How to Get Ahead in Television

by Sophie Cousens

  ‘Well, maybe you don’t know me very well, Rhidian,’ I said testily. ‘I didn’t think you were the kind of person to write cruel things on your stupid chart, but I obviously misjudged you, didn’t I?’

  ‘That was obviously a joke, Poppy.’

  ‘You’ve got a funny idea of a joke, Rhidian.’

  ‘Look, whatever, I’m sorry if it offended you so much, I just—’ Rhidian stopped talking as David came in with two cups of tea.

  ‘Woah, tension-tastic, guys. What have I walked into? Lovers’ tiff?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Rhidian swung his chair around, turning his back to me.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Shall I let you finish, or do you want me to stay and act as ref?’ David asked.

  Neither of us said anything. My phone started ringing; it was my mum, so I clicked it to voicemail.

  ‘Which one of your multiple boyfriends was that then?’ Rhidian asked.

  ‘Piss off, Rhidian,’ I said, getting up and leaving the room.

  STEP 31 – DON’T BE AFRAID TO TAKE SOME INITIATIVE

  FROM:

  TO:

  SUBJECT: RE: Bank My Bonus

  Sorry, P. Actually going to have to rain check drink plans. Under the weather, so going home early for some R&R. Thanks for the write-up, will take a look at it when I can.

  JR

  RealiTV – because a real workforce makes real TV!

  THE EMAIL CAME through at five o’clock, just as I was about to prompt JR on where we should meet. A wave of disappointment hit me. I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him all week. He’d finally got around to making plans with me and now he was cancelling. This was turning out to be one hell of a shitty day. Then an idea popped into my head: perhaps I should take some hot soup to his house? The man was probably feeling rotten – I could surprise him with a takeaway and then snuggle in for a movie night. Brilliant idea.

  I knew JR’s home address off by heart because he always got me to order him a cab home when we were working late on What Do They Know?. Leaving the office, I stopped off at the shops to pick him up a few treats. If I were feeling ill, I’d want someone to bring me a chick flick and Grazia magazine, so I scanned the shelves for the male equivalent. I settled on GQ magazine and a DVD about extreme sports. It put me over my new seven-pounds-a-day budget, but this could be chalked up as ‘exceptional circumstances’.

  I got to Camden tube station and found a noodle bar called Thai Thai Thai. I picked up two large pots of chicken laksa soup, then, goodie bags in hand, set off to find JR’s street. I skipped along, congratulating myself on thinking of such a spontaneously romantic gesture. I felt like the lead in a feminist version of a classic love story, where the heroine comes to rescue the sickly hero. I found JR’s flat and rang the buzzer. No answer – that was strange. Perhaps he’d nipped around the corner to get some Lemsip or something?

  I sat on the doorstep, not wanting to call him for fear of ruining the surprise. The soup was going to get cold now. After ten minutes, it wasn’t just the soup getting cold as I started to shiver. There was a pub at the end of the street; perhaps I should go and have a hot chocolate, then come back in ten minutes. He really couldn’t have ventured far if he was ill. I trotted down to the Two and Sixpence pub, and that’s when I saw him, through the window, drinking beer with a group of men.

  He did not look ill.

  My first instinct was relief; there he was, fit and well and looking as gorgeous as ever. But then the truth dawned on me: he’d lied to get out of seeing me tonight. My heart sank. How could he do this to me? I was about to leave, to slip away before he saw me, but then my hurt turned to anger. Here I was, running around town like a misguided Florence Nightingale, bringing him bloody soup, and he was having beers in the pub! Without really thinking through any sort of plan, I charged into the pub and stormed over to JR and his little party.

  ‘I came up here to bring you soup, ’cause you said you were ill, arsehole. You don’t look very ill to me!’ I shouted, not caring as drinkers turned to stare. The pot of cold laska soup was in my hand, and then, before I knew what I was doing, I had thrown it over him. Before JR could react, I turned and ran from the pub, stopping just around the corner, my whole body shaking, heart pounding in my chest.

  I stood there, fuming. How could he do this to me? Lie so brazenly like that? Maybe I’d read too much into that dinner and that kiss… I paced up and down on the street corner, waiting for JR to rush outside and apologize. Perhaps I’d accept his apology and we’d both go back to his and he could have a shower, and then he’d kiss me and it would all be fine again. But JR did not come rushing out to find me. In fact, he didn’t come out of the pub at all.

