The Cat Wore Electric Goggles

by Ian Hutson

  Executive Smith leaned in confidentially and ruffled the papers on his clipboard. ‘Between you, me and the gatepost sir, H.M. has become involved and suggested that the crew might be more balanced in re the sexes. Women’s lib, and all that sort of thing. There’s a woman in the Palace, there ought to be a woman on the Moon was the message.’

  ‘Good gravy. You don’t say. Will Rutherford fit into the suit?’

  ‘We’ve rolled up the legs, sir, and there’s a certain amount of elasticity about the waistband.’

  ‘A woman landing on the Moon? Do you think that the public will really swallow that? I mean, Queening is one thing, but the Moon is technical, probably dirty and oily - a chap’s job, surely?’

  ‘Believe me, sir, they’ll lap it up. Besides, the original suggestions forwarded from the Palace were Germaine Greer, Barbara Castle and Fanny Cradock...’

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘Exactly, sir. We can thank Simpkins for some quick thinking on that one. He worked wonders on the telephone with their agents and within half an hour not a single feminist in London would be involved with a mission based on the use of phallocentric technology. The man’s a genius.’

  ‘Phallocentric technology? I thought we were using an English rocket?’

  ‘Yes, sir. We are.’

  ‘Oh. Well however he did it, Smith, make sure there’s a bonus in his salary this month, and put thicker carpet in his office. He does have an office, I suppose?’

  ‘He does now sir. I gave him one with a window - if you’ll please just initial here, and here to confirm. Thank you.’

  Fotheringham wandered out into a moon-crater, gathering a trail of lesser assistants and eager technicians as he did so. The Lunar Lander was being attached to some very stout cables dangling from the studio ceiling, and several indolent types were still banging nails into the plywood and appliquéing tin foil using “Blue Peter” PVA glue. Two of them were glued together at the forehead and a third appeared to be eating the glue.

  ‘Why is there no glass in the portholes?’

  ‘The actors - I mean the astronauts - will need to be inside the lander for some time, sir, and it gets rather warm and stuffy without ventilation. Once the technical bods have added some glare and interference to the broadcast it won’t be noticeable. The young son of one of the Special Effects chaps came up with the design. It’s really rather good, don’t you think?’

  ‘Will it wobble about like this when we’re on air?’

  ‘We’re going to avoid any really close-up shots and it should be more stable when weighted down with the actors.’

  ‘What are we going to do about that ruddy Herbert Newton and his gravity? People on the moon should bounce, you know.’

  ‘Well sir, we’ve hidden a couple of trampolines inside two of the smaller craters and we’re going to fiddle with the transmissions to make them slow motion. We’ve also asked the actors to be a bit light on their feet, ballet steps and suchlike. Higgins who ordinarily works on the Parliamentary broadcasts team has given us a lot of insight into slow motions. Shall I have his carpet upgraded too sir?’

  ‘Give him executive shag-pile and a couple of potted plants.’

  Smith jotted a note on his clipboard about ferns.

  Off set, the dressing room was in uproar.

  Alastair Sim was distraught. ‘I just don’t understand my motivation. Why am I going to the Moon? Why?’

  ‘Because Her Majesty wants you to, dear boy’ was Gielgud’s reply as he shifted from one yoga stance to quite another, his string vest tucked into his tighty-whities and stretching quite alarmingly under the tension. ‘That, plus fifteen guineas.’

  ‘Sufficient unto the action, my dear fellow, but wholly inadequate to the modus. Am I going as explorer, or as a warrior, or am I simply a victim of circumstance, cast from the planet by my fellow man? I must know!’ Sim looked like an insecure bloodhound with haemorrhoids. ‘These helmets, they do me no good at all - I am hired for my face, not for my ability to fill out a Michelin Man costume and a goldfish-bowl.’

  Rutherford was more pragmatic as she struggled with her rubbery Playtex girdle. ‘We must fall back on the method, gentlemen - a gesture here, a movement there. Dominate the stage. Our presence alone must convey our message to our audience.’

  ‘And that message would be, dear lady?’

