Dead Famous

DAY TWENTY-NINE. 9.30 p.m.

Episode twenty-eight of House Arrest went out in an extended ninety-minute special edition on the evening following the day after the murder. It should have been episode twenty-nine that night, but there had been no show on the previous evening, partly out of respect and partly because the inmates of the house had spent all day at the police station.

All except one inmate, who was in the morgue.

The special edition show included the lead-up to the murder and the murder itself. There was a tasteful ten-second edit for the actual moment when the sheet rose and fell, a pointless precaution, since it had been aired endlessly on the news anyway. Also included in the show was the return of the housemates into the house in order to bring the chronology up to date. The whole thing was generally considered to have been very good telly indeed. Straight after the broadcast, and by way of absolving themselves from all criticism and responsibility, the network aired a live discussion programme about the morality of their having continued to broadcast the show at all. Geraldine Hennessy appeared on the discussion, along with various representatives of the great and the good.

“I fear that what we have just watched was depressingly inevitable,” said a distinguished poet and broadcaster. Distinguished, as Geraldine would point out to him afterwards in hospitality, principally for appearing on discussion programmes.

“Reality television, as it is called,” drawled the distinguished broadcaster, “is a return to the gladiatorial arenas of ancient Rome. What we are watching is conflict, conflict between trapped and desperate antagonists who compete for the approval of the baying crowd. Like the plebeians of old, we raise and lower our thumbs to applaud the victor and condemn the vanquished. The only difference is that these days we do it via a telephone poll.”

Geraldine shifted in her seat. She hated the way supposed intellectuals leeched off popular culture while loftily condemning it.

“Personally,” the distinguished broadcaster continued, “I am astonished that it has taken so long for murder to become a tactic in these entertainments.”

“Yes, but does that justify its being broadcast?” the shadow minister for home affairs leapt in, angry that the discussion had been underway for over two minutes and that he had yet to speak. “I say most definitely not. We have to ask ourselves what sort of country we wish to live in.”

“And I would agree with you,” said the distinguished poet, “but will you have the courage to deny the mob? The public must have its bread and circuses.”

Geraldine swallowed an overwhelming desire to unleash a four-letter tirade and resolved to be reasonable. That was, after all, why she had come on the show. The last thing she needed at this crucial moment in her career was to be taken off the air. “Look,” she said. “I don’t like what has happened here any more than you do.”

“Really?” sniffed the poet.

“But the truth of the matter is if we don’t put it out one of the low-rent channels will. The moment the inmates decided to carry on with the show, we didn’t have a choice in the matter. If we had refused to go on, some publicist or other would have packaged the lot of them up and sold them to the highest bidder. Cable or satellite, probably. A programme like this could finally bring those carriers into the heart of the mainstream.”

“You could have refused to let them use the house,” the programme’s distinguished host interrupted.

“There are any number of similar houses currently empty overseas,” Geraldine said. “I think I saw that the original Dutch one was being sold on the Internet, cameras and all. That would have been perfect. Besides which, the simple truth of the matter is that you could put these people in a garden shed and the public would watch them.”

“Because one of them is a murderer,” said the shadow minister. “There is blood and gore to be enjoyed here. But let us not forget, Ms Hennessy, a girl has died.”

“Nobody is forgetting that fact, Gavin, but not everybody is attempting to make political capital out of it,” said Geraldine. “There is a genuine public interest here in what is, after all is said and done, a major public event. The audience feel, I think legitimately, that they are a part of this murder. In many ways they feel some responsibility for it. They have been shocked and traumatized. They are grieving and they need to heal. They need to remain connected to what is happening in order to begin that healing process. We cannot suddenly cut them out of the loop. Kelly was much loved, an enormously popular contestant. She truly was the people’s housemate, and in many ways this is the people’s murder.”

It was a brilliant, jaw-droppingly audacious gambit, and totally unexpected. Everybody knew that the real reason Geraldine and the channel wanted to continue broadcasting was money, pure and simple. The stark truth was that Kelly’s murder had turned House Arrest from a moderately successful programme into a television colossus. Episode twenty-six of the show, the last to be shown before the murder, had achieved a 17 per cent audience share. The episode that had just been broadcast, the one that included the murder, had been watched by almost 80 per cent of the viewing public. Almost half of the entire population. Thirty-second advert slots in one of the three commercial breaks had sold at fifteen times their normal price.

