News Where You Are

22

Frank worked through his in-box. In a bid to appear relevant in the digital age, the email addresses of the show’s presenters appeared on-screen underneath their names, as well as on the website. Aside from spam, he typically received between ten and twenty mails a day from the public and the policy was to reply to all but the outright abusive or threatening. Today he had three requests for personal appearances, four suggestions of stories to feature, one asking about the shirt he’d worn on the programme of 2 October, one obscene request pertaining to his female co-presenters, one veiled threat, one unveiled threat and a racist joke. He was left now with the ‘unfriendlies’, which needed more time and care. An unfriendly wasn’t straightforwardly abusive and thus warranted a reply, but a generically bland response would lead more often than not to a rapid escalation of hostility. Julia received roughly the same amount of mail as Frank, but the content tended, even Frank would concede, more towards the bizarre. Reporters and correspondents got their share of mail too and at any one point someone on the show would always have a stalker, but it was naturally enough the presenters who attracted the most attention.

In total there were seven presenters covering the various bulletins and programmes across the team’s output. Frank and Julia were the regular presenters of the evening show as well as presenting some of the other brief post-network news bulletins throughout the week. Frank liked working with Julia, even though she gave no sign of this being mutual. They were an odd couple, but with an on-screen dynamic that seemed to work. She was younger, earnest, frosty, but concerned. He was older, sincere, awkward and corny. As a pair they seemed to convey the right blend of warmth and authority and both had enough self-awareness to know that they were better together than apart.

Julia took the job seriously and gave every indication that she thought she was the only one who did, though in fact she and Frank shared a similar approach. Historically presenters tended not to attend production meetings. The way that shifts worked out meant it still wasn’t always possible and many of the other presenters on the show rarely attended for that reason. But Frank and Julia had both always seen the meetings as part of their jobs. Frank wasn’t sure that this was something necessarily welcomed by all the reporters and correspondents and sometimes had the distinct impression that some members of the team preferred the old-style presenters, with backgrounds in light entertainment rather than journalism. He knew some called them ‘gobs on sticks’ and expected them to mouth the reports they were given unquestioningly despite how thin they might be or how little coherence they possessed. It was hard to mistake the sarcasm with which certain correspondents referred to presenters as ‘the talent’.

But neither Julia nor Frank had any desire to present stories that they themselves couldn’t see the point of, or that failed to deliver on the promise of the headline. Frank had become skilful over the years in giving the impression of going along with whatever was the order of the day, whilst actually continuing quite doggedly along the path he thought was the right one. He liked to arrive early in the day with plenty of time to check through the reports and rewrite links. It was a way of curbing the more tabloid or inconsequential impulses of the day’s producer. He checked through the stories diligently, watching the packages, subtly pointing out gaps or errors to reporters and rewriting their links as necessary. Much of this work was invisible to Julia who tended to see Frank as spineless. She favoured confrontation and drama and didn’t seem to notice that she lost many of the fights that she picked, leaving her fuming as she presented stories she felt lacked credibility.

Frank turned his attention back to the remaining mails:

dear Frank,

I saw you the other day buying wine in oddbins on colmore row. I expect you need alcol to help you sleep at nite. you looked very shabby I thought. I followed you up corporation street but then you went in house of fraser and I didn’t go in because of the PROSTITUTES. remember that Jesus is watching you and so am I.

a friend

Frank wondered if he should mention in his reply that he’d never been in that branch of Oddbins. He wondered if that mattered. Did it alter the central premise of the correspondence? Was there a central premise? He thought about the shabby man who had been followed in error. He liked the idea of having a double out there absorbing the sidelong glances and the harmful thought waves. He imagined the man as his tireless protector, his clothes shabby from pounding the city streets 24/7 as Frank, taking the odd drink to fortify himself against the baffling comments people shouted out to him.

As well as respecting her work in its own right, Frank valued Julia because he knew how much worse the alternatives could be. There had been several short-lived co-presenters before Julia started on the programme. The first was Suzy Pickering, who had worked alongside Phil for many years. Smethway and Pickering represented a nostalgic golden era of the show for many viewers and would be the faces forever associated with the programme no matter how many successors came and went. If Phil was a suntan with white teeth then Suzy was a haircut with impeccable knitwear. She had hit on a pageboy bob sometime around the heyday of Purdey and stuck with it throughout the ensuing decades, with the obligatory nod to Diana in the early eighties. Her discreet jewellery was provided exclusively by a boutique named Sally Anne in Knowle in what was a blatant exercise in sponsorship, but went unchallenged. Suzy was old school through and through. A beautiful broadcast voice, a wonderful after-dinner speaker and a marked lack of interest in local news and current affairs. She loved to talk about the old days where everything was marvellous and everyone was a real character. She adored Phil, falling for his faux reverence and delighting in his gentle teasing. The undoubted highpoint of her career was an interview with Telly Savalas when he had made an unlikely promotional film entitled Telly Savalas Looks at Birmingham. In it Savalas spoke of the wonders of the second city in his trademark honeyed growl: ‘I walked on the walkways, sat on the seats and admired the trees and the shrubs in the spacious traffic-free pedestrian precincts.’ In fact the actor was somehow able to resist the allure of the precinct shrubbery and never set foot in Birmingham, recording the script in a studio in London instead. In Suzy’s repeated telling of the tale, a twenty-minute Q & A session conducted in a London hotel lobby had expanded to become an entire afternoon of almost unbearable sexual tension and unspoken longing between herself and Savalas. Phil needed only to waggle his eyebrows and mutter, ‘Who loves ya, baby?’ and Suzy would dissolve into fits of girlish giggles.

