by Simon Brett
It was Steve Kennett. ‘Charles, I’ve found something new.’
‘What?’
‘A letter from Mark to Andrea. I was tidying up her bed this morning and I found it slipped down the side. I didn’t want to ring you from work, because there are always so many people eavesdropping. But I’ve just got in.’
‘What does the letter say?’
‘It dates from just after Andrea broke off the affair. Mark was writing to try and get her back. It’s all a bit melodramatic.’
‘That’s Mark’s style.’
‘There are various protestations, recriminations and so on. But there’s one bit that seems more relevant – or more worrying, maybe – in retrospect.’
‘What does he say?’
‘Well, like I said, it’s all a bit melodramatic . . .’ She was losing confidence, wondering whether she should have rung to tell him of her discovery.
‘Go on.’
‘He writes: “I suppose I could learn in time to accept the fact that I haven’t got you, and learn to live without you. But what I don’t think I could ever accept is the thought that someone else has you, that someone else makes love to you. If I ever found out you had another lover, I would not be responsible for my actions. I couldn’t stand it. I would kill you both.”’
There was a pause. Charles decided to make light of it, though his mind was reeling with possibilities. ‘As you say, very melodramatic.’
‘Yes. I mean, knowing Mark, as you say, it’s very much his style. Dog in the manger.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s just . . . now that Andrea’s dead . . .’
‘I know, everything takes on new meanings.’
‘Exactly.’
‘I’ve had a few other thoughts actually, got something new on Danny Klinger. Maybe we could get together and talk about it.’
‘Sure.’
He suggested a time, but she was spending the weekend away, so it was left that he would ring her the next week.
As he put the phone down, he wondered if he had been hypersensitive to detect in her voice a slight unwillingness to meet. He really must stop this, a grown man behaving like a teenager over some girl who was totally unaware of his feelings.
He didn’t want to think about it. Nor, for the moment, did he want to complete the simple deduction that Mark’s letter could produce. He saw no reason to change his previous plan, and set off for Mr Barretta’s.
CHAPTER SIX
FOLLOWING THE INSTRUCTIONS on his contract, Charles presented himself at the Paris Studio in Lower Regent Street on the following Monday just before the nine-thirty rehearsal call for Dad’s the Word. It was the first morning he had felt that all his body fitted into the skin provided since the Friday’s heavy interface with Johnny Smart and friends.
He had read his script over the weekend. He didn’t find it particularly funny, but put this down to the fact that he could never judge comedy material and, anyway, since this was one of many, perhaps appreciation depended on familiarity with previous episodes. He recognised the name of the writer. Steve Clinton had been responsible for some of the script of The New Barber and Pole Show, a somewhat unwieldly vehicle in which Charles had made a brief journey into television comedy. He hadn’t found much of that script very funny either.
Dad’s the Word chronicled the misadventures of a middle-aged man, who, after a lifetime abroad, returns home to find he has to look after three young children, who call him Dad. Whether he was actually their father, what had happened to their mother, what had brought him back to England (and indeed why he didn’t just stay abroad), the script did not make clear, and Charles thought it impolite to ask. The programme was merely a showcase for the talents of a once-loved radio comedian, Dave Stockin (famous in the Fifties for his riotously witty catch-phrase, ‘This is Stockin knockin’).
Stockin was one of those dated characters whom radio management love and from whom the radio audience has slowly drifted away. Nick Monckton was the latest in a long line of producers faced with the challenge of putting Dave Stockin ‘back where he ought to be’ (as the young producer’s boss had put it to him). Nick had more brutal ideas of where the comedian really ought to be, but he was too diffident to suggest them.
Charles hadn’t realised on first acquaintance just how shy Nick Monckton was. But during rehearsal he was uncomfortably aware of the young man’s constant nervous movements and sweating brow. The whole thing was a frightful ordeal and the producer was patently scared witless by his star. The tentative notes he gave on lines and performance showed a good sense of comedy, but, if Dave Stockin disagreed on any point, Nick immediately recanted. The comedian had an unpleasantly snide way of asking, ‘Look, do you want me to do it your way, or do you want me to do it right?’
