Ben Elton - Dead Famous

Fogarty sat down.

“Good. You may be an arsehole, but you’re a talented arsehole and I don’t want to lose you. And besides which,” Geraldine went on, “Dervla is free to leave that house at any time. She could have walked out there and then, and she could walk out now. But she hasn’t done, has she? And why? Because she wants to be on telly, that’s why, and at the end of the day, if she has to take her clothes off to do it, then you can bet your last quid she’ll allow herself to be persuaded.”

Bob stared down into his coffee. He looked like a man who needed a bar of chocoate. “We’re corrupting her,” he mumbled.

“What?” Geraldine barked.

“I said, we’re corrupting her,” but this time Fogarty said it even more quietly.

“ Look !” shouted Geraldine. “I’m not asking the snooty stuck-up cow to show us her bits full on, am I? There are guidelines, you know. We do have a Broadcasting Standards Commission in this country. The polythene walls of that box are going to be translucent and the lights will be off. The idea is to make it so dark that the anonymity will persuade some of them to have it off, which I can assure you will be a lot more interesting than precious little Dervla’s sacred little knockers. I want it to be literally dark as hell in that box.”

Eviction

Coleridge pushed the record button on his audio tape-machine.

“Witness statement. Geraldine Hennessy,” he said before sliding the little microphone across the desk and setting it down in front of Geraldine.

“Bit of a reversal for you, eh, Miss Hennessy?”

“Ms.”

“I’m sorry, Ms Hennessy. Bit of a reversal, you being the one getting recorded, I mean.”

Geraldine merely smiled.

“So tell me about the night it happened.”

“You know as much as I do. The whole thing was recorded from start to finish. You’ve seen the tapes.”

“I want to hear it from you. From Peeping Tom herself. Let’s start with the sweatbox. Why on earth did you ask them to do it?”

“It was a task,” Geraldine replied. “Each week we set the inmates challenges to perform to keep them busy and see how they react when working together. They get to pledge a part of their weekly booze and food budgets against their chances of success. We gave them wood and tools and polythene, a couple of heating units and all the instructions, and as it happens they did a bloody good job.”

“You told them how to make it?”

“Of course we did, or how else would they have done it? If I gave you some wood and plastic and told you to construct a Native American sweatbox to seat eight, could you do it?”

“Probably not, I suppose.”

“Well, nor could this lot either. We gave them the designs and the materials and told them exactly where to put it to suit our hot-head camera. This they did and it took them three days. Then on the Saturday evening, as the sun went down, we gave them a shitload of booze and told them to get on with it.”

“Why did you let them get drunk?”

“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? To try to get them to have sex. The show had been going for three weeks and apart from a near miss with Kelly and Hamish in Bonkham Towers we’d had scarcely a hint of any nooky at all. I wanted to get them going a bit.”

“Well,” said Coleridge pointedly, “you certainly did that.”

“It wasn’t my fucking fault somebody got killed, inspector.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“No, it fucking wasn’t.”

Coleridge absolutely hated to hear a woman swear, but he knew he could not say anything about it.

“Look, I’m not a social worker, inspector. I make telly!” Geraldine continued. “And I’m sorry if it offends you, but telly has to be sexy!”

She said it as if she was talking to a senile octogenarian. Coleridge was in fact only two years older than she was, but the gap between them was chasmic. She had embraced and joined each new generation as it rose up to greet her, remaining, in her own eyes at least, forever young. He, on the other hand, had been born old.

“Why did it have to be so dark?”

“I thought it would loosen up their inhibitions if they couldn’t see each other. I wanted them all completely anonymous.”

“Well, you certainly succeeded in that, Ms Hennessy, which is the principal factor inhibiting my investigation.”

“Look! I didn’t know anybody was going to fuck off and murder someone, did I? Forgive me, but in my many years of making television it has never crossed my mind to arrange my work on the offchance that you coppers might want to look at it later in the light of a homicide investigation.”

It was a fair point. Coleridge shrugged and gestured Geraldine to continue.

The sweatbox stood waiting in the boys’ bedroom, but for the time being the housemates remained in the living area, trying to get drunk enough to take the plunge.

“Well, we gotta do four hours in there,” Gazzer said, “and if we don’t want to get caught all nudey when the sun comes up we’ll have to get started by one at the latest.”

“I want to get it over with long before that,” said Dervla, gulping at her strong cider.

“Well, don’t get too pissed, Dervo,” Jazz warned. “I don’t think the confines of a sweatbox are a very clever environment to honk up in.”

Peeping Tom had given them all the luxuries that they needed to get in an appropriately silly mood: plenty of booze, of course, also party hats, party food and sex toys.

“What are they, then?” Garry asked.

“Love balls,” Moon replied. “You stick ’em up your twat.”

“Blimey.”

“I’ve got a pair at home. They’re great, keep you permanently aroused, except they can be dead embarrassing. I don’t wear knickers much, you see, and I were wearing me love balls to go shopping, right, and they fell out in the supermarket and went bouncing up the fookin’ veggies isle. This old bloke picked ’em up for me, no fookin’ idea at all. ‘Excuse me, dear, I think you dropped these.’”

Jazz fished in the party box and brought out a sort of plastic tube. “What’s this, then?” he asked.

“Knob massager,” said Moon, who seemed to be something of an expert on the subject. “You stick your knob in it and it whacks you off.”

“Ah well, you see, me, I’m a traditionalist,” said Jazz. “Why get a machine to do something that is best done by hand?”

Everybody was getting quite deliberately drunk, slowly convincing themselves that they were at a party. That they were amongst friends instead of amongst rivals and competitors.

“Quite frankly,” said Moon, “at the end of the day, ninety-five per cent of sex toys never get near a knob or a vag. People buy ’em for a laugh, to give as embarrassing birthday presents and whatever. It’s like ‘What are we going to get Sue for her eighteenth?’ ‘Oh, I know, let’s get her a fookin’ great big dildo with a swivel end. That’ll be a laugh when she opens it in front of her gran.’ Nobody actually uses this shite. Quite frankly, I’ve got a pair of nipple clamps at home and I use them for keeping my bills together.”

Along with the sex toys, Peeping Tom had supplied a coolbox full of ice creams. The modern variety of expensive iced versions of well known chocolate bars. They all dipped in excitedly.

“I remember when there was ice creams and there was KitKats,” Jazz observed, “and the idea of the two trespassing on each other’s territory was simply not an issue, it just was not going to happen. Unimaginable. Kids today reckon it’s the norm.”

“Mars Bars started the rot,” Dervla observed. “I’m old enough to remember the excitement, it seemed such an incredible idea at the time, a Mars Bar made of ice cream. Stupid. Now they do ice cream Opal Fruits.”