Big Beacon, page 10
She stands up, buttons the buttons on her buttoned jacket and begins to pace, the dull clack of her one-inch heel echoing around the room. She stops, turns to face the group and takes a breath.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, it goes without saying that your concerns will be addressed forthwith. But if we take a moment we might see there’s a bigger question here. For who among us has not harboured – pun intended …’ she pauses, waiting for the laugh that is never going to come, ‘dreams of building something bigger than they are?’ On that she sweeps her eyes theatrically around the room. ‘Who among us has not—’
‘Actually, she’s not my attorney, she’s just an assistant, I told a lie,’ I blurt out, simply unable to face whatever feeble characterisation she was about to attempt. ‘You can sit down now,’ I say to my assistant, and she clomps back to her chair.
Well, this really riles them. Ordinarily I’d say sorry, but my Norwich neighbour Katrina has taught me that apologising is for the weak so instead I suggest they calm down. Big mistake.
Julia starts putting on her coat. ‘A renovation that fails to respect the building’s wonderful heritage isn’t something we can support,’ she says.
‘Why would I need your support?’ I ask, quite reasonably.
‘Come on, John.’
‘Yeah. Go on, John,’ I say. ‘Off you pop, John. Thanks for coming, John. D’you normally say nothing when you go to public meetings with your wife, John? D’you normally look at your shoes and let her do all the talking, John? D’you normally get into situations that very publicly highlight issues in your marriage, John?’ At which point John hung his head even more and I felt a bit bad. I’d taken out my frustration on a profoundly weak man.
I am delighted to say that time is up, as I only have the hall until 9 p.m., so I usher the seething mob into the night and shut the door behind. Well, that went badly, I think. Stupid fucking bastards. Rude rude people. Rarely have I felt so despondent.
‘Be nice to get the old lighthouse fixed up.’
I turn. It’s Red. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ I say.
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘Yes,’ I say, a touch redundantly. We look at one another. ‘You’re not going give me the third degree as well, are you?’
‘Me? No. I’m not here for the meeting. I’ve just come to lock up the hall.’
* * *
56 Orig. meaning
57 My assistant and my housekeeper are generally at loggerheads – like two cats circling each other and hissing, sometimes literally. Their beef is ostensibly about whether you should wash up with a plastic bowl inside the kitchen sink (my assistant: yes; Rosa: no) – but I know it runs deeper than that. Theirs is a classic power struggle. My assistant doesn’t like Rosa’s tone, reckons it’s too shirty. But I’ve explained to her: that’s just the way they speak. In the mouth of a Thai waitress the phrase ‘you no like?’ can sound confrontational, aggressive even, when actually she’s just wondering why you left your chicken satay. The same applies to a Filipino like Rosa. And my assistant is no angel herself. She could try keeping her nose out once in a while. If Rosa wants to clean the house in a T-shirt without a bra underneath, that’s her business, you shouldn’t be looking. Still, it’s created quite the atmos at the oasthouse. On one occasion I’d asked my assistant to collect something from my house – a shoehorn or some such – completely forgetting that Rosa would be in that day, which would surely mean fireworks. I jumped in the Vectra and hightailed it after her, eking whatever I could out of the 2.8-litre 250bhp V6 engine, in accordance with the relevant speed limits. I pulled into the drive, ran up the gravel and burst through the door to find . . . a scene of perfect tranquillity. The house smelt of eucalyptus and freesia (or the synthetic version Air Wick had knocked up) and, sitting at the kitchen table, pleasant as you like, was my assistant, asking Rosa about Philippine cuisine and if it had any dishes that weren’t spicy. It was all very cordial and I immediately put that down to the quelling effect of the plug-in freshener. These days I stock up!
58 As I say, they do offer a certain calmness but you will pay a price nasally.
MARVIN
April 2016
Things were about to go belly up.
It was 2016 and I was still inching inexorably towards my second televisual coming.59 I wasn’t pulling up any trees speed-wise, but I was getting there and that was the important thing.
Meanwhile, I was still leeching salary from North Norfolk Digital.
Then, one day, there came a class of kids from … I’m not going to disparage the school in question, they have enough on their plate having seen their Ofsted rating tumble from Excellent to Requires Improvement in the last three years – not helped, one assumes, by local news reports of their pupils smoking next to a war memorial and leaving cigarette butts on a monument to the fallen.