Stockin worked in a little sealed unit of his own ego. Charles, with experience of other stars, had been wary, knowing how capricious some could be in their reactions to their supporting artistes, but he need not have worried. Dave Stockin was totally unaware of the other people in the show; he only thought about his own lines and how he could get more of them.
His three children were played by an actress of thirty-seven, an actor of thirty-three and an actress of fifty-four (who took the part of the six-year-old boy). A character actor called Toby Root (one of that band of highly skilled character actors who are never out of work and who, in their quiet way, probably make as much in the long run as most stars) played a travel agent, and Charles Paris had the small part of a second travel agent. The script revolved, needless to say, about Dad’s efforts to take the three children away on holiday, with all the predictable mix-ups that might involve. After the ups and downs of a disastrous trip to Skegness, Dad had a brief scene with the second travel agent, in which he tried to book a holiday to the Chamber of Horrors, ‘or anywhere else where kids aren’t allowed’. The script could have been written twenty years before and, knowing Steve Clinton’s zealously conservationist approach to comedy material, probably had been.
The cast assembled for the read-through in the small Narrator’s Cubicle, off the main studio, with the communal gloom of people all serving the same sentence for the same crime. They read with lethargic precision and funny voices. Steve Clinton roared hugely throughout and Nick Monckton smiled terrified encouragement.
Compared with television, Charles’s most recent experience of this sort of work, it was all refreshingly quick. With the audience arriving at half-past twelve, there was only time for one read-through, notes, a run on mike, more notes and a short break before the show was actually performed. He felt that the script, like some poisons, would be in and out of the system so quickly that it wouldn’t have time to do any harm.
After the read-through, Dave Stockin took Nick Monckton on one side to tell him all the lines he was going to change and all the long-remembered jokes he was going to insert into the script, and the cast started desultory conversations among themselves. Like people at a funeral, they spoke of anything but the corpse (or in this case, script).
Charles discovered that he knew one of the actresses from way back. Or at least she knew him. ‘Charles, darling, I haven’t seen you since Hot and Cold Running Water in Cheltenham.’
‘Ah yes.’ He remembered the production vaguely. (‘I don’t know who this show was meant to appeal to. Certainly not me, and judging from their reaction, not last night’s audience either.’ – Gloucestershire Life and Countryside.)
The actress then revealed that she was on the BBC Drama Rep. ‘Lucky to be working on this series for Light Ent.,’ she confided. ‘Usually it’s difficult to get regular bookings, because of course Drama has first call.’
‘Ah.’ Charles nodded wisely. He looked at her covertly and with a little surprise. He had long had a private joke with himself that the BBC Drama Repertory Company was made up entirely of actors and actresses so handicapped and disfigured that they could only act on radio. He knew it was untrue, but the fantasy had taken root in his mind and he had
difficulty in shifting it. It was a surprise to find the girl had the normal complement of arms and legs.
As they were talking, a young man came in with some enquiry for Nick Monckton. He could have stepped off a pop LP sleeve. He had smartly cut long black hair and wore tight blue jeans and a black T-shirt with ‘Sardi’s’ written in glitter on the front. His expression was one of contempt for his surroundings. When he looked at Nick Monckton, that contempt seemed to grow, and the young producer was aware of it. The nervous movements intensified.
The newcomer turned to go, his query answered, but the Drama Rep. actress called out to him, ‘Hello, Keith, back with us then?’
‘For a bit.’ He spoke without enthusiasm. ‘They were short. I basically do Radio Two stuff now.’
‘Oh, and, Keith, sorry to hear about . . .’ She shrugged helplessly.
He gave as little acknowledgement of the sympathy as he could without actually being rude, and left the room. Charles looked up enquiringly, but got the information unprompted. ‘Poor boy, his wife died last week. Well, I say died – committed suicide, actually. I think they were separated, but it must still be a shock for him.’
