Jonathan Coe - Number 11

… the mad dash down to London for two emergency meetings. The first had been at the offices of the production company, Stercus Television. A young, brittle production assistant called Suzanne had met her at reception and led her upstairs into the Hilary Winshaw suite, named after the legendary executive who had joined the company in the early 1990s and transformed its fortunes by taking it in its present cost-efficient, populist direction, with 90 per cent of its output in the field of reality shows. Here she was briefed on her travel arrangements, given contracts to sign and told that Suzanne would be flying out to Australia with her and would not leave her side until the helicopter flight into the jungle itself. The second had been in the consulting rooms of a Harley Street doctor. He gave her a quick examination, and an even quicker psychiatric assessment. ‘You did tell them,’ Alison had asked when she got home that evening, ‘that you’re terrified of insects?’ One of the questions they had put to her, it was true, was whether she suffered from any phobias, but Val had said no, fearing that otherwise she would not be allowed to take part. ‘Well, that was bloody stupid,’ Alison had said. ‘What are you going to do when they start getting you to eat cockroaches?’ ‘Why would they do that?’ Val had asked, to which Alison said, ‘Have you ever seen this bloody programme, before last night?’, leading to another tremendous row which went stratospheric when her mother had informed her that Stercus were paying for one companion to fly out to Australia with her, and she was taking not Alison but Steve …

… the taxi drive to Heathrow the next morning. Steve clasping her hand as she sat in the back seat, shaking with nervousness and expectation, the beige conurbations of Banbury, Bicester, High Wycombe, Hemel Hempstead swirling past on their way down the M40 …

… the sheer, unimaginable joy of flying first class, the pamperedness of it, the dry marzipan richness of the free champagne, the quantity and variety of the free food, the things they had never tasted before, the caviar, the foie gras, the carpaccio of bluefin tuna, the fillet of Kobe steak, the thin ribbons of pasta in truffle sauce, and finally the thirty-year-old single malt which had sent them into a deep, restful sleep, the depth and restfulness of this sleep being made possible by the welcoming embrace of the fold-down beds, and by the soothing ministrations of the cabin crew, who did pretty much everything but massage their toes, stroke their hair and sing them lullabies …

… the dazzling whiteness of the light as soon as they stepped off the plane at Brisbane, a light they had not experienced, had not even been able to imagine, while living in Birmingham, and then the excitement of having a cluster of young, enthusiastic people from the production company waiting for them in the arrivals hall, and a couple of dozen journalists and paparazzi. The thrill of being recognized again, of no longer feeling invisible …

… the wonderful, trashy opulence of the beachside hotel outside Brisbane, to which they were taken by limo. The mindboggling acreage of bedroom, sitting room and bathroom — altogether about twice the size of Val’s house in Yardley — all done out with magnificent vulgarity …

… a vulgarity which was carried over to the poolside restaurant where they had their first dinner in this amazing new continent and met some of their fellow guests: Mr and Mrs Perry, the parents of Danielle, the gorgeous young glamour model who was favourite to win the competition this series; Mary Walker, the mother of Pete Walker, the reality TV star, and her younger sister Jacqui. ‘So Pete and Danielle were allowed to bring two people over with them, were they?’ Val had asked Suzanne, and Suzanne had nodded but offered no explanation, giving Val her first intimation that perhaps there was a hierarchy among the contestants on this show, and she was not going to be at the top of it. But she had brushed this mildly troubling thought aside, and instead found herself enjoying the company of these people, enjoying the feeling of being part of a chosen few, an elite, transplanted from mundanity into paradise, and she soon warmed to Mary and Jacqui, who remembered her hit single and agreed with her that this show was just what she needed to reboot her career, and she didn’t warm to Danielle’s parents quite so much, in fact she and Steve agreed afterwards that they were rather strange, especially when Val ordered a Caesar salad and when it arrived Mrs Perry burst into tears, because apparently Caesar had been the name of their boxer dog, and he had died just a couple of days before they’d flown out to Australia, after twelve years of living with them, and that was a bit weird, the way a salad made her burst into tears, but anyway, they both sympathized, and put it down to the champagne, of which they had all drunk about a bottle and a half each by the time they made it upstairs to bed …

… the helicopter ride the next day, which had been the real start of the adventure. She had kissed Steve goodbye and said — for the first time in seven years or so — ‘Love you’ (which he had answered by hugging her and whispering ‘Good luck, babes’). Before she had climbed into the helicopter, a sound engineer had clipped a microphone to the lapel of her jungle outfit and Val was told that anything she said from this point onwards would be recorded and could potentially be broadcast. She tried not to swear, or to say anything too inane, or to scream too loudly as they took off. She had never been in one of these things before and it was, at first, predictably terrifying. But the journey, which she had imagined would take at least an hour, plunging ever deeper into impenetrable rain forest, turned out to be quite short — only ten minutes or so — because the camp was really only a few miles from the hotel, in what looked from the air like rather a tame stretch of national park. The pilot had made a lot of unnecessary swoops and dives, to get her screaming and to make their arrival look more dramatic, but then she was deposited safely in the middle of the forest and there was a guide on hand to walk her towards the camp …

… her entry into the camp. What had she been expecting? Whoops of recognition? Hardly. But something more, certainly, than the palpable sense of indifference when she walked into the clearing. ‘Hi everybody!’ she had cooed, embarrassed to hear how needy her own voice sounded already. It took about ten minutes to explain to everybody who she was, and then it transpired that only two of her campmates — the oldest two, as it happened — remembered her, her hit record or her fleeting appearances on Top of the Pops . Apparently there had been a rumour going around that the star of a hit sitcom from the 1990s was coming to join the camp, and they were all a bit deflated to discover that this wasn’t the case. (Val guessed that this was the person she had been called in to replace, although she had been told to keep quiet on that subject.) After that it seemed there was nothing much she was expected to do except settle in. The prevailing atmosphere among the celebrities, she noticed, was one of intense boredom. Everyone seemed to be suffering from exhaustion, brought on by a combination of heat, humidity and hunger. All that anyone could think of, and talk about, was the evening meal, which consisted of ungenerous portions of unflavoured rice and beans: in fact tonight’s portion would be especially small, as Edith, the elderly soap star, had failed dismally at today’s ‘trial’. The purpose of these trials was to entertain the public by torturing and humiliating the celebrities, making them perform various revolting tasks in order to obtain food for their campmates: tasks which usually involved being put into confined spaces with large numbers of insects, snakes or other jungle creatures which presumably found the experience just as distressing as the human participants.