That’s to say nothing of an art teacher who was caught in the shower block on a school trip to France chatting to a class of girls with his top off, not long after being asked to leave his previous (Catholic) school for getting one of the mum’s pregnant. As I say, I shan’t add to their woes by badmouthing their name through any more mud.
What I will say is that I found it odd, shall we say, that their teacher had left them unchaperoned for their live interview.
The guy, a Mr Crewe, had left the building, later claiming he had popped outside to take an urgent phone call but apparently a phone call that left him smelling of fags. I said, ‘You must have had a strong CIG-nal,’ but he didn’t get the pun because cignal sounds exactly the same as ‘signal’, the very word on which the pun was based.60
Left without a teacher, the children became difficult and surly. One boy in particular – a yob named Marvin – behaved appallingly. Whether it’s because he was born demented or has become defective thanks to parental negligence, I won’t speculate. He’s a kid, he deserves a break.
These days Marvin works in a kid’s trampolining centre. It’s his job to ensure the trampolines are being correctly used and that patrons are wearing the prescribed trampolining socks. He’s soooooo hit the big time.
I must say I found his attitude perplexing, and the suggestion that I was partly to blame, hurtful. I’ve never spoken about this before, but earlier that afternoon I had been outside in the car park checking my car was locked because I was worried my car wasn’t locked. Whilst there, I saw a teenage boy standing all alone. I could tell something was upsetting him so I offered him a piece of chewing gum and took one myself, and we stood together in companionable silence for a while, both enjoying our gum.
Eventually, I said, ‘Shit weather, right?’ He looked at me and nodded. I nodded back. He didn’t nod in response to my nod because that would have been one nod too many, but the point had been made. He knew I wasn’t talking about the crummy weather. He knew what I was really saying was, ‘Whatever it is, you can get through it. Whether you’re struggling at school, getting hassle from bullies, wetting the bed, if you ever need to talk about anything to anyone, you know where to find me.’
It was a touching gesture and something I didn’t have to do. So for him to lash out at me? Well, disappointing doesn’t cover it. But I thought it was worth mentioning here to provide some useful context as to who was the good guy and who was being out of order.
As I say, it’s not something I’ve mentioned before and might even be something that Marvin disputes ever happened, but if he wants to demand a retraction – particularly about the wetting the bed bit, which I suppose he might think was a cheap shot, had it not happened, which it did – then he’s more than welcome to use some of his trampolining money to instruct a libel lawyer. If not, well, the record remains unamended.
Regrettably, the outside world wasn’t privy to the nice bit of the story and instead only saw what I concede could be construed as cross words. Of course it was nothing of the sort.
What happened? You’d have to ask Marvin, really. For reasons known only to him he made a loud sheep noise mid-broadcast, aimed squarely it seemed at me. I responded with a brief deconstruction of his slur and a few comedic additions of my own to add to the general air of levity. All good-humoured, knockabout fun with some kids who were on my level, and I on theirs. So you can imagine my bewilderment when, moments later, I was asked to speak to the station controller Jason who immediately sent me home, where I should await further news.
I couldn’t believe my ears. Sent home, I demanded? Await further, I exclaimed? News, I wailed?
Couldn’t they see? This was just banter! And even if it wasn’t, surely I’d have been within my rights to defend not just my own honour but the good name of the wider Norfolk farming community who would never allow even one head of livestock to be drawn into an intimate relationship with a local broadcaster, however sincerely held his or her affection for the sheep. But as I say, this wasn’t that. This was just a bit of fun.
Two days later, I was sent a formal letter by HR, detailing my crimes with a transcript of the offending segment. As I read it, my eyes screamed with horror. The way they’d written it – in bald, plain dialogue – obviously made it sound inappropriate and aggressive, but that wasn’t a fair reflection of what it sounded like in reality. Equally, they’d transcribed things in a way that didn’t reflect what any reasonable listener could hear on the tape, so I sent it back to them with some very light amendments designed to remove inaccuracies and provide guidance on tone. Incredibly, they’d insisted I had said ‘you dick’ to Marvin when what I’d actually said was ‘Yaddick’, because I went to school with a boy called Marvin Yaddick and I briefly used his name in error.
