’ TV these days. I mean the kids themselves would probably be just as happy to watch an enthusiastic old granny, but the bleary, beery students who haven’t gone to bed yet want something sexier, as do the dads who say, “Let’s watch Tazz on the BBC. She’s much better than that computer-generated ferret they have on ITV.”

The show started off fine. I got Kylie sat down amongst the other kids whom at first she affected to despise but I soon noticed that she had hooked up with two eleven-year-old sisters whose mother seemed to have dressed them as prostitutes, in so much as their skirts were the merest pelmets and their tops barely covered the fact that there was as yet nothing to barely cover. Having seen Kylie settled in, I went up to the control box. It’s rather fun being an executive producer. People bring you coffee and things and I was surprised to discover that I was clearly the most senior figure present. I recall reflecting how generous it was of Nigel to stay away and let me take my rightful place centre stage as the BBC’s official Prime Minister host. Ha! And double ha!

Anyway, after the usual half-hour of cartoons (“We hate showing them but it’s what the kids want”), Tazz introduced Grrrl Gang. Despite my niece’s snooty contempt for them, having Grrrl Gang on was quite a coup (what’s more I spotted Kylie screaming with all the other little grrrls). Grrrl Gang are the newest girl group, tougher and more street than whatever the last one was. None of these groups is ever going to do what the Spice Girls did in ’96, but Grrrl Gang are pretty hip at present. They were “In the Dock”, which was another of these sections in which the star guest takes questions from the kids in the audience and on the phones. Which in reality means a series of tremulous voices from Milton Keynes and Dumfriesshire asking, “How do you get to be a pop star?”

To my surprise the answer to this turned out to be quite simple.

“You just got to be yourself, right? Livin’ it large. Kickin’ it big. That’s all it takes,” the grrrls of Grrrl Gang assured the kids of Britain.

“You gotta kick it, girl! Big yourself up!”

“Yeah, and don’t let no one disrespect you, right?”

“Cos it’s about babe control, right? Grrrl strength. Like if you tell a teacher you wanna be a pop star, right, or an astronaut? And she says like, no way, babe , you’ve got to work in a factory or go on the dole! You tell her you are going to be a pop star or an astronaut, right? Cos you can be whatever you want, grrrl. A pop star or an astronaut… or… anything.”

“Yeah, if you want it, grrrl, just grab it. It’s a babe revolution.”

That being sorted out to everyone’s satisfaction, a tiny voice from Solihull asked if the grrrls had heard that their manager was predicting that they would soon be bigger than the Beatles.

“We’re already bigger than the Beatles, aren’t we?” said one of Grrrl Gang. “I mean, there’s five of us and there were only four of them.”

The rest of the Grrrls nodded wisely at this.

Then Tazz announced that it was environment week on Livin’ Large and that the show was committed to biggin’ up the environment big time, right. The grrrls from Grrrl Gang all let it be known that they had big respec’ for this concept and it was at this point that I got my first intimation that the morning was not necessarily going to go entirely smoothly. Tazz had brought on the Livin’ Large “Green Professor”, a nice, wacky, bearded git called Simon. The idea was that Simon would discuss green issues with Tazz, Grrrl Gang and the kids.