The Wall in the Head

by Christopher Beanland

  [An unpromising, windy hillside. Trees being chopped down. A zoom towards the skyline of Birmingham in the distance. Workers filling a hole with concrete. Then a lot of metal arrives on trucks and slowly the shape of a transmitter begins to rise into the sky.]

  ‘The Lickey Hills, south of Birmingham. It was decided to raise a transmitter here on this lofty perch, where the Mids signal could reach right out to Shropshire, Worcestershire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire – and the West Midlands conurbation. Builders worked tirelessly to sink concrete foundations and erect a proud, hard aerial that no one could miss! Now there was a transmitter, programmes had to be made that could be broadcast from it.’

  [Back to central Birmingham. Looking along Broad Street a few years previously, the scruffy site where the Mids TV HQ and studios were about to be built.]

  ‘After much studying of suitable sites, Broad Street in Birmingham was decided upon as the location for the new Mids Television Centre. It has easy access to the soon-to-be-completed Queensway Inner Ring Road – and the building itself will have underground and surface car parking for 400 vehicles. This was a former industrial area, near to the Gas Street Canal Basin. A part of Birmingham that seemed unpromising in previous eras. But in the forward-looking 1960s, anything is possible! The site was full of dirt and grime; the memory of a former Birmingham was alive – a Birmingham where people toiled in factories and on canal barges. But those dark days of heavy manufacturing are almost over, and so they should be. The future is about technology and leisure! There’s talk of ridding all of central Birmingham of these grubby Victorian warehouses and wharves, even concreting over the canals and turning them into motorways – wouldn’t that be something?’

  [Builders swarming over scaffolding.]

  ‘Construction of the Mids Television complex has been completed in lightning-quick time – two years flat. And anyone that says you can’t rush these things better think again. The architect reckons – and who are we to question him – that this lot can stand for a thousand years. So let’s look around. The site is split into three. The studio block where the programmes will be shot and edited – the stores, dressing rooms and other assorted technical tricks of the trade are in here. A different block containing the canteen and bar, reception and other public areas. Then, thirdly, the office tower, reaching high into the sky above the city and containing space for the programme makers; the advertising, administrative and accounts departments; and also management, who have the highest offices of all with sweeping views out towards the countryside – well, you can’t run a tight ship without having some of your top men at the top, can you?’

  [Inside the same corridor as earlier, tracking along.]

  ‘So why don’t we stop talking about the abstract and instead meet two of the men who’ll be bringing television in the Midlands to life, when Mids TV goes live to air.’

  [Zoom in to a figure standing in the Mids TV HQ car park. A man in a sharp suit, handsome and with hair slicked back. He takes off his glasses. He looks like he’s in his mid twenties.]

  ‘Meet Mr Ralph Marks. Marks is in his twenties. Married, he commutes by car into the studios every day from his house near Kidderminster. Mr Marks used to be the news editor on Birmingham’s local newspaper, the Evening Brummie. But now he’s got a new role and a new life – as a television presenter. Specifically, Mr Marks will be presenting Bullseye, the weekly current affairs programme, which will cast a glance at everything from industrial relations to consumer issues. Mr Marks votes Conservative and says his favourite tipple is a Campari on the rocks. Mr Marks smokes cigarillos.’

  [Zoom in to another figure standing in the Mids TV HQ car park. A man in a suit again. It’s not as chic as the previous suit, cheaper – obviously. The man is smoking a cigarette. His tie is loose. He’s handsome but his hair is rather scruffy-looking. He also looks the same age – mid twenties.]

