The Right Man

by Nigel Planer

  To succeed, to get anywhere as an agent, you have to burn with it. You have to wake in the morning with last night’s prime-time TV ratings figures beckoning you into consciousness. You have to put down the office phone, look at your watch and realize that it’s half past eight at night already and that you haven’t eaten for the last seven hours. You have to be able to keep a cast list of names, faces and phone numbers at the forefront of your mind for fourteen hours on the trot. For it to be fun, which it can be, requires that you engage your third gear after breakfast, if you believe in breakfast, and keep it engaged until bedtime. Coast along in fourth or pause to admire the view and some other nippier vehicle will overtake you, probably picking up your passengers on the way. I suppose it’s the same in any field of entrepreneurial work, which covers almost everything these days since the privatizations of the late eighties. It seems as if, traditionally, mothers and midwives knew what they were doing keeping men away from childbirth. It’s not so much that men weren’t interested in babies but that the women couldn’t afford to risk having their husbands lose the plot, going all philosophical and sentimental on them, taking their hands off the steering wheel of commerce when, as new mothers, they were most in need of security and support, and money of course.

  Not that I’ve gone completely soft or anything. Wood and Walters no. But no one ever said on their death bed, ‘I wish I’d spent more time at the office’, did they? Well, maybe my father, and that speaks for itself. To get where I am required a finely tuned killer instinct and I don’t know whether I will be able to stay here without it. Nowadays, for instance, when I put down the phone and look at my watch, I’m aware of another timetable, running alongside my own: 12.30 p.m. nursery pickup — and, as of this September, 3.30 p.m. big school pick-up —6.00 p.m. bathtime, 6.30 story and bed. The women in the office are pretty good on the whole about me turning up later than I used to, and I leave early now on three afternoons a week, whenever possible. Tilda’s got an eight—year-old, so she’s the most sympathetic, but she has a live-in granny, so it’s easier for her. Naomi got a bit stroppy at the beginning but that was fair enough, I suppose; I was turning up zombified from lack of sleep and she had to take the load, especially through Grace’s ear infection stage. She did badmouth Liz a fair bit I know, but not to my face, to the others.

  The trouble is, my concentration’s gone somewhere without a paddle. These days I seem to have a sort of twenty-four-hour undertow of concern that something bad might happen to Grace. It’s my fault she was born after all, I got her her first break as ‘twere, she didn’t ask for it. She didn’t write in with hopeful ten-by-eights asking to be taken on. Well, mine and Liz’s fault, obviously. When she stopped waking through the night I just couldn’t get myself back into uninterrupted sleeping patterns, so I started having these recurrent nightmares about her. Funny how the system plays tricks on one. They’d always involve some danger she was in which I would have to get her out of by putting myself in it instead. A kind of Abraham and Isaac in reverse. For instance, we’d be walking along the cliffs in Cornwall or somewhere windy, the path would be steep and rerouted due to some of the cliff having fallen away. There would even be a danger sign and a rickety clanking fence. Grace was at the edge, not being naughty, just there, almost as if I had put her there. The limestone began to crumble and tufts of gorse pulled away from the path. A loud sea below competing with the roar of the wind in our faces. The ground beneath her feet didn’t crumble fast but slowly enough to present me with the main dilemma of the dream, almost as if it were written on the wooden sign. I would have to throw myself over the cliff in order to spare Grace. The cliff only needed to claim one of us. Would I throw myself to the shingle below? I would. Indeed it was almost as if I had brought us to this dangerous point for that very purpose. Some kind of primordial deal with the devil.

  And that’s another thing, since the little bleeder was born I seem to have been in touch with something elemental, something primeval. Some force which isn’t about happy couples putting up wallpaper together like in the ads, or about couples at all, something which is altogether unknowable, which is a matter of life and death. My death, Grace’s life. As if now she’s here I no longer really matter. As if there were some tide which has blown me to the edge of relevance like an amateur wind-surfer on the horizon whose disappearance is a mere holiday statistic. From now on my job is to be benign because what else is left? A player no more, a carer from here on in. My career a mere shelter providing domicile, my grandiose dreams redundant, my nightmares flabby fiction. Suicide would now be merely an insult to those who needed me. Everything must bend like the wind-blown branches of an ancient oak to the whims of Grace’s survival.

  I took Neil James’s bloody unfinished manuscript out of its used brown envelope and scanned through the first few pages, trying to see a point. The Right Man by Neil James. Not another novel by a TV comedian. That had been my first, but of course unexpressed reaction. A funny thing seems to happen as soon as somebody gets successful in a certain field in this business. They immediately set about seeing how grandly they can fail in other fields. Pop stars want to be actors or charity workers, actors want to be pop stars or politicians, writers want to be stand-up comics, and TV comedians, as we all know, have to write rip-roaring, roller-coasting novels. I wonder what real novelists want.

  Of course this mass envy-pre-emption exercise can be very useful for someone in my position. It can take me into new areas, where there is new talent to be found. I hate putting it like this, but I have always been very talent-led. Talent will lead you to other talent, and Neil had done that for me several times before, unbeknownst to him, of course.

  Despite certain initial doubts, more to do with a somewhat saturated market area than with my faith in Neil’s as yet untried ability as a novelist, I went along with it. The publishers were keen, and seemed to have inspired Neil with confidence after their initial meeting with him — at some rained-off charity cricket match for Children in Need, I believe it was. Now the poor bod needed rescuing. Sandra Subtlety would be required.

  ‘Hello, Neil m’dear. Listen, I’ve spoken to Marc Linsey and he agrees we should have a meeting …

  ‘Oh no, not another meeting… What’s the point of another meeting?’ Neil was getting bolshy too. Unattractive, that.

  ‘I know, meetings are a complete backside ache, but look, m’dear, I think if we can get him to come up here to us this time…’

  ‘I hate coming in to the West End, man.’

  ‘God, so do I. So does your editor, for God’s sake. That’s the point. How about if we have lunch?’

  Being the artiste, Neil was less fond of meetings than the rest of us. To me, meetings should be an art form in themselves: where to have them, how long to let them go on, how much to say or not say are things which have to be considered and practised if one is to get a meeting right.

  The best meeting is one whose outcome has already been decided before the arranged time, either by the possession of fresh information, to be ponged in at the appropriate moment, or by separate and prior conversations with most of the parties concerned. A well-designed meeting should be like a neat and totally rehearsed one-act play, with everyone playing their role —room for a certain amount of improvisation, yes, but preferably only from the party who has been kept in the dark until the last moment; usually the one who will have actually to write a cheque or OK a budget at the meeting’s conclusion. You have to know more than your adversary does. It’s all very Zen. A deal is struck when all parties can come away from a meeting feeling that their needs