I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book.
– Groucho Marx
Ψ ?
Hazel Cole had never been in a chauffeur driven limousine before. After yesterday’s phone call from Shona’s personal assistant, she had been expecting a car to collect her but it was something of a surprise when she answered the door to a uniformed driver. Looking past the driver, she saw the absurdly elongated American beast parked in the road, its darkened glass making it look very menacing. She followed the driver down the stairs and reluctantly let him open the rear door for her. She hoped her neighbours could not see her. She climbed in but could not make herself comfortable.
From the moment the door closed behind her it was obvious that she would not be able to travel like this. Unable to find the door handle, she tapped on the darkened window to the driver, not realising straight away that he could not see her. She fumbled with the door some more and succeeded in opening it and climbing out, just as the driver had got round to the other side of the vehicle, climbed in and closed his own door. He took off his peaked cap, placing it on the seat next to him, fastened his belt and turned the key. He checked the offside mirror out of habit and was leaning forward to peer out of his window and check that it was safe to pull into traffic when he found his view was obscured by a person. The same person he had just seated in the rear of the car. Doctor Cole was tapping on his window. The chauffeur pressed the button to lower it.
“I don’t suppose you would mind if I sat up front with you would you? I did not like it back there.”
He was delighted. Brian had got into driving because he enjoyed talking to people. When he started to get bored of the short hops and repetitiveness of taxi work, he had discovered through a friend that he could make a similar living driving fleet cars for a private hire company. A lot of it was dull too, but for the last year he had regular work for Shona’s television company. He enjoyed ferrying minor celebs and other daytime guests to and from their homes and the studios. The studios were north of London, just beyond the M25, and it was a rare journey that did not take at least an hour. Since he also drove the same individuals home, it was wonderful to be able to continue his interview after they had appeared on the show. And because it was television, there was no shortage of interesting passengers, always welcoming another chance to talk about themselves. Tales he could then re-tell to his friends down the Flying Pig. It was Brian’s dream job. At least it used to be when he drove a simple executive saloon, but as her ratings had grown Shona had started having delusions of Oprah and had insisted all guests were collected in American black limos. Brian was cut off from conversation by the formal atmosphere and the privacy divider.
“I know what you mean. Hop in,” he said cheerfully, removing his cap from the passenger seat.
At the studios, Shona reviewed the running-order for this morning’s show. It was all the usual crap. Slightly famous guests with something to sell or promote: A soap star discussing her first serious role, an obscure shrink with a book to plug, and some reality-TV D-lister having to come to terms with the reality that most of the country hated him. It was not exactly Oprah, but she knew that people tuned in to see her, not her guests. Shona preferred it if none of them could outshine her. That did not look like it was going to be a problem today. But it meant that Shona would have to carry the show herself. That was fine. She was as hyped as ever.
The journey from Hazel’s house in Peterborough to the studios flew by. Hazel and Brian hit it off instantly. She tried to tell Brian about the psychologist who had put several taxi drivers in a brain scanner. They each had an enlarged hippocampus; the organ of memory, that holds the knowledge of locations and directions. Naturally, being a taxi driver, Brian had heard all about it and this triggered his own reminisces about his early days learning the routes round London. From there, their conversation took many twists and turns.
Brian was having such a good journey that he got carried away. Forgetting that he was talking to a grey-haired old professor, he accidentally told her the story of having to carry a paralytic Spice Girl into her flat and help her change out of her vomit splattered clothes. Hazel did not mind. It took her mind off the butterflies in her own stomach.
•
The man had been a London bus driver once. He had driven a Routemaster. It was a London icon, and he had really enjoyed the job, pleased to be associated with this moveable capital landmark and proud to be doing an important job, carrying London to and from work. Working for London Transport was one of the first times in his life he felt that he had friends, that he was accepted. He got on with his colleagues but he appreciated the distance. He would only see his fellow bus drivers occasionally in the depot or as their paths crossed out on the routes. The conductors he was paired with were generally busy on the runs so he had privacy during the day, sitting up in the cab of this large, useful and friendly machine. He even joined an break-time chess league that ran at the depot. There were some strong players and the man enjoyed a friendly rivalry with several of his fellow drivers. For several years he was very happy.