Charles asked the wife’s name and got the answer he expected. So now he had met another of the people in Andrea Gower’s life. He raked through his memory for anything Steve might have told him about the husband. Only that his name was Keith and that he had been on an ‘attachment’. Presumably if he was back working as a Studio Manager, his attachment had been detached.
Charles got confirmation of this just before the run on mike. Dave Stockin had formed another little huddle with Nick Monckton to graft some more moribund jokes on to the script and everyone was kept hanging around. The rest of the cast started discussing the commercial voice-overs they were doing or the books they were going to record for the blind (Charles hadn’t before registered the specialisation of actors who worked mainly in voice), and he wandered through the curtained area at the side of the stage, where he found Keith sitting disconsolately by a table loaded with unlikely objects. ‘Are you doing Spot?’ asked Charles, remembering the technical term, Spot Effects, for the sounds made at the time of recording.
Keith nodded ungraciously and Charles decided to lay on a little theatrical naiveté. ‘I’m fairly new to radio. Is this all the stuff you make the noises with?’ He pointed to the table.
Again Keith inclined his head.
‘I’m Charles Paris.’
He received a grudging ‘Keith Nicholls’. Ah, so Andrea had reverted to her maiden name when the marriage broke up. Or perhaps she had never changed it for work purposes.
Charles looked at the table. ‘It’s obvious what some of this stuff’s for. I mean that bell on a spring must be for a shop doorbell.’ Keith regarded this as too obvious to be worthy of confirmation. ‘And these buzzers are for other doorbells . . . And the telephone’s self-explanatory. But what the hell’s that for?’
He pointed at what appeared to be a shoe box covered in brown paper and sticky tape. He had judged his quarry right. The opportunity to demonstrate his skills to the ignorant prompted some reaction from Keith, who picked up the box.
‘It’s for marching. Listen.’ He placed one hand on either side and shook it rhythmically.
The sound was startlingly like a squad of soldiers on a parade ground and Charles said so. ‘Is that how you usually do the Effect?’
‘Yes. Cheaper than getting a real lot of soldiers into the studio and the BBC’s always keen to find the cheapest way. It’s just sand and gravel inside. You can do all kinds of other Effects with it. Listen . . . Halt. Or, if you like, a ragged halt. Stand at ease. Present arms.’
He illustrated each order with the appropriate twitch of the box and, for a second, looked mildly interested in what he was doing. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘this studio isn’t really designed for Effects. Some of the Drama studios have got steps and gravel pits and rows of different sorts of doors and stuff. I used to do a lot of Spot before I got into the Radio Two group.’
He seemed to lose interest. He put down the marching box and his expression of lethargic distaste returned.
‘That’s for a bit where the family goes to the holiday camp run on military lines?’ Charles tried to keep the conversation going.
‘Yes.’ Keith expelled the word as a long sigh, expressing what he thought of the script and life in general.
‘It must be an interesting job,’ Charles offered.
Keith just looked at him, and he backed down. ‘I mean, not all the time, but it must be quite interesting sometimes. And no doubt it’s a step in the right direction of production if that’s what you want to do.’
‘For the last six months,’ Keith reflected bitterly, ‘I have been working as a producer. This week I’m back here banging doors and rattling tea-cups. Not even doing music, which is what I specialise in.’
‘Oh, did something go wrong?’ asked Charles, deciding not to appear to know too much.
‘Not really. It was just a six-month attachment, working for Radio Two. Now I have to sit and wait for a job to go up on the board and apply for it and . . . oh, shit, it goes on for ever.’
‘Did you enjoy producing?’
‘I liked the music sessions. The rest was okay. The money was nice. Mind you, you’re really cheap labour on an attachment.’
‘Oh well,’ said Charles comfortingly, ‘I expect a job will come up soon.’
‘I suppose, if I’m still here, I’ll apply for it.’
‘If you’re still here . . .?’
‘There is a world of commercial-music production of which the BBC seems unaware. In fact, so far as I can tell, the BBC is a conspiracy devoted to keeping from people their market value in the world outside.’
‘Perhaps, but a lot of people seem to like working for it. Commands strong loyalty.’
