Catherine O'Flynn - News Where You Are

Frank found it impossible to take the piss when Phil wouldn’t bite back. ‘It’s okay. It was funny.’

‘It was pathetic.’

‘Well, maybe, but that’s okay. Are you okay? You seem down.’

‘Yeah, yes, I’m fine. Probably still hungover. What an idiot.’

‘Well, you’re making me feel bad now. Almost as if you didn’t mean what you said.’

‘To be honest, Frank, I don’t even remember most of what I said.’

‘Oh, it was nothing. You love me, you love Michelle, that’s all.’

‘I’m ridiculous.’

‘Bloody hell, Phil, don’t worry about it. I enjoyed it; I thought I’d be able to mock you for years, but you’re taking it so badly you’re ruining all the fun.’

Phil said nothing — his breathing was heavy.

‘Phil? Are you sure you’re okay?’

‘Yeah. Honestly, I’m fine. Sorry, just tired.’

‘There was one thing you said on the phone that was a bit odd.’

‘What? What did I say?’

‘Something about not being scared even though you had every reason to be. What have you got to be scared of? Are they discontinuing Grecian 2000?’

‘God knows. I was talking rubbish. Bloody Glenfarclas. Never again.’

Within a month Phil was dead. His apology call was left hanging in Frank’s memory as their last conversation. It was a strange note on which to end. Frank felt guilty for his facetiousness. He squeezed Andrea’s hand. ‘I thought a lot of Phil, you know.’

Andrea looked at him, surprised. ‘I know. Of course you did.’

Frank opened the door to the restaurant and wished he’d said the same to Phil.

Frank worked through his in-box. In a bid to appear relevant in the digital age, the email addresses of the show’s presenters appeared on-screen underneath their names, as well as on the website. Aside from spam, he typically received between ten and twenty mails a day from the public and the policy was to reply to all but the outright abusive or threatening. Today he had three requests for personal appearances, four suggestions of stories to feature, one asking about the shirt he’d worn on the programme of 2 October, one obscene request pertaining to his female co-presenters, one veiled threat, one unveiled threat and a racist joke. He was left now with the ‘unfriendlies’, which needed more time and care. An unfriendly wasn’t straightforwardly abusive and thus warranted a reply, but a generically bland response would lead more often than not to a rapid escalation of hostility. Julia received roughly the same amount of mail as Frank, but the content tended, even Frank would concede, more towards the bizarre. Reporters and correspondents got their share of mail too and at any one point someone on the show would always have a stalker, but it was naturally enough the presenters who attracted the most attention.

In total there were seven presenters covering the various bulletins and programmes across the team’s output. Frank and Julia were the regular presenters of the evening show as well as presenting some of the other brief post-network news bulletins throughout the week. Frank liked working with Julia, even though she gave no sign of this being mutual. They were an odd couple, but with an on-screen dynamic that seemed to work. She was younger, earnest, frosty, but concerned. He was older, sincere, awkward and corny. As a pair they seemed to convey the right blend of warmth and authority and both had enough self-awareness to know that they were better together than apart.

Julia took the job seriously and gave every indication that she thought she was the only one who did, though in fact she and Frank shared a similar approach. Historically presenters tended not to attend production meetings. The way that shifts worked out meant it still wasn’t always possible and many of the other presenters on the show rarely attended for that reason. But Frank and Julia had both always seen the meetings as part of their jobs. Frank wasn’t sure that this was something necessarily welcomed by all the reporters and correspondents and sometimes had the distinct impression that some members of the team preferred the old-style presenters, with backgrounds in light entertainment rather than journalism. He knew some called them ‘gobs on sticks’ and expected them to mouth the reports they were given unquestioningly despite how thin they might be or how little coherence they possessed. It was hard to mistake the sarcasm with which certain correspondents referred to presenters as ‘the talent’.

But neither Julia nor Frank had any desire to present stories that they themselves couldn’t see the point of, or that failed to deliver on the promise of the headline. Frank had become skilful over the years in giving the impression of going along with whatever was the order of the day, whilst actually continuing quite doggedly along the path he thought was the right one. He liked to arrive early in the day with plenty of time to check through the reports and rewrite links. It was a way of curbing the more tabloid or inconsequential impulses of the day’s producer. He checked through the stories diligently, watching the packages, subtly pointing out gaps or errors to reporters and rewriting their links as necessary. Much of this work was invisible to Julia who tended to see Frank as spineless. She favoured confrontation and drama and didn’t seem to notice that she lost many of the fights that she picked, leaving her fuming as she presented stories she felt lacked credibility.

Frank turned his attention back to the remaining mails:

dear Frank,

I saw you the other day buying wine in oddbins on colmore row. I expect you need alcol to help you sleep at nite. you looked very shabby I thought. I followed you up corporation street but then you went in house of fraser and I didn’t go in because of the PROSTITUTES. remember that Jesus is watching you and so am I.

a friend

Frank wondered if he should mention in his reply that he’d never been in that branch of Oddbins. He wondered if that mattered. Did it alter the central premise of the correspondence? Was there a central premise? He thought about the shabby man who had been followed in error. He liked the idea of having a double out there absorbing the sidelong glances and the harmful thought waves. He imagined the man as his tireless protector, his clothes shabby from pounding the city streets 24/7 as Frank, taking the odd drink to fortify himself against the baffling comments people shouted out to him.

As well as respecting her work in its own right, Frank valued Julia because he knew how much worse the alternatives could be. There had been several short-lived co-presenters before Julia started on the programme. The first was Suzy Pickering, who had worked alongside Phil for many years. Smethway and Pickering represented a nostalgic golden era of the show for many viewers and would be the faces forever associated with the programme no matter how many successors came and went. If Phil was a suntan with white teeth then Suzy was a haircut with impeccable knitwear. She had hit on a pageboy bob sometime around the heyday of Purdey and stuck with it throughout the ensuing decades, with the obligatory nod to Diana in the early eighties. Her discreet jewellery was provided exclusively by a boutique named Sally Anne in Knowle in what was a blatant exercise in sponsorship, but went unchallenged. Suzy was old school through and through. A beautiful broadcast voice, a wonderful after-dinner speaker and a marked lack of interest in local news and current affairs. She loved to talk about the old days where everything was marvellous and everyone was a real character. She adored Phil, falling for his faux reverence and delighting in his gentle teasing. The undoubted highpoint of her career was an interview with Telly Savalas when he had made an unlikely promotional film entitled Telly Savalas Looks at Birmingham . In it Savalas spoke of the wonders of the second city in his trademark honeyed growl: ‘ I walked on the walkways, sat on the seats and admired the trees and the shrubs in the spacious traffic-free pedestrian precincts. ’ In fact the actor was somehow able to resist the allure of the precinct shrubbery and never set foot in Birmingham, recording the script in a studio in London instead. In Suzy’s repeated telling of the tale, a twenty-minute Q & A session conducted in a London hotel lobby had expanded to become an entire afternoon of almost unbearable sexual tension and unspoken longing between herself and Savalas. Phil needed only to waggle his eyebrows and mutter, ‘Who loves ya, baby?’ and Suzy would dissolve into fits of girlish giggles.