Dead Famous

DAY THIRTY. 9.45 a.m.

“You know that even though the weather was warm and sunny Geraldine insisted that the central heating be on at all times, don’t you?” Fogarty said.

Trisha was astonished. “You made it hot in order to get people to take their clothes off?”

“Of course we did. What do you think? Peeping Tom wanted bodies! Not baggy jumpers! Twenty-four degrees Centigrade is the optimum good telly temperature, warm but not sweaty. Geraldine always says that if she could make it twenty-five degrees in the room and minus five in the vicinity of the girls’ nipples she’d have the perfect temperature.”

Trisha looked at Fogarty thoughtfully. He certainly was going out of his way to make his employer look bad. Why was that? she wondered.

“Anyway,” the man concluded, “Miss High and Mighty, oh so brilliant, Machiavellian genius Geraldine Hennessy got it totally wrong with Kelly, although she has never admitted it. She thought that just because she didn’t like Kelly nobody else would, but the public did like her and apart from Woggle she was the most popular one on the show. We had to change tack and from day two we edited in Kelly’s favour.”

“So sometimes the subject does lead the programme?”

“Well, with a little help from me, I must admit. I gave Kelly plenty of cute angles. I was buggered if I was going to do Geraldine’s dirty work.”