‘Not from me it doesn’t. And I’m not going to let the BBC or anything else stand in the way of what I should be doing.’ This outburst had a sudden intensity. Keith Nicholls was very ambitious and had the share of ruthlessness that that kind of ambition needs.
Charles steered the conversation into calmer water by pointing at another of the Spot Effects on the table. It was a small box, about the size of a clarinet case, painted in black and yellow stripes. There was a latch from which a padlock had been released.
Keith picked it up with a cynical grin. ‘That is here because the bloody writer of this abortion can’t think of a pay-off to the camping holiday scene. If you can’t keep the audience laughing then at least keep them awake.’ He flipped back the lid to reveal a very businesslike revolver.
‘That looks distressingly real,’ observed Charles.
‘Oh, it is.’ Keith picked the gun out of its padding and pointed it at him. ‘It’s the real thing all right.’ Charles knew the young man was only fooling about, but there was an unpleasantly hard glint in his eye as he looked along the barrel.
‘Presumably you only get blanks with it.’
‘Oh yes, it’s no fun. Just a bloody nuisance actually. You have to get it signed out of the safe in the Effects Library and you aren’t meant to let it out of your sight while you’ve got it. Don’t know why, the barrel’s spiked, so even if you got a real bullet, it couldn’t do much harm.’
‘That’s a relief. Otherwise you could have some nasty accidents.’
‘Hmm.’ Keith weighed the gun gently in his hand. Then, in a new, distracted voice, he said, ‘I don’t think there are any accidents really. I think everything’s meant.’
The Paris had once been a cinema and its layout as a radio studio made no attempt to hide that origin. Set below street level, the main studio area contained about 350 seats facing a deep bare stage, with grey curtains at the back, where once the cinema screen had been. Behind the audience, beneath the former projection box, was the Control Cubicle. Through a glass window, from behind the long and sophisticated mixing desk, the producer and senior SM looked down towards the stage. The back
row of seats was about two yards from the producer.
However, on that Monday lunchtime, the nearest member of the audience was a good fifteen yards away. Only three and a bit rows at the front were full, and those present sat with the resignation of a geriatric specialist’s waiting room (where, judging from their appearance, they probably spent most of their time). The only advantage of their age was that they were well qualified to remember the days when ‘This is Stockin knockin’ was on everyone’s lips. (Charles, who had never heard the catch-phrase before, secretly wondered whether such days had ever existed, save in Dave Stockin’s imagination.)
Tickets for radio recordings were free, and so the shows built up a repertory company of regulars. (No, actually it was not the shows that built up the following; it was the studios. The regulars turned up whatever was on.)
Because it was now mid-July, the regulars couldn’t be accused of being there for their usual reason, which was to sit in the warm for an hour, but they still presented a somewhat motley appearance. One or two were just well organised pensioners, taking advantage of free entertainment, but others manifested more positive eccentricity.
Charles was given a run-down of who to expect from the Drama Rep. actress. There was the Indian who wore a Union Jack waistcoat and socks and toted round a polythene carrier full of framed photographs of the Duke of Edinburgh. There was a beaming Spanish matron, who didn’t understand a word of any of the shows, but applauded all the music links. There was a tall intense lady who sat in the front row eating bananas and who always tried to get every member of the cast and production staff to autograph her bank paying-in book.
And there was The Laugh. A lady in late middle age, who must have been destined at some point to win the Radio Personality of the Year Award, so great had her contribution been to the cause of radio Light Entertainment. Not a comedy show was broadcast without her trademark, a long trilling cackle, like a demented duck being goosed by a swan. Many comedians and personalities had suffered the diminishing effects of that laugh. Some had tried to defeat it (‘All right, lady, you lay ’em, I’ll sell ’em’, or ‘I’d call in the plumber to have a look at that, madam’, or ‘I think you got the wrong date – the bullfrogs’ convention is on Tuesday’), but The Laugh could not be deflected and always triumphed. It became such a regular feature of radio comedy programmes that the listening public might have missed it if removed.