  I wasn’t sure what to do now. The whole situation felt very unresolved. You couldn’t just throw soup over someone, leave and then go home without an explanation, could you? I felt a nagging sense of doubt that maybe soup-throwing hadn’t been the correct move. I wasn’t even sure why I had done it, it was as though my arm possessed a rebellious little mind of it’s own.

  After fifteen minutes, I was still loitering in the street. Finally, JR emerged. He’d taken off his soup-soaked shirt and borrowed a jumper. He said goodbye to his friends at the pub door, then saw me lurking on the street corner. Walking towards me, he did not look happy.

  ‘What the hell was all that about, Poppy?’

  ‘You… you… said you were ill, and you’re not,’ I said, trying to muster a reasonable tone of indignation. For some reason I felt as though I was on the back foot.

  ‘Well, for your information, I am not feeling great, no. But my friends coaxed me out of the house to have one drink for my mate’s birthday.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘And then you come flying in and cover me in Thai curry. What are you even doing here, Poppy?’

  ‘It’s actually soup…’ I interjected.

  ‘Making a scene in front of all my friends? How do you think I’m supposed to explain who the hell you even are, Poppy?’

  JR didn’t appear to be calming down, and the apology I had expected was definitely not materializing. I couldn’t help but feel hurt that he didn’t know how to explain who I was to his friends. Surely he would have talked to them about the girl at work he liked. I’d told Nat everything about him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, bowing my head.

  ‘I can’t deal with this sort of melodrama, Poppy. I’ll see you later.’

  JR turned and walked back up the street without a backward glance.

  I shuffled back to the Tube. My grand romantic gesture had turned into a bunny-boiler moment.

  STEP 32 – ASK FRIENDS FOR SUPPORT IN PURSUING YOUR CAREER GOALS

  BY THE TIME I arrived back in Greenwich, I’d fallen into the depths of depression. My Cornwall fantasy of becoming Oscar-winning-writer-slash-surfer-slash-culinary-maestro Poppy Ravenstone was dissipating before my eyes, and I was the only person to blame for sabotaging it.

  As I put my keys in the front door and pushed it ajar, I felt someone pulling it from the other side. The door flew open to reveal Natalie in the hall. She put a finger to her lips and bundled me out into the street.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I hissed.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for you to get back. We have to go out.’

  Natalie turned and started walking towards the bus stop. I ran to catch up with her.

  ‘It’s eleven o’clock at night. Why are we going out?’

  ‘Because that dress shop called my sister about your inky episode, and my sister is on the phone to my mother about it. Right now.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘That’s not good.’

  ‘No. Anyway, it’s best we’re out of the way. We might have to tell my mum you had a mental breakdown over a guy. We’ll say you’ve got a weird obsession with wedding dresses, which is why you wanted to try some on, then this guy dumped you and you went nuts. Mum’ll feel sorry for you
then and smooth things over with the shop. She’s good at that kind of thing.’

  ‘Why do all your plans have to involve me having a mental breakdown?’ I sighed.

  ‘Well, that’s the most realistic scenario, isn’t it? Our other option is to say that a giant squid attacked you, but how many giant squid attacks have you seen in central London? Not many, Pen, not many.’

  ‘Why can’t we tell your mum the truth, which is that you forced me to try on wedding dresses and then you forced me to run from the scene of the crime?’

  ‘We could say that, but it doesn’t sound as realistic as you having a mental breakdown.’

  We found an open wine bar in Greenwich and ordered a bottle of red wine at the bar.

  ‘Didn’t you say you were having a drink with JR tonight?’ Natalie asked.

  ‘That plan went a bit… Well, disastrously.’ I cringed as I remembered the soup-sloshing moment.

  ‘Tell me.’

  Once I had filled Nat in on the evening’s events, I felt marginally less horrendous about the whole thing. There was something about Natalie’s laugh that I found strangely comforting.

  ‘You are hopeless, Pen,’ Nat cried. ‘I mean, I thought I was a nightmare, but throwing food over someone, that’s proper diva behaviour!’