Frank got off on the wrong foot with Suzy from the start. In their first week presenting together she had regaled him with story after story from the good old days, most of which he had heard before. After telling the Telly Savalas story she concluded in a studiedly wistful way, ‘I often think of how of all the cities in the world something, something perhaps we’ll never understand, drew an international superstar of the stature of Savalas to Birmingham, and, well, I suppose in a funny way, to me.’

In retrospect Frank realized that the required response was to say that it had been kismet, or some mysterious transatlantic catnip operating on the bald-headed actor, but instead he said, ‘I suppose desperate times, desperate measures. Kojak was axed the year before. He did Telly Savalas Looks at Portsmouth and Aberdeen as well. He would have advertised Don Amott caravans if they’d have had him.’

Despite his best attempts to make amends it was clear that Suzy always considered Frank a very poor substitute for Phil and altogether lacking in old-world charm. After a few years of working together she opted to go part time and remained as one of the seven-strong presenting team, usually doing the early morning bulletins. Julia maintained that Suzy’s continued presence was due more to her devotion to Sally Anne’s pearl studs than to her career.

After Suzy there was Nicki, who was smiley and petite and in a short space of time became very popular with viewers. She had a natural warmth and vivacity that burned through the screen, and after Suzy’s hauteur Frank found her a joy to work with. Because of her popularity Nicki received a particularly large number of invitations and requests for PAs, which she showed no inclination to decline. The weekly society page of the local paper rarely failed to carry a picture of Nicki at a charity dinner, or the opening of a new restaurant, or an awards ceremony for industrialists. As the months passed, she became less petite, her brightness seemed to fade and her slips whilst reading the autocue became more regular. Frank remembered the day he finally reached across and pushed the lift button for her rather than have everyone watch her struggle to control her shaking hands. She resigned due to ill health after just four years.

After Nicki came Lisa, who Frank had found strangely absent and had a hard job remembering much about. She had worked on the show in pre-sofa days and the producer thought the fact that she was taller than Frank was disconcerting for viewers and so had her sit on a lower seat. Lisa never really forgave the producer or Frank for that. She stayed for two years before moving on to become sole anchor woman of the early evening news on a satellite channel. She was now enjoying, as far as Frank could tell, all the benefits of a full-height chair.

After Lisa was Joy, fondly remembered by all, even Frank’s mother, but who moved regions after only a few months. She was followed by the equally short-lived Erica, who collected lizards and was dismissed after an incident involving cocaine, the sports correspondent and the disabled toilets. And then finally Julia arrived.

He looked at his watch and wondered where she was now. He could do with some advice on how best to answer his mail. He gave up on the Oddbins sighting and moved on to the next one:

Allcroft, the programme would be a hundred times better if you were not on it. You are not funny. I like it best when you are on holiday. Also, how do you get a job in television?

He was uncertain about the last line. From the tenor of the mail he could assume that it was meant rhetorically, with the emphasis on ‘you’. But maybe it wasn’t. The ‘also’ suggested to him another tack, an unrelated point. He’d once sent as full and helpful a reply as he could to the request, ‘Where do you get your ties?’ Only to receive the response: ‘I was joking, you wanker. They make me want to be sick.’ He remembered Julia had laughed at that, for what he had thought had been an unnecessarily long period of time. As he sat and thought, a new mail appeared in his in-box and he opened it:

Dear Mr Allcroft,

I don’t know if this mail will find you or if you will have time in your busy schedule to read it. My name is Sidney Craven and I am currently enrolled upon a ‘Silver Surfers’ course at my local library which is trying to teach me and some other seniors how to use the world wide web. I think the teacher is finding it a bit of a struggle. It took us a long time to get the hang of the mice.

Last week we learned how to send email. To be honest I can’t see what use that will be as I don’t have a computer and don’t know anyone else who does either, but I think it’s good to keep the mind active and learn new things. Anyway I see your email address every evening on the telly and I don’t know if that’s just a gimmick but I thought I would try anyway.

My wife Margaret died late last year but we used to watch Heart of England Reports every evening together. She was a fan of yours and particularly enjoyed your jokes. She also thought you had a lovely smile. You reminded her of someone she used to know when she was younger and every night without fail she’d say: ‘Oh, he looks just like Charlie Stoker. I wonder if they’re related.’ Well, she had a real bee in her bonnet about it and would go on and on. Sometimes she’d say, ‘I’m going to write to the programme and ask him,’ and I’d say, ‘For goodness’ sake, Margaret, they’ve got better things to do with their time than answer silly questions.’ If I’m honest I was a bit short with her because I didn’t like her always mentioning this Stoker chap. It was jealousy I suppose as I’d never met the man, but I know that he had been sweet on her before I came along.

Anyway Margaret’s gone now and she never did write, but when I watch the programme I always feel as if she’s still sat on the settee next to me. So I thought I’d send an email and maybe you would read it and I could tell you about Margaret and ask if I may: are you related to Charlie Stoker? If you send an answer, I’ll get the teacher to print it out and then I can put it on the sideboard next to Margaret’s photo. I think she’d like that.

Yours faithfully,

Sidney Craven

Frank sensed that someone was behind him and looked to see that Julia had arrived at work and was reading over his shoulder. They looked at each other briefly.

Julia rolled her eyes. ‘So this Charlie Stoker looked just like you?’

Frank nodded and said, ‘Apparently.’

Julia shrugged. ‘That would explain why she ditched him for old Sidney.’