  ‘Meet Mr Bob [inaudible]. He is in his twenties. Single, he commutes into the studios from his flat in Bearwood, Birmingham. Mr [tape skips] studied English at Birmingham University and has done work for theatre groups and small “underground” magazines in the Midlands. He also organised one of the country’s first so-called “stand-up comedy” nights at Birmingham’s Student Guild. He will be embracing his position as one of the troupe of multifunctioning writer-performers on Mids TV’s flagship light entertainment Saturday-night spectacle Welcome To The Masshouse. The programme will feature satirical skits, comedic sketches, a sideways look at the week’s news, games and the like. The title – in case you’re wondering, and I know I was – is a pun of course on Masshouse, that infamous district of central Birmingham, which is now the site for a traffic roundabout super-interchange. Do you get it? I know I do now. Comedy will be a big part of the station’s remit. Television is a new medium, and Mids is committed to challenging the status quo and pushing accepted boundaries to deliver the most revolutionary light entertainment programmes to its viewers. It is almost the 1970s, after all. Oh, and Mr [inaudible] votes Labour and says his favourite tipple is a pint of Birmingham Bitter. He smokes Gent Cigarettes.’

  [A prototype version of the Mids logo – a spinning ‘M’ that’s not been quite properly drawn. It looks half-finished compared to today’s version. It spins awkwardly in white against a drab black background.]

  ‘And what’s this? Well, it’s our logo. Mids Television will be represented by the letter ‘M’. The ‘M’ signifying, of course, Mids and thence Midlands, which is where Mids got its name from. Glad we cleared that up. And is there anything else we need to show you? I quite fancy a trip to the bar. Don’t you?’

  [A glamorous woman with a large cleavage and tight red dress sits on a stool at the bar, sipping fizz from a retro champagne glass. She holds up the glass to toast the camera and flashes a set of pearly choppers.]

  ‘My, my. There’s one good reason to visit the Mids Television bar. Or two good reasons! The Mids Television bar is the place to see stars and let your hair down after a long day at the office. It is already Birmingham’s most glamorous after-dark lounge, with a range of cocktails you can enjoy while sitting on fine leather seats. You’ll be able to sip wine and smoke a cigar in the company of the most exciting people of today.’

  [On to shots of a canteen, which is painted bright white. Cherry-coloured hexagonal islands sit in the middle of the room, piled high with cold food. A line of hot dishes in shallow metallic vats are down one side of the room, and sets of chairs and tables are on the other side of the room.]

  ‘Mids is a thoroughly modern enterprise which caters well to its workers’ needs. There’s a canteen with all kinds of foods served in a progressive style – that means, for cold grub, you can locate the food island you need easily: if you fancy an egg salad or some strawberry jelly, for example. Or if it’s hot food you’re after, like beef stew and dumplings or sausage and chips, head over to the heated stations where chefs dish up the piping-hot goodies. The canteen is just one example of where Mids Television is innovating. The architect of the building went to America, where he researched the way offices and television studios worked, in order to better understand what staff needed and what made a really great television complex, and I think you’ll agree that the end results we can see here in Birmingham are truly second to none.’

  [A montage: engineers coiling up cables in a studio, lights being wheeled across the floor. Outside broadcast vans – with the giant ‘M’ logo on the side – piling out of the car park onto Broad Street. Secretaries typing away; a man in a suit comes over and hands one of them a document, and she smiles. A security guard in the gate lodge and another guard out in the car park pick up walkie-talkies to chat to each other. Pan shot showing sweeping views from the top of the Mids TV Tower, looking down on the traffic and the cranes in Birmingham. Two cool-looking 20-somethings dressed in flower prints sit down in oversized yellow plastic pod chairs in a white, minimally decorated flat and begin to watch a TV. The spinning ‘M’ logo appears on the screen, and
the couple bob their heads as if they’re listening to some kind of funky song.]

  ‘So this then is Mids Television. A new television station for a new era. A new television station for a region that’s going places. A new television station for a new you! Enjoy the show.’

  *

  Ten Brutalist Buildings

  By Belinda Schneider

  Chapter Eight

  Mids TV HQ – why are people killing themselves?

