Dead Famous

DAY THIRTY. 9.15 a.m.

While Coleridge and Hooper nosed their way along the M25, Trisha was interviewing Bob Fogarty, the editor-in-chief of House Arrest. After Geri the Gaoler, Fogarty was the most senior figure in the Peeping Tom hierarchy. Trisha wanted to know more about how the people she had been watching came to be presented in the way they were.

“House Arrest is basically fiction,” said Fogarty, handing her a styrofoam cup of watery froth and nearly missing her hand in the darkness of the monitoring bunker. “Like all TV and film. It’s built in the edit.”

“You manipulate the housemates’ images?”

“Well, obviously. We’re not scientists, we make television programmes. People are basically dull. We have to make them interesting, turn them into heroes and villains.”

“I thought you were supposed to be observers, that the whole thing was an experiment in social interaction?”

“Look, constable,” Fogarty explained patiently, “in order to create a nightly half-hour of broadcasting we have at our disposal the accumulated images of thirty television cameras running for twenty-four hours. That’s seven hundred and twenty hours of footage to make one half-hour of television. We couldn’t avoid making subjective decisions even if we wanted to. The thing that amazes us is that the nation believes what we show them. They actually accept that what they are watching is real.”

“I don’t suppose they think about it much. I mean, why should they?”

“That’s true enough. As long as it’s good telly they don’t care, which is why as far as possible we try to shoot the script.”

“Shoot the script?”

“It’s a term they use in news and features.”

“And it means?”

“Well, say you’re making a short insert for the news, investigating heroin addiction on housing estates. If you simply went out to some urban hellhole with a camera and started nosing around, you could be looking for the story you want till Christmas. So you script your investigation before you leave your office. You say… all right, we need a couple of kids to say they can get smack at school, we need a girl to say she’d whore for a hit, we need a youth worker to say it’s the government’s fault… You write the whole thing. Then you send out a researcher to round up a few show-offs and basically tell them what to say.”

“But how could you do that on House Arrest? I mean, you can’t tell the housemates what to say, can you?”

“No, but you can be pretty sure of the story you want to tell and then look for the shots that support it. It’s the only way to avoid getting into a complete mess. Look at this, for instance… This is Kelly’s first trip to the confession box on the afternoon of day one.”