Here is the transcript NND provided. My amendments are in bold.
[Marvin makes an aggressive bleating noise]
PARTRIDGE: ‘Alright,’ laughs Partridge gently. ‘Who did that? Was that you?’ Partridge smiles.
MARVIN: ‘Yeah,’ snaps Marvin.
PARTRIDGE: ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ inquires Partridge, kindly.
MARVIN: ‘That you shag sheep.’
PARTRIDGE: ‘No need for that, mate!’ Partridge chuckles.
MARVIN: ‘Sorry.’ [The word was spat like venom.]
PARTRIDGE: ‘That’s cool, that’s cool’ says Partridge, meaning it.
MARVIN: ‘Didn’t mean to insult your [fucking] girlfriend.’
PARTRIDGE: ‘My girlfriend’s not a sheep, you wally,’ Partridge teases.
FEMALE PUPIL: ‘Shut up, Marv.’
PARTRIDGE: ‘Yeah, shut up, Marv.’ He says, ribbing the girl for her concern.
[An object was thrown at Partridge’s head. Had it been made of sharp steel it could have cut his ear off or fractured his skull. The fact that it was a ball of paper was pure fluke.]
PARTRIDGE: ‘[Yaddick], calling me a sheep shagger.’
MARVIN: ‘You are one.’
PARTRIDGE: You think I’m a sheep shagger?’ Partridge asks curiously.
MARVIN: Don’t know, mate.
PARTRIDGE: Yeah, I think maybe you’re a sheep shagger haver,’ Partridge laughs. ‘You’re the one who keeps going on about it,’ Partridge laughs. ‘Probably keep sheep magazines under your bed, yeah?’ Partridge laughs. ‘Probably keep pictures of sheep lying on their back in a pen with their knickers off,’ Partridge continues to laugh. ‘You’re the sheep shagger,’ Partridge chuckles. ‘Bet you kiss them, bet you lie them down on their back, kiss them tenderly, stick your tongue in their mouth, swirl it round, play with their teats,’ jokes Partridge. ‘Get behind it, strum them like guitar,’ jokes Partridge again. ‘Grab fistfuls of fur, grab its horns like a bike, like drop handlebars on a racer, a Grifter would be more of a yak,’ smiles Partridge. ‘And do you hold them afterwards and say you mean the world to me, spooning [food into] them with your hot balls bowl pushed up against its woolly back.’ Partridge laughs. ‘You’re just a bloody chav!’
The added context here was absolutely crucial. You can make any transcript of a live broadcast seem like someone has lost control, but a bit of context can go a long way – be it Will Smith punching Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars or Lulu headbutting Pete Waterman at the 2005 Cosmo Awards. On first viewing, Will Smith twatting Chris Rock seems like an open and shut case of thuggery – a powerful man losing his temper and delivering a beatdown. But what if Chris Rock had had a concealed gun and was about to use it on the audience? What if Rock had promised Smith he’d give a million dollars to a children’s charity if he punched him live on stage? What if Smith, on a front-row seat, remember, had seen Rock start to choke on a bit of food and was trying to dislodge it the only way he knew how? There are loads of unknowable factors that could have been at play, but people are so quick to judge: Will Smith thumped a guy; Alan Partridge called a child a sheep-shagging chav.
But if anything, my attempts to qualify the more incriminating utterances on the transcript seemed to annoy NND more, and I was formally asked to take a few weeks off. The sheep content hadn’t been the issue, they said. It was my referring to Marvin as a ‘bloody chav’.
Big. Mistake.
* * *
59 Date-focused readers will have noticed a time jump here from 2012 in the previous chapter of this strand of the dual narrative to 2016 in this one. Please do not be alarmed at this. The nature of biographies is to document the peaks and troughs of a journey, the ups and downs of the rollercoaster. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the years 2012–16 were like the long flat bit of a rollercoaster where the riders get on and off and the carriages trundle by without incident. There were no peaks and troughs to document – the trajectory of my television career flatlined, neither rising nor falling, so it’s not germane to this story. Obviously things happened in that time – London Olympics, Cameron won majority for Conservatives, grew hair down to shoulder, became briefly nationally famous due to armed siege, friend died, Bradley Walsh quit Law & Order: UK, flight MH370 went missing over South China Sea which some put down to pilot error and others believe might be due to Russian electromagnets, won lunch with Farage in raffle but couldn’t go. So, like the bits on The X Factor where the contestants visit their home town and introduce us to their families, let’s skip this bit and get on with the decent stuff.