  The most depressing thing about modern life is the way it alienates people. But are people sad because of the physical world we’ve created, or are they sad because of the materialistic society we’ve fostered? I don’t think brutalist architecture makes you feel sad. I think it’s the pressures and stresses that go along with being poor or being troubled or just, maybe, being modern. Money, sex, conformity, relationships – all these things can blister you. Capitalism chips away at your heart. In recent years the talk has swung to how buildings can cause this feeling of anomie. But I’d counter that it’s not that physical built world we have a problem with; it’s the modern society we’ve created, the consumer society, that is specifically designed to make you unhappy. So you buy your way out of the morass.

  The unfortunate truth has been that people in cities not only kill themselves, but kill themselves by jumping off modern buildings, off modernist buildings, off brutalist buildings. Is it because they’re the tallest ones around? Or because they represent some of the hurt people feel? If you think I’m going to talk about TV when I talk about the Mids studios, I’m not. I’m going to talk about suicide. Many people have jumped to their deaths from the top of the office tower at the Mids TV HQ. Too many people. I find this fact profoundly depressing. We need to help people who feel this way. People who want to kill themselves. It’s not just the studios either – all around Birmingham there are places where vulnerable people go to end their lives. This is the sad secret of the city. And Birmingham is just one city. Tower blocks, office towers, car parks. People jump off these buildings to escape from their demons. I wish people wanted to live. I wish they saw these buildings as places they could go to think, to play, to enjoy. But they’re too often places they go because they’ve reached the end of their tether. We can’t ignore these things. But we should also try to see that just because these are places of death, the architecture doesn’t have to represent death.

  Of all the thinking about architecture I’ve done, this is the thing that troubles me the most. I don’t understand it. I’m not a philosopher or a psychologist. I wonder what’s really going on in people’s minds. I wonder why this happens and what it says about us. I wish brutalism could be all about happiness and possibility, I really do. I’ve tried to show how I think it is and it can be. But I have to show this side as well, this tragic side. And if you’re reading this and thinking about doing anything stupid, for God’s sake please don’t. You’re loved. You’re always loved by someone, usually by many people. They can’t live without you. You’ll break their hearts. Seek them out. Know there’s someone there for you. Don’t make yourself another one of those horrific statistics. Wherever you are in the world. Just stop and think. Please. When you die, however you die, you wreck everything. You wreck everything for other people. Your death ruins their lives.

  29

  2000

  ‘I enjoyed Big Plans, I thought it was fu—’

  ‘It wasn’t, but go on.’

  ‘It was funny, but—’

  ‘It wasn’t.’

  ‘It was!’

  ‘OK, maybe in places.’

  ‘Exactly. But it nurtured a kind of attitude. All those films shot in the 1960s and ’70s, they presented brutalist buildings as dystopias… or jokes.’

  ‘They did, that’s a good point. But to my eye they made it all look sort of glamorous and sexy sometimes. Strange, yes, but I don’t know… intriguing?’

  ‘To your eye. But sex and glamour to you is aggression and threat and sleaze to someone else.’

  ‘With that show I was really mocking – apart from the idiots in power who are always idiots and always all-powerful – that feeling of being talked down to. You know, the public information films and the council documentaries that found their way onto Mids TV. Everything was rosy. Mums with prams, and flowerbeds everywhere. The future will be perfect if you TRUST US to lead you there. I bet you saw loads of those films on East German TV. Well, fuck them.’

  ‘Everything was rosy – sometimes. It could really have been like that for all time. It almost was. They were building a new Jerusalem for all the people. The future was exciting; the buildings were exciting. The politicians messed everything up – they always do, wherever they are. But the architects were on to something.’

  ‘People felt they were sold a pup though.’

  I lit two cigarettes, passed one to her.

  ‘You’re attracted to failure. You can smell it.’

  ‘Why would you say that?’

  ‘You’re attracted to a failed writer and failed buildings.’

  ‘Other people might think they’ve failed, but I don’t.’ She inhaled, looked pleased with herself.

  ‘Seriously, I’ve been thinking about it. I reckon it’s got something to do with your caring side. You want to rescue things, to nurse them.’

  ‘I’m a very caring person. I used to help animals I found outside the block of flats who had injuries.’ She leaned in and squeezed me.