Unfortunately things turned bad for the man when the buses were deregulated. A private contractor took over the man’s routes and depot and, although initially they all kept their jobs, matters went rapidly off the road. The company rearranged the shifts and the timetables so that the drivers had to work harder and had less chance to fraternise with each other. It was only about twenty minutes longer on the road each day but it was that little bit too much. Many of the drivers felt they were pushed too far and were more exhausted than they had been. The changes also meant that shifts often began or ended at the other end of the route. Meaning a driver would have to travel home on his own time. Drivers usually lived near the depots, which was how they had been assigned when they first got the jobs, so starting and finishing work at the depot left them close to home. The new scheme effectively lengthened the working day for the already over-worked drivers.
It did, of course, mean the company needed fewer drivers and initially they were able to reduce the numbers through early retirements and voluntary redundancies. Thereby increasing the profits. But whatever they did one year just raised the bar for their productivity the next. The new bus company was always looking for ways to cut its costs. Naturally enough the Routemasters and their costly surplus headcount were the next to go. Half the Routemaster fleet was replaced with driver-only buses. Conductors were given the choice of retraining as drivers or talking a walk. As a relatively new driver, the man was transferred to the driver-only buses. And it was this change that led to him getting the sack.
Ironically for someone who would shortly later be locked up in a secure mental unit for aggravated assault, the man had lost his job as a bus driver for being too nice. Although the new buses were ugly and utilitarian, they were no harder to driver than the Routemasters. The man quickly adapted to the new vehicles. He could not however adapt to his new dual role as driver and conductor. Firstly, he lost that meditative privacy of a separate booth, where he could concentrate solely on the driving, now he was far more easily distracted by passengers talking to him or merely standing close by in his peripheral vision. He had a couple of accidents and a few near misses. Worse yet, the man was a not man to be dealing with the general public. He tried to be friendly but he never quite got the tone right. All to often he would misread a passenger’s cheery hello as an invitation to start a conversation and the bus would often be held up as the slightly bemused passenger tried to cut him off. By far the greatest concern to the bus company, the man was terrible at dealing with fare-dodgers. A victim of bullying all his life, the man had no experience of standing up for himself or telling people what to do. If someone wanted to get aboard his bus without paying, he was happy to let them. The company, however, were not happy and after two warnings and two failed opportunities to adapt the company’s ‘productivity centred ethos’, the man was sacked. It was to be the last time the man ever worked for The Man.
Ψ ?
Shona’s assistant, Alice, had talked Hazel through everything carefully. Hazel would be asked a little about the book and a little about herself. There was always the chance that Shona would latch onto something she said and launch into an anecdote of her own, reinterpreting whatever the guest was saying in terms that related better to her. Apparently the audience related to this too, or at least didn’t seem to tire of Shona’s unhappy childhood. So if a digression came, it was best if Hazel were to go along with it and just agree with everything Shona said. A look of panic that flickered across Alice’s face as she said this. Hazel took careful note.
“Thank you, Maggie Daniels. Later on I will be talking to ‘Orrible ‘Enry recently evicted from ‘The Oil Rig’. But right now I am pleased to welcome onto the show, Dr. Hazel Cole.”
Shona said, standing to greet her guest and giving her perfect TV smile. She wasn’t in the least bit pleased. These shrinks always made her uneasy. You never knew how much they knew about you.
“Dr Cole is a psychiatrist, who..”
“Psychologist actually, it’s slightly different.” Hazel interrupted, smiling sweetly.
“Oh God,” thought Shona, “Not one of these pedantic medical types. They are always uncooperative, monosyllabic and make crap television.”
Shona smiled sweetly back. “I’ve just finished reading your new book, ‘Help Yourself ’ ” She hadn’t. In fact, she hadn’t read any of it; she hadn’t even seen it before picking it up just now for the benefit of camera three. At lunchtime yesterday, the show’s producer had flung a copy at some flunky with instructions to read it and prepare some intelligent questions for Shona to ask.
“Did you like it?” Hazel asked. This was not right. It was Shona who asked the questions and the guests who replied. Those were the rules of the game and any guest desperate enough to appear on this kind of show should surely know that?
“I loved it!” How could she? But it was another rule of the show to be uncritically gushing about everything. Anyway the junior researcher’s questions would let Shona bluff her way through. She consulted the bullet points.
“So you are saying we can all be thinner, fitter, better people?”
“No, nothing like that,” said Hazel.
The office junior hadn’t read it either. He had been out extremely late the night before to some newly opened club and got lucky with a stunning girl who worked in public relations. He had not slept at all last night and he was hoping to see her again that night. To be prepared he was planning to hide in a guest dressing room and spend the afternoon catching up on his sleep. He had flicked through Help Yourself, but the words were floating off the page, so in the end he had just copied and pasted the questions from the notes for another self-help guru they had had on the show half a year ago.