60 It seemed that back then I probably wasn’t ready to try stand-up!
NEITHER CHUMS NOR EGGS
April 2022
‘Now shake the pan. And see there? That wobbly bit? That’s not cooked. The white should be firm and white, not wobbly and translucent. That’s how you can tell.’
They say you can’t teach a grandma to suck eggs. But you can certainly teach the old girls to cook ’em! And that’s what I’m doing now. I’m in the kitchen of a seaside B&B, just a short walk from my lighthouse. The Seaview is comfortable enough but – whether it’s through laziness or ignorance – does serve undercooked eggs.
I’ve popped into the kitchenette and am giving the landlady, Cynthia – who I’m assuming is a grandma, she’s certainly of age – a crash course in breakfast cookery.
‘You’re thinking: How do you get the translucent bit – the “see-through” bit – to solidify without sacrificing the softness of the yolk? Little tip for you. Pop in a dash of water, cover it with a pan lid, it’ll gently steam the white until it’s cooked. See?’
I scrape the eggs into the bin. ‘Now, you try.’
‘They were the last two eggs.’
I look down to see my breakfast eggs steaming atop a mound of dumped cat food. ‘I’ll have toast. Remember we looked at toast yesterday? It was about cutting it …?’
‘On the diagonal.’
‘Great, Cynthia. That’s great.’
I’m starting to warm to Cynthia and I sense she’s fond of me. A woman of few words and even fewer smiles, she’s a no-nonsense hotelier who asked for payment upfront but, to her credit, does tolerate constructive cooking demonstrations of both eggs and toast.
But Cynthia aside – and, let’s be honest, as a non-talker she wasn’t best mate material – the locals here haven’t exactly rolled out the red carpet for me. We’re different, I get that. I am from Mars, they’re from a planet that has little in the way of retail or leisure offerings and next to no transport infrastructure. I’m from the hustle and bustle, beep-beep-out-of-my-way, sorry-can’t-stop pell mell of the big city. These are village folk – wary, rustic and slow. But I am more than happy to try and fit in: I don’t use my iPad in public areas or ask if people have Wi-Fi. I stroll and lean on gateposts and drink pints in those glass tankards made up of small windows. I stop saying ‘can I get’ when ordering in cafés and revert to the more traditional ‘can I have’ construction that provincial non-millennials find less annoying. I nod at passers-by, since vocal greetings such as hello seem to startle them. I am doing my bit.
But it’s like I’m being black-balled; as if there’s been a concerted decision to close ranks and not let me in. And that hurts. I remember how crummy I and my fellow broadcasting chums had felt when we decided not to let Adrian Chiles join our Sunday Skype sessions in which we chatted about current affairs, ethical conundra (‘is it OK to nod off during a massage?’) and ‘men things’ such as shaving your upper arms. Chiles wanted in but we just didn’t feel he’d quite get the vibe we were going for. So he received a curt email on the Monday simply saying, ‘Thank you for your interest but no.’ And the torrent of emails he sent throughout the day – ‘why not’, ‘please, lads’, ‘I don’t get why you won’t let me’, ‘will someone please answer me’ – left me feeling pretty low, without quite rendering me low enough to actually write back to him.
And while the locals here aren’t explicitly telling me I’m not welcome, they are raising their tails, skunk-like, and emitting a pretty foul message. Striking up a chat is almost impossible, as painful as initiating small talk on a first date when perhaps a more recent photo would have got things off on a friendlier footing. My usual failsafe technique, used largely in airport lounges or green rooms, is to read a newspaper and gently mutter ‘dear, oh dear’ or ‘oh, for goodness sake’ or ‘what the …?’, and by and large people within ear shot feel compelled to reply, ‘What’s that?’ Then BOOM, you’re away. Chat initiated. Well, that reaps precisely no dividends here on the coast.