  ‘I knew it!’

  ‘So now you’re happy that your fucking theory is correct, Dr Donald?’

  ‘Very happy.’

  ‘I’m happy about that.’

  I picked up my newspaper.

  ‘I’m very proud of you. You’re famous in Birmingham. People at that steak house always recognise your name. Bartholomew’s. Maybe it’s because you go there too much though?’

  ‘They recognised my name from the end titles of I Love My Dog! They said it was their favourite programme.’

  ‘There’s no accounting for taste.’

  ‘That sounds like another sitcom I could write. There’s No Accounting For Taste. Set in an accountant’s office.’

  Bel groaned.

  We sat in silence.

  ‘You know I love you no matter what, whether you’re a success or a failure, though in my eyes it will always be success. And you’ll love me no matter what too.’

  ‘No matter what.’

  ‘Do you want to possess me? Love is like possession, I guess. Men want to possess women like a car or something. I’d never change my name.’

  ‘Keep your name. No one can possess you. You’re a free spirit. I can borrow you, like a book from a library. That’s all.’

  She laughed. ‘Like my students. They can borrow me for a term and then they have to put me back.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I’ll get fined for keeping you out too long…’

  30

  [Title music – jaunty and insistent, like the soundtrack to a fair pulling into town. Scenes of Birmingham play out in the background, but they all look grotty – motorways, underpasses, tower blocks, concrete boxes.]

  Title card – BIG PLANS

  [The camera hovers over Victoria Square and then crash-zooms down to show two men in suits with drainpipe trouser bottoms strolling across the screen and into the Council House as the music fades out. Benedetti and Rocaster.]

  [Establishing shot of a deserted piece of waste ground, a grand old factory building behind it looking mournful.]

  Benedetti: ‘Put that shovel down, Seddon, and come over here!’

  Seddon: ‘Yes, sir. What’s up?’

  Benedetti: ‘The clock is frantically counting down until the arrival of the Minister. I want these explosives laid, charged and checked. And no monkey business. This is a big day. I want that custard factory demolished with the minimum of fuss. When the Minister presses the button – one blast, all gone.’

  Seddon: ‘Whatever you say.’ [Cut to Seddon’s face. He silently mouths
mock words, impersonating Benedetti. Benedetti turns round and catches him at it.]

  Benedetti: ‘And Seddon… what are you playing at? Stop larking around and get on it with it.’

  Seddon: ‘What’s going in the gap once the Minister’s blown it up?’

  Benedetti: ‘I’m glad you’re taking an interest. First time for everything. A mixed-use development, Seddon. Library, school, flats, shops, offices, car park and a slip road connection up to the dual carriageway. All finished in fresh, raw, delicious, naked concrete – of course.’

  Seddon: ‘Blimey. Big plans.’

  Benedetti: ‘Blimey indeed, Seddon. Blimey indeed.’

  *

  [Cut to later in the day. A huge crowd of dignitaries has gathered a hundred yards from the exclusion zone in front of the huge old factory. Women in their finery, a few looking foxy in miniskirts. Men in suits, smoking cigars. Workmen in overalls milling around. Rocaster and Benedetti stand in front of a table at the front of the crowd, under an awning. A comical red plunger sits on the table. A workman appears, yawns and seems about to lean on it. It’s Seddon.]

  Benedetti: ‘Seddon! What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  [Seddon recoils at the last second then rolls his eyes out of Benedetti’s view.]

  Seddon: ‘Sorry, sir.’

  Benedetti: ‘Right, Rocaster, everything’s set?’

  Rocaster: ‘I believe it is. We’ve got the charges primed, the crowd moved back, the plans for the new development are propped up on a frame over there.’

  Benedetti: ‘Refreshments?’

  Rocaster: ‘Tea, coffee, a few bottles of that sweet German wine. What else? Oh, Mrs Pershore made a few rounds of ham sandwiches, two Dundee cakes and an apple pie.’