Ben Elton: Popcorn

On the morning after the night it happened, Bruce Delamitri was sitting in a police interview room.

‘Name?’ said the interrogating officer.

It wasn’t really a question. The officer knew Bruce’s name, of course, but there was a procedure and he was required to follow it.

On the morning before, Bruce had been sitting in a television studio. Opposite him, across the sweeping curve of the presentation console, were two KenandBarbiestyle presenters of indeterminate age.

‘His name’ (pause) ‘is Bruce Delamitri,’ said Ken, employing the sincere, plonking tone he reserved for really big guests.

‘Occupation?’ said the policeman on the morning after, as if he didn’t know.

‘He is probably the most celebrated artist working in the motionpicture industry today. A great writer, a great director. Hollywood ’s golden boy.’

‘I heard he makes a great pasta sauce too,’ interjected Barbie, by way of adding a little human interest.

It was the morning before, and the last day on which Bruce would hear himself described in such terms.

‘Marital status?’ the cop enquired.

‘But career excellence takes its toll, and Hollywood was recently saddened by the news that Bruce’s marriage to actress, model and rock singer Farrah Delamitri was in big trouble. We’ll be talking about that also.’

The red light on top of the camera facing Bruce lit up. He adopted a suitably sardonic ‘shit happens’ expression. The next twentyfour hours would prove him right about that.

Bruce tried to look the policeman in the eye. Marital status? What a question. The whole world knew his marital status.

‘My wife is dead.’

‘Tell me about last night.’

‘Tonight is Oscars night,’ Ken beamed. ‘The big one. Numero Uno. Nights don’t get any bigger than this. The night of nights. The nightiest night of them all. The night which, according to all the forecasts, promises to be the greatest night of Bruce Delamitri’s life.’

‘Last night?’ said Bruce, who had given up trying to make contact with the cop and now spoke almost to himself. ‘Last night was more terrible than I could have imagined possible.’

‘You’re watching Coffee Time USA. We’ll be back after these messages,’ said the male presenter, whose name was not Ken but Oliver Martin. The studio lights dimmed and the Coffee Time logo came up while Oliver and his female colleague, Dale, stacked their papers in an important manner. There was of course nothing on their papers, but maintaining the fiction that TV presenters are proper journalists, as opposed to people who read whatever comes up on the autocue, is one of the principal duties of currentaffairs broadcasting.

Bruce watched on the monitor in front of him as Oliver and Dale disappeared and were replaced on the screen by four bikiniclad babes clutching soda bottles and tumbling ecstatically out of an old VW Beetle.

‘A girl, a beach, it’s happening, it’s real.

It’s a boost, it’s a buzz, it’s the way you should feel!’

The studio controller killed the volume, and the bikini babes were left sucking on their bottles in muted delight.

‘One and a half minutes on the break,’ said the floor manager.

This was the signal for the makeup girls to rush in and pat gently away at all available faces. Oliver turned to Bruce, addressing him through a flurry of powder and pads.

‘I think what we need to concentrate on here is the fact that our industry is not a dream factory any more. We deal in gritty realism. We show it like it is.’

The makeup lady applied another layer of slap to Oliver’s already heavily caked features. The gritty reality was that anyone who had acquired such a deep and lustrous tan would long since have died of skin cancer. But Oliver was of the old school of TV presenting: he believed that sporting a thermonuclear tan was a mark of respect to the viewer, like wearing a nice shirt and tie. You had to show you’d made the effort.

‘One minute to the break,’ said the floor manager.

Across the vast pastelcoloured desk, Dale’s voice could be heard from the midst of a cloud of hairspray. ‘I mean, surely the big issue, Bruce, has got to be this whole copycat killing thing, hasn’t it? I mean, that’s what America is concerned about. As an American woman, it sure is what I’m concerned about. Are you concerned about that, Bruce? As an American man?’

‘ America ’s population is not as young as it was, and soon the numberone issue concerning the majority of Americans will be adult incontinence.’

This was not Bruce. It was the TV. The studio controller had pumped the volume back up preparatory to going back on air. It was after nine, and the network advertisers were beginning to switch their focus from workers and schoolkids to a ‘coffee time’ audience, which meant young mums and old lonelys. Sodasucking babes were giving way to nipple pads, denture fixative and nappies both infant and adult.

‘No, I am not concerned about copycat killings,’ said Bruce, speaking with difficulty because a young woman was painting some kind of mentholflavoured grease on to his lips. ‘I don’t believe that people get up from the movie theatre or the TV and do what they just saw. Otherwise the people who watch this show would all have their hair set in concrete and their brains sucked out along with their cellulite.’

It was scarcely a comment calculated to endear him to his media colleagues, but that was Bruce. Tough, sarcastic and a bit of a stirrer. If you wore a leather jacket and shades on TV at nine in the morning, you were almost dutybound to be abrasive. In fact, Bruce had guessed that Dale would not hear his answer anyway. He could see she was the type of interviewer who used her guests’ answers as quiet time in which to consider her next question.

‘Good, good, you should make that point on air,’ said Dale absently, checking her eyeliner.

‘Fifteen seconds on the break,’ said the floor manager. Four, three, two, one…

Oliver’s face lit up. ‘We’re talking to Bruce Delamitri, the hot tip for tonight’s “Best Director” Oscar. But amidst all the glory and the adulation there lurks very real controversy.’

Dale picked up the ball. ‘Bruce Delamitri’s movies are hard, tough, witty, sassy streetwise thrillers, where the life is low and the body count is high. Remind you of something?’

‘You tell me, Dale,’ said Ollie, deploying his serious and thoughtful face.

‘How about America ’s streets?’ said Dale, looking equally portentous. ‘That’s right, the streets of America, hard, tough and dangerous, where the kids grow up fast and dying is a way of life.’

‘You’re saying that the movies of Bruce Delamitri reflect the streets of America?’

‘Some say reflect, some say influence. America, it’s your call. We’ll be back after these messages.’

The studio lights dimmed again. Oliver and Dale went dark and shuffled their papers.

‘Do you have sensitive teeth? Does icecream make you go ow! when you should be going mmmmm? ’

On the morning after it all happened, a young woman, hardly more than a girl, stared across a bare formicatopped table at an interrogating police officer. She was being interviewed in the nextdoor room to the one in which Bruce was being questioned. Unlike Bruce, however, the young woman was considered highly dangerous and was therefore in chains, her thin wrists manacled to her almost equally thin ankles. In fact, so petite was she that it looked as if she could have slipped off the steel bracelets if she had wished and just floated away on the next breeze. She was indifferent to whether they chained her or not. She had nowhere to go anyway.