Dead Famous

DAY THIRTY-ONE. 2.00 p.m.

“Actually it was Layla’s cheese that gave Geraldine her first crisis.”

Trisha had returned to the monitoring bunker to speak once more with Bob Fogarty. She and Coleridge had agreed that Fogarty was the person who knew most about the housemates and also about the workings of Peeping Tom. “Why was there a crisis over the cheese?” she asked Fogarty.

“Well, because the duty editor resigned and took both his assistants with him. I had to come in myself and cover. Don’t you call that a crisis? I call it a crisis.”

“Why did he resign?”

“Because unlike me he still had some vestige of professional pride,” Fogarty reflected bitterly, dropping a square of milk chocolate into his cup of watery foam, something Trisha had never seen anyone do before. “As a highly trained, grown-up adult, he simply could not continue to go home to his wife and children each evening and explain that he’d spent his entire working day minutely documenting a quarrel between two complete idiots about a piece of cheese.”

“And so he resigned?”

“Yes. He sent Geraldine an email saying that House Arrest was a disgrace to the British television industry, which, incidentally, it is.”

“And what did Geraldine do?”

“What do you think she did? She leaned out of her window and shouted, ‘Good riddance, you pompous cunt!’ at him as he got into his car.”

“She didn’t mind, then?”

“Well, it was very inconvenient certainly, particularly for me, but we soon got a replacement. People want to come to us. We make ‘cutting-edge television’, you see.” Fogarty’s voice was bitter with sarcasm. “We’re at the sharp end of the industry, we’re hip, challenging and innovative. This is, of course, an industry where they thought it was challenging and innovative when the newsreaders started perching on the fronts of their desks instead of sitting behind them… Damn!”

Fogarty fished about in his cup with a teaspoon, searching for the square of chocolate. Trisha concluded that he had been intending only to soften the outside rather than melt it completely. People develop strange habits when they spend their working lives in dark rooms.

“God, I was jealous of that bloke who left,” Fogarty continued. “I came into television to edit cup finals and Grand Nationals! Drama and comedy and science and music. What do I end up doing? I sit in the dark and stare at ten deluded fools sitting on couches. All day.”

Trisha was discovering one of the great secrets of House Arrest. The people who worked on it loathed the people they were charged with watching.

“It’s all just so boring! No one is interesting enough to be looked at the way we look at these people, and particularly not the sort of person who would wish to be looked at. It’s catch twenty-two, you see. Anyone who would want to be in that damn stupid house is by definition not an interesting enough person to be there.” Fogarty stared at his bank of television monitors. A long, sad, hollow silence ensued.

“It’s the hugging I hate most, you know,” he said finally, “and the stroking … And above all the endless wittering on.”

“You should meet my boss,” said Trisha. “You two would really hit it off.”

Fogarty fell silent once more before resuming his theme.

“If that lot in the house had any idea of the contempt in which we hold them from our side of the mirrors, the cruel nicknames we give them… ‘Nose-picker’, ‘Sad slap’, ‘the Farter’… If they knew the damning assessments we make as we chop up their comments to suit our needs, the complete lack of respect we have for any of their motives… well, they’d probably wish they’d all got murdered.”