  Rutherford needed no moment for consideration. ‘Our message is clear - ya boo sucks to you Johnny Foreigner, with knobs on, England got here first. That is our message. We will be on the moon for all mankind, so long as mankind is from the Home Counties or other domestic environs of course.’

  Sim looked unconvinced, and Gielgud when dressed, struggled under the weight of his oxygen-supply backpack to channel Stanislavski in any organic way at all.

  Rutherford head butted the inside of her space helmet as she tried to nod in the direction of the studio set. ‘Gentlemen, our public, and the moon, awaits... we must mount the landing craft! Chocks away! Cry havoc for Harry, for England and Saint George - light the blue touchpaper and stand well back, there’s likely to be one hell of an explosion.’

  En route to the studio she sent a runner with a message to Hospitality to smoke her a couple of kippers, fry several eggs and keep a kettle on the boil, since it was possible that she would not be back in time for regular-time breakfast, dangers of near-space notwithstanding and so forth, exigencies of the mission and such.

  With a little grunting, and some groaning - and a set of step-ladders - they all assumed their positions inside the Lander, ready to descend to the surface and to then burst forth and plant the National flag (er - on behalf of all Mankind, of course).

  ‘Lights! Camera! Action!’

  ‘Do people really still say that?’ asked the DG in a ridiculously loud whisper, not having been on the floor much since assuming the helm of the corporation.

  ‘They will from now on, sir. They will from now on.’

  ‘Rolling’ came the reply from almost two television cameras, and a red forty-watt light bulbs began to blink over the outside of the doors to the studio. The EBC Maintenance Department were proud of their red bulbs; they hand-painted each one on demand. From then on only full Executives, and Tea-Ladies with specially-silenced trolleys laden with tea and cakes were permitted studio ingress and egress.

  ‘Take up the slack on the cables’ shouted a stage hand.

  Inside the Lander Rutherford muttered that she did not much care for being referred to as “the slack on the cables”. Gielgud confided that his nickname at school had been ‘Slack Alice’ so it was really no skin off his derriere. Sim just looked about himself, desperate and hopeless, sucking at the air like a goldfish alongside its bowl.

  Special Effects Department had done the production quite proud considering the budget constraints, and the Lunar Lander descended gently atop a column of dry-ice, backlit by two headlamps nicked from an unattended Mini Cooper in the Visitor’s Car Park. Technicians crouched just out of camera view, and they flung handfuls of talcum powder over the Lander’s legs as it touched down on three tons of sharp sand and two wheelbarrow’s worth of assorted ornamental rocks. It was all most convincing indeed against the blackened canvas backdrop and would have been a thing of stark scientific beauty, had not the studio Philharmonic been playing The Colonel Bogey March in the background.

  At a (quite possibly rude) gesture from the Studio Director’s Assistant and his favourite fingers, Rutherford flung open the Lander’s hatch and prepared to dismount. It was only at this point that the problem of feminine lunar decorum reared its ugly head, or rather its other end; something that had not surfaced during rehearsals when they had been using three strategically-placed chairs and a lot of imagination to serve as the landing craft. Would a lady astronaut tackle the dismount problem by sliding feet and ankles first through the tight hatchway, or would a lady astronaut somehow emerge headfirst and then perform some miracle of thespian gymnastics to right herself on the ladder?

 
In the end Miss Rutherford managed a little of both and all of neither, for in squeezing through the hatchway she gave the impression of an elderly pole-dancer exiting a submarine, and she did so with four extra helping hands and rather too much gravitas. Still, professional experience won the day, and Miss Rutherford ended up in accordance with the usual head up feet down stance on the ladder. When she was quite certain that the dust had died down and that the camera focus had been correctly pulled, she opened proceedings and addressed the PM, the Palace, England, the Commonwealth, the Empire and anyone else who was likely to have a television set or a wireless handy. Raising one space-suited arm in the dramatic manner one might adopt while addressing the Roman senate on some issue of import she said ‘I take now one small step for a Ma’am, one giant leap for Ma’amkind.’

