Catherine O'Flynn - News Where You Are

When Julia had joined the team, she’d made it clear that she wouldn’t be doing any PAs — she considered them a compromise of her neutrality and integrity. At first Frank had dismissed this as more of Julia’s pompous earnestness, but as time had gone on he’d felt more and more uncomfortable cutting ribbons and making speeches. It was a ridiculous way to spend an evening. It was also more time away from Andrea and Mo. He now tried to only accept those invitations that had become annual commitments.

He removed the cufflinks and played with them in his palm. They had a nice weight and surface finish. They were solid silver, made by Hermes, and he was sure they had been horribly expensive. They had been Phil’s farewell gift. It was typical of Phil to not only buy everyone else presents at his own departure, but for those presents to far outstrip in both thought and value the tacky landfill purchased with the proceeds of the office whip-round for him. Inside the box Phil had put a small note saying: ‘Have some class for once in your life.’ And even though Frank knew Phil had bought them to mock his singular lack of panache, he thought they were beautiful.

Phil Smethway’s career had been marked by a combination of good luck, personal charm and an amazing ability to adapt. He had started out in insurance before taking detours through estate agency, concert promotion and pirate radio. He’d suffered setbacks in his career like everyone, but his ability to shed his old skin and move on meant that they were never more than fleeting. His move to national TV came at the age of sixty-three, a time when most men would be considering retirement, but for Phil it was just the start of his greatest work. Phil was born only five years after Frank’s father and yet Frank would never have placed them in the same generation. Phil always seemed entirely of the moment.

When Frank joined Heart of England Reports as a reporter in 1989, Phil had been on the show for fifteen years, the last nine of those as the main anchor. Frank had grown up watching Phil, and the easy charm he had on screen made Frank suspicious of how he might be in person. Frank had come to recognize a certain strain of presenter in local radio. Some of those who possessed a greater fluency, who were able to communicate a smile through the microphone and achieve a close rapport with listeners, developed a strangely exaggerated view of the rarity and specialness of their gifts. They had seen too often how others groped and stumbled at something they found effortless and this knowledge worked on them. They began to see their personalities as the commodities they were and to ration and exchange them only for hard currency. Off air they aspired to be as charmless as plastic forks. This combined with a suspicion of newcomers and a generalized paranoia that one day someone would come along with all the natural, easy, unmeasured grace they had once possessed. Perhaps luckily for him, Frank had presented no such threat and so suffered nothing more from them than mild contempt.

Frank learned quickly that Phil was not of this school. His on-screen warmth was a contained and diluted version of his off-screen self. Away from the camera Phil had a wicked sense of humour, dry and relentless, a constant jabbing. He found something to needle everyone around him and kept at it, and yet no one got angry or found it tiresome, but reacted instead like puppies having their stomachs tickled. Phil was a lover of the finer things in life and he never ceased to get comic mileage out of Frank’s lack of discrimination. Frank would enter the office and Phil would look genuinely concerned and ask if he was happy with the tie he was wearing. On the occasions when they grabbed a bite together he was both amazed and appalled at Frank’s utter indifference to food.

His greatest skill, though, was in capsizing co-presenters and correspondents, something he would do only very occasionally and which he swore was unintentional. In the last few seconds of a video package, as the action was about to return to the studio, he would say some small thing, his face a deadpan mask. They called them ‘grenades’ as there was always a small delay before detonation. The co-presenter would launch into the next item, successfully holding it together for five or maybe ten seconds before issuing an abrupt bark of laughter, and Phil would frown and apologize to the viewer and take over the link. The baffling thing was that the lines were never that funny, at times even made no sense at all, but some combination of delivery and context was devastating. Often their humour lay simply in the glimpse they offered of Phil’s internal mental landscape, which seemed always at a far remove from whatever report was running. He’d done it to Frank just once, back when Frank was the sports correspondent. They sat and waited in the studio whilst a report ran about a fatal stabbing outside a fish-and-chip shop. Their crime reporter was at the scene speaking to overexcited eye-witnesses and speculating as to the motive for the attack.

As the reporter was about to hand back to the studio, Phil turned to Frank and said as if in response to something he’d said, ‘The problem is that saveloys turn your piss red.’

Frank could only remember one occasion on which someone had taken offence at something Phil had said. A floor manager once told him to fuck off for a fairly innocuous crack. Frank was amazed at Phil’s reaction.

‘Oh God, Frank, he thinks I’m a complete dick.’

‘Don’t be daft. He’s just having a bad day.’

‘No, you didn’t see the way he looked at me. Like he really hated me. He said it with real venom.’

‘I was there! There was no venom — he just snapped. It was nothing.’

‘I don’t like the thought of him hating me.’

Frank was laughing. ‘He doesn’t hate you, and even if he did — so what? What do you care about his opinion? Everyone thinks I’m a dick and it doesn’t bother me.’

Phil gave a small smile. ‘Yes, but it’s factually accurate in your case.’

Frank nodded in acknowledgement of the open goal. After the conversation, though, he felt he’d glimpsed another side of Phil. Not the effortless charm on the surface, but a hint of the frantic paddling underneath. It would never have occurred to him that someone so assured and confident felt such a need to be liked.

He put the cufflinks on the coffee table and finished his drink. The whiskey had worked to smooth out the edges of the evening. He looked in on Mo, pushing some strands of hair from her face, before gratefully climbing into bed and drifting off to sleep.

Maureen had never been like other mothers. As a general rule, the kinds of things that made other mothers happy tended to have the opposite effect on Maureen. Frank had known this since he was a little boy. He remembered visiting the homes of classmates and being shocked and puzzled to see their finger-daubed paintings stuck on walls and fridges. Whenever he took a picture home from school to his mother, she’d ask: ‘What am I supposed to do with this? Why do they make you bring these things home?’

It never occurred to Frank to be upset by this, in fact he agreed. His paintings were rubbish; he could see that. They were rushed things, done under duress, and never looked remotely as he had intended.

Maureen couldn’t stand boasting. She tried to compensate for her husband’s professional confidence by deprecating herself to a brutal degree. Similarly Frank’s modest achievements, such as they were, were not the source of joy they might be to other mothers, but a cause of real anguish to Maureen. She was mortified to discover that Frank had done better than many of his classmates in his O levels.

‘Don’t tell anyone what grades you got! Oh, how can I face the other mothers?’