“Treating yourself to a new outfit improves your self-confidence,” Shona asked uncertainly, having scanned down her crib for something in the summary that seemed most likely to her.
“You haven’t read it have you?” Hazel suggested, still smiling sweetly.
From there, it degenerated badly. And unfortunately for Shona, having just come back from the commercial break, there were many awkward and uncomfortable minutes before the producer could come to her rescue. (What she never found out was that he let the section run on longer than he needed to because car-crashes were always such compelling television.)
The final section with ‘Orrible ‘Enry had gone moderately well and coming off the set Shona was slightly calmer than she had been during the debacle with the head doctor. But now as she played back the show in her mind she relived the bad bits. Her stomach dropped as she recalled how Hazel had made a fool of her. Shona did not like being mocked. She channelled her anger at her perceived humiliation into righteous indignation and very quickly had turned the situation round in her head. She picked up the copy of the accursed book and looked at the gentle smiling face of Hazel on the back and read the blurb beneath that listed Hazels many qualifications and her time working in psychiatric hospitals.
Slowly it began to make sense to Shona. That shrink had deliberately set out to make Shona look stupid. On her own show! Just so people would think how clever the doctor was and buy her stupid book. The scheming and devious old biddy. You would never suspect it to look at her. But this was so clearly what happened. She would not get away with it. You did not get your own show on daytime television without knowing how to stand up for yourself. Shona was not about to let this insult pass. She grabbed the offending book, had a short scream and stomped out of her rooms and down the corridor.
Shona exploded into Hazel Cole’s dressing room.
“I suppose you think it’s clever to trick me on my own television show, do you?” She screamed, brandishing ‘Help Yourself ’ as if it were damning evidence.
Hazel Cole had lived through stand-up shouting matches with psychopathic multiple murderers, so she was not intimidated by a furious chat show host.
“I wasn’t trying to trick you. I think there must have been some misunderstanding. I am sorry. I expect you get a lot of guests and it must be hard to keep track of everything?” Hazel asked in a clear and steady tone that calmed Shona somewhat.
“Yes, I have to do everything round here or, as you see, it all goes wrong. So it doesn’t help if you try to catch me out!” Shona added, remembering that she was still mad.
“I am sorry.” Hazel knew better than to argue the point. Instead, she changed the subject “But I bet you’ve always had to do everything haven’t you? Were you the oldest of your brothers and sisters?”
“Second. But my older brother was no use. Just like my dad.”
“And it was a big family?”
“Two little brothers, four little sisters and just me and my mum to look after them.”
“Yes?” Hazel had calmed the woman in front of her and now sought to draw her out.
For Shona, talking about herself was one of her favourite ways to pass the time but it was rare to find anyone who actually listened. Properly listened and knew when to ask questions or when to let her carry on. Hazel had forty years of professional experience of doing precisely that. Shona talked for a long time. Hazel listened.
•
The man did not own a television that worked. The eight he did own had fallen victim to his inquiring mind. This was probably a good thing because television was not good for someone in his condition. There was too much happening at once.
He had always had trouble concentrating and television seemed to be edited to make it impossible for him to follow. The constantly changing sequence of shots and scenes left him reeling. Especially all the hidden messages. He had once videoed the news and very carefully gone through it using the pause button. He had filled a whole notebook from just the secret codes hidden in that one minute morning news program. He often wondered who the messages were for. It was too much for one person. It had taken him a whole day to go through that one program and there were more news broadcasts almost hourly.
Maybe each code was just to communicate with just one group or person and they were all unaware of each other? How many people was that, out there receiving these instructions? How many more were there these days of satellite and cable? Back when he had done his investigation there were just four television channels and the computer graphics were very simple. Now there was far more crammed into each frame of each program and there were hundreds of channels readily accessible. As he understood it there were over six channels that showed nothing but news twenty-four hours a day. It made his head spin just to think of it.
Ψ ?
After leaving Hazel’s dressing room Shona had gone back to her own room, hurrying so no-one would notice her tear-stained face. She locked the door, blew her nose and opened her copy of Help Yourself on the first page. She finished it that same night and the next morning she arrived at the studio carrying two dozen copies. A dozen were given out at the production meeting and everyone on the show was ordered to read it. The other dozen were couriered to (in this order) her agent, her two best friends, her mother, several other friends and two of her sisters. Her other sister, her brother and her father did not receive a copy. (She had learnt a lot from Dr. Cole’s book, but it would not work miracles.)