  In Buckingham Palace Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Secundus pushed a corgi off her lap and took her eyes off the television screen just long enough to place a neat tick mark and the initials “EW Rex” next to the word “Dame” on the Honours List.

  Rutherford then missed her next footing and landed on her arse on the moonscape, and was promptly engulfed in a cloud of talcum powder “moon dust” that a very on-the-ball stage-hand threw at her. She muttered something into her radio about too many stirrup cups, excused herself and laboured to her feet leaving two perfect, matronly buttock imprints in the moon dust as the memorial mark of Ma’amkind’s first kiss of the Moon.

  Gielgud and Sim then appeared both stage-left and stage-right on the grainy, black and white moonshots flickering on every available ten-inch screen. They had not been able to agree on who should be next to the moon’s surface, and so both had nipped out of the back of the Lander, neither willing to risk the hatchway themselves. A studio assistant hissed “low gravity - remember the walk!” into their radios, but the penny dropped rather slowly - probably as it should in such low gravity. Several off-set technicians had to mime walking like an idiot before the actors caught on. All three astronauts then spent a few minutes engaged in the representation of “walking around on the moon”, occasionally checking with someone off camera whether they had done enough. The hidden trampolines worked a treat, as did Sim’s early ballet training.

  ‘It’s like riding a bicycle’ he said, ‘One never quite forgets.’ The writers, off-camera, tore out their hair and waved their copies of the script at him. Being very polite, he naturally waved back.

  The Director, biting his usual knuckle in the studio control room, toggled a switch and reined in all three with reminders to collect a bit of moon-rock, do a couple of scientifical experiments and to remember not to raise the visor on their helmets no matter how hot and muggy it got inside under the studio lights.

  Rutherford, very gamely but rather optimistically given the parlous state of her coccyx, tackled a football-sized lump of rock but found that she couldn’t lift it, and instead used her mission bucket and spade to collect some of the sand nearby. In the spacesuits it was extraordinarily difficult to maintain a knees-together decorum in crouching down. Gielgud did something awfully butch with a Box Brownie and Sim, still struggling with his motivation, looked worried and measured a few things on the moon with a tailor’s tape measure.

  From the Control Room point of view it was all going rather well, considering, and the Complaints Telephone rang twice, indicating that the public were indeed out there, lapping it up. The running order then required that they should next move on to explorations further afield (but not too far, for obvious, studio backdrop reasons).

  ‘Deploy the Personal Moon Rovers’ came the instruction to the astronauts over the walkie-talkies.

  The DG whispered a question in the nearest available ear, which fortunately happened to belong to the Tea Lady, who always knew most about what was what and why.

  ‘Why are they now on bicycles?’

  ‘Sir, the Special Effects Department had originally intended an electric milk float as a Moon-mobile, but the only one we could locate would have been on loan, and it seemed a little incongruous to the Art Director to have the Unigate Dairies logo charging around the moon. Plus they would only lend us one if it was a Sunday - there are apparently no milk rounds on a Sunday.’

  ‘I see. Good decision. That new “Ski Yoghurt” stuff they’re flogging is disgusting. I can’t believe that foreigners eat it.’

  All of the astronauts were of course by this time quite gasping for a cup of tea, and all of them were happy to be given the “fingers across the neck” sign to begin to wrap up the performance. Gielgud struggled a little to find the pre-formed hole to slot the little flagpole into, and when Rutherford tugged the Cross of St George out of a breast pocket on her spacesuit it did initially look rather as though she were endeavouring to remove an item of her underwear while still wearing her top-clothes. The viewers breathed a collective sigh of relief when she produced the flag and not a still-warm example of Marks & Spencers’ finest canvas bras with reinforcing under-springs and anti-fiddle clasp, although, technically, this would have served the feminist purpose of her inclusion both more topically and more directly - especially had some way been found to ignite it.

  The big speeches were coming up. Oh dear, the big speeches were coming up. The Director moved on to a fresh biting-knuckle and took a deep gasp of breath.