  ‘I didn’t mean for it to be diva-ish,’ I said sheepishly. ‘It was just in my hand and… then it wasn’t.’

  ‘No, good on you, everyone needs to be a bit diva-ish occasionally. Sounds like he deserved it.’

  ‘Anyway, Nat, can we go home now? I’ve got work tomorrow and I can’t be hungover.’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Pen.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a no then.’

  ‘Hey, look, those two guys are checking us out.’ Nat indicated the other end of the bar with a nod of the head.

  ‘You think?’ I looked over. She was right: two men in suits were definitely eyeing us up. I caught the eye of one of them. He smiled at me, so I quickly looked away.

  ‘Oh no, please, let’s not embark on one of your chat-up games,’ I pleaded with Nat. ‘Can’t we just have a nice quiet drink and nurse our thoroughly deflated egos in peace?’

  ‘My ego is perfectly well inflated, thank you,’ Nat said, taking another swig of wine. ‘Right, you’re Tabitha, an engineer who designs oil rigs; I’m Evelyn, an air traffic controller with a penchant for life in the fast lane.’

  ‘Don’t do this…’ I said through gritted teeth, but I was too late, she was already waving them over.

  ‘Hi!’ Nat said as they eagerly trotted over. ‘You looked like you wanted to buy us another bottle of wine?’

  ‘Oh yes. Absolutely,’ said one of the men. They both looked to be in their mid-thirties.

  ‘I’m Evelyn, this is Tabitha. She designs oil rigs; she’s very interesting.’

  ‘For real?’ said the second guy. He was American.

  ‘Yup,’ I said with a smile. ‘Not the whole rig, of course. Just aspects of it… I’m mainly involved in waterproofing the pipework.’

  Natalie loved this game. The aim was to make up an outlandish identity for yourself in front of a stranger, which got more and more ridiculous as the conversation went on. If the stranger queried whether what you were telling him was the truth, you lost the game and owed the other player a drink. I never won.

  A second bottle of wine later, Brad, Paul, Evelyn and I were the last people in the bar. We lounged around a table in varying states of sobriety.

  ‘I know, Brad, that’s what I said!’ Natalie said, sloshing her drink across the table. ‘Why would they give me a Grammy? But in some ways, co-ordinating that many planes is like the conducting of a winged orchestra.’

  ‘We really should go home now Na—Evelyn. Remember, I’ve got to go to work tomorrow,’ I said, picking up Natalie’s handbag.

  ‘But you can design your oil rigs from anywhere, can’t she, boys?’ Nat grinned.

  ‘Of course she can!’ cried Paul.

  ‘Hey, you’re not going anywhere till you give me your number,’ said Brad, standing up and getting out his phone.

  ‘She might give yooou a fake one, so yooou better test it firrrst,’ Nat slurred.

  ‘I won’t give you a fake one,’ I said.

  That is exactly what I had intended to do.

  I eventually managed to extract Natalie from her alter ego, Evelyn, and escort her home. It was one-thirty in the morning, and my head was already throbbing from too much red wine.

  ‘You are such a bad influence,’ I chastised Nat as I helped her up the stairs.

  ‘You forgot alllll about Soupy McSoupfaceeee though, didn’t youuu?’ she said, drunkenly jabbing my chest with a finger.

  She was right. I had.

  STEP 33 – FAMILIARIZE YOURSELF WITH THE STATIONERY CUPBOARD

  FROM: POPPY

  TO: JAMES

  I am so sorry about last night. I am a soup-throwing idiot. I hate the idea of you being cross with me : ( xxx Dangermouse

  FROM: NATALIE

  TO: POPPY

  Tabitha, I feel like death. Why did u make me drink last night!? Good news is, spoke 2 mum, shop got stain out, just want us to pay for dry cleaning (£200). Told Mum u got dumped by a boy and had mini episode, so she’s gonna pay it. Maybe cry next time u see her? Nx

  TOMORROW I WAS being sent to work on location for a few days for the programme Changing Grooms. This meant I had one day to try and put right my psychotic stalker behaviour with JR, otherwise I would be fretting about it for the whole trip. Thanks to Natalie’s late-night drinking shenanigans, I also had one hell of a hangover to deal with and looked suspiciously like someone who’d only had four hours’ sleep.