“To prevent further broadcasts would be entirely elitist,” Geraldine continued. “What we would be saying is that we know what is good for the public. We, the high and the mighty, the great and the good, will decide what the proles can be trusted to watch. That is totally unacceptable in a modern democracy. Besides which, let me remind you that this event has already been seen live on the Internet. It’s already part of the culture. It is already out there. Do you condone the social disenfranchisement of people who do not own a computer? Are they to be denied their chance to grieve? To come to terms with Kelly’s death just because they are not on-line?”

Even the distinguished poet and broadcaster was caught off balance by such a breathtaking display. He was no slouch at pressing every argument into the service of self-promotion, but he was quickly realizing that with Geraldine Hennessy he was punching in a different league.

“Our responsibility to the public,” Geraldine concluded, “is not to take responsibility for the public. Our duty is to enable them to take responsibility for themselves. Allow them to make a choice. We can only do that by continuing to broadcast. That is the responsible and moral thing to do.”

The last thing any of the other panellists wanted was to be seen to be elitist.

“We certainly must listen to what the people want,” said the shadow minister. “Already Kelly Simpson has become part of their lives. They have seen her murdered, they have a right to view her legacy.”

“As I said,” Geraldine repeated. “They have to be given the opportunity to grieve and to heal.”

The distinguished poet made a late attempt to give the impression that it was actually he who had led the argument to the place where Geraldine had taken it. “As I believe I implied,” he said, “in many ways this event crosses the Rubicon in the democratization of the human experience. Reality television has already shown us that privacy is a myth, an unwanted cloak which people eagerly discard like a heavy garment on a summer’s day. Death was the last truly private event, but thanks to House Arrest it is private no longer. In our open, meritocratic age, no human experience need be seen as ‘better’ or more ‘significant’ than any other, and that includes the final one. If Kelly had the right to be seen living, then surely we must grant her the right to be seen dying.”

Geraldine had won her argument as she had fully expected to.

The simple truth was that people wanted to watch, and it would have been very difficult to deny them that opportunity. And not just in Britain either. Within thirty-six hours of the murder occurring it had been broadcast in every single country on earth. Even the rigidly controlled Chinese state broadcaster had been unable to resist the allure of such a very, very good bit of telly.

This worldwide exposure had been the cause of considerable frustration in the Peeping Tom office, which had been caught completely offguard by the sudden surge of international interest in House Arrest. When the flood of requests for tapes of the murder came in they had been handled like the ordinary clip requests that arrived in the office every day from morning TV and cable chat shows.

The clips had been given away!

Normally Peeping Tom was glad of the publicity. The nation was getting bored with reality television, and it was essential to give the impression that, when Jazz made an omelette or Layla got annoyed about the boys’ flatulence, a national event was taking place. Therefore, Peeping Tom Productions actively sought out opportunities to air their show on other programmes. So when every news and current-affairs show on earth had suddenly requested a clip, the Peeping Tom Production secretaries had simply followed procedure and handed them over for nothing. In fact, running off the huge number of tapes requested had actually cost Peeping Tom thousands of pounds.

No one involved would ever forget Geraldine’s reaction when she realized what had happened. There simply wasn’t enough foul language in the vocabulary to encompass her rage. In private, however, she had to acknowledge that it was her fault. She should have thought more quickly. She should have recognized immediately how profitable this murder was going to become.

Geraldine soon made good her mistake, and, from that point on, broadcasters who wanted to show any further footage of House Arrest were asked to pay a very heavy price indeed. But no matter how high Geraldine pushed that price, it was paid without a murmur.

Within a week of the murder, Geraldine, the sole owner of Peeping Tom Productions, had become a millionaire many, many times over. Although, as she was to explain in numerous interviews, this fact was of course in no way her reason for wishing to continue to broadcast. Oh no, as she had already made abundantly clear, she did that because it was her duty. She did that in order to give the public an opportunity to grieve.

Geraldine also dropped heavy but vague hints about substantial charitable donations, the details of which had of course yet to be finalized.