  Sim, reading like a myopic tortoise from a board held aloft just off camera, proceeded to open the closing of the official proceedings. ‘This is the LM pilot. I'd like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way. Perhaps a small cheque made payable to the Treasury, or a letter of congratulations to the many scientists who made this journey possible. At the very least you might purchase your Television Licence before the detector vans sweep your neighbourhood.’ At the finish he looked as though he’d sniffed something really rather awful, but was prepared to put up with it until death came along, as it probably soon would.

  Gielgud stepped then forward in order to make a couple of significant readings from pertinent texts chosen carefully to mark the occasion. ‘I should like to read briefly to you all now from the Good Book, Principia. In particular from Book 1, De motu corporum. On the motion of bodies concerns motion in the absence of any resisting medium. It opens with a mathematical exposition of "the method of first and last ratios", a geometrical form of infinitesimal calculus...’

  Sensing that he had centre stage for once, Gielgud milked his part. ‘Further, I shall now close with a passage from the only other Good Book in existence, On The Origin Of Species by Mr Darwin, which I shall read to you in the original Shakespeare. ...Owingeth to thif struggle for life, what variation through yonder window breaks, howevereth slight and from whatevereth cause profeeding, if it be or not to be in any degree profitableth to an individual of our two great houses, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and, yea - t’wexternal nature, t’will tendeth to the prefervation of yonder indifidual, and will generally be inheritedeth by fate’s offspring ... I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if usefuleth, is preserved, by the term of Naturaleth Selection, in order to mark its relation to Ma’amkind's power of selection...’ He then flourished bending one knee just so, and could hear thunderous applause in his mind.

  Rutherford, poised nearby for the dedication of the flag and of the small, impromptu flower-garden that they had built around it, caused an emotional tear to fall from her nose right on cue. Damn, she was good. After due professional pause she postured, very simply and elegantly, and added ‘All the moon's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts. Ladies and gentlemen, we have come upon our exit.’ Then, with a waggle of her sword hand in farewell - ‘Rule Britannia! Full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes!’

  Whereupon it being almost nine-thirty o’clock in the evening and t
hus quite late, the three brave astronauts re-entered the Landing Craft in their preparations to return to England, and a soft touchdown somewhere in the familiar Thames Estuary. At a signal from the Studio Director the slack from the studio winch cables was reeled in, the Lander began to rise and under the auspices of several chaps with extinguishers, the final pyrotechnic flourish was lit in the rocket cone while stage-hands caused a maelstrom of dust to form.

  The flames of course leapt much further than their allotted portion and licked about the Landing Craft, causing a sudden flurry of exiting women, children and actors first, but not necessarily in that order. Scheduling, intending to cut back to studio discussion where several eminent politicians and a sober professor of Astronomy from Oxford or Cambridge were expounding plans for lunar colonisation and industry, hit some random switch amid the growing jubilation.

  In the moon-set studio all decorum and procedure was lost amid an outburst of happy celebration at yet another - and a rather special - production achieved with a quality beyond all hope and expectation. Backs were slapped, hands were shaken and the charred remains of the Landing Craft were finally extinguished by gentlemen in EBC Firemen’s outfits, who shook their heads in disbelief and awe.

  History had been made, they almost all said, and such was undoubtedly history added the Firemen.

  As one, actors, technicians and all, they retired to the nearest pub to celebrate. The real-ale brewing industry of the Home Counties and the London purveyors of quality gins welcomed them with the Rat-Catcher’s Arms. The Prime Minister slapped Her Majesty on the knee, levered himself up off her settee and laboured across the room to turn off the television set. Elizabeth took the opportunity to pop outside to the lav.

  The telephone on the hall table ran hot with congratulations and with admissions of victory in the space race from the United State of North America, and from the perennially disunited state of Mother Russia. The gentleman from Washington (not Tyne & Wear) asked that a message be passed to the EBC, cancelling their own booking of the studio previously made for the week following, since there was then little point remaining in NASA continuing in their own plans to show the North American public a moon landing of their own. Well done, they said, goddam well done. The gentleman from Russia, having forgotten during his first telephone call, rang back some minutes later to ask that the earthy congratulations of the Soviet citizens be conferred upon the brave cosmonauts involved. The PM assured the gentleman that he would do just that the very next time that he met them.