  ‘Is JR in yet?’ I asked Mel in my best ‘casual enquiry’ voice.

  ‘Nope,’ she said. ‘He called in sick. Oh, he did ask me to give you a message though,’ said Mel, with an arched eyebrow.

  ‘Oh yeah? What?’ My voice sounded nervous. I couldn’t let her see panic; she was like a swarm of wasps – you didn’t want to let them know you were scared or they’d go for you… Or was that dogs?

  ‘Um, let me see if I can remember…’

  ‘Mel!’

  ‘Let me think…’ Mel tapped her head in an exaggerated ‘thinking’ gesture. I clenched my nails into my palms to stop myself from throttling her.

  ‘It will come back to me.’ She was enjoying this far too much. ‘Oh, wait, I remember,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t a message for you, it was a message for Jude about the edit, and I already gave it to her. Sorry, Poppy, my mistake.’ Mel grinned at me like a Cheshire cat, then picked up the ringing phone next to her. ‘Good morning, RealiTV.’

  In the post room, David was sitting at Helen’s computer wearing a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest T-shirt.

  ‘Poppy, have you ever wanted to find out what kind of tool you would be? I’ve done a survey and apparently I’m a wrench.’

  ‘I’m good, thanks, David.’

  ‘Too blokey for you? There’s another one here: “What kind of footwear would you be?” I’m going to guess flip flop?’

  ‘Flip flop? I don’t think that’s a compliment.’

  David looked at me strangely, then appeared to remember something he was supposed to tell me.

  ‘Oh, by the way, Rhidian has just started an epic stationery cupboard clear-out – do you mind helping him out if I keep control of star command?’

  ‘Sure.’

  There was nowhere I’d less like to spend my morning than cooped up in that tiny cupboard with Rhidian, but I would have to be professional. I had to work with the guy, I couldn’t be furious with him for ever. I went to make two cups of tea, checked my phone for the fiftieth time that day, then shuffled to the small cupboard opposite the lift.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  ‘Hi,’ said Rhidian from behind a pile of ring binders.

  ‘I made tea,’ I said, proffering him a cup.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘So have you got a system for this massiv
e clear-out?’ I asked, happy to keep the conversation within the confines of stationery-related topics.

  ‘Well, I’m a little suspicious about this whole “massive clear-out” job, to be honest, Poppy,’ Rhidian said with a smile. ‘Helen emailed me to say that it was imperative I sort out the stationery cupboard this morning, and now you’ve been sent along to help me. I think those two might be trying to get us to make peace.’

  ‘Ah, subtle as sledgehammers.’

  ‘Listen, Poppy, I’m just going to come out and say it.’ Rhidian brushed hair out of his eyes and looked down at me earnestly. ‘I couldn’t work out why you were so angry with me, so I asked David if he knew why you were so pissed off and he told me what somebody wrote on the chart. That wasn’t me, Poppy – I’d never write something like that.’

  I looked at my feet awkwardly. ‘Okay… I’m… But you said you’d written up a new joke? You were laughing about it?’

  ‘I wrote up a point to you for “Excellent Bear Detection”.’

  ‘Ah, I didn’t see that. I guess it must have been Mel who wrote the… the other thing.’

  ‘Sounds Mel-ish to me.’ Rhidian rolled his eyes.

  ‘Are you guys still…?’ I tailed off, fiddling with a pile of Post-it note packets.

  ‘No, I was never seeing Mel. I don’t know where everyone got that idea. We just went for a couple of drinks. She’s not my type, Poppy.’

  ‘Well, it’s none of my business.’

  I kept looking at my feet and fiddling with the Post-its, strangely unable to look up at Rhidian. I was pleased he wasn’t seeing Mel. Obviously not for me, but it raised him in my estimation, plus it explained why Mel had been such a bitch recently – she was feeling rejected too.

  ‘So are you and Ravenstone…?’ Rhidian tailed off.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, not sure what to say. It felt strange talking to Rhidian about JR. I started busying myself with the Post-it notes again but, glancing up, I saw that Rhidian looked hurt that I’d shut the conversation down.

  ‘I think I’ve made a bit of a dick of myself,’ I said, sitting down on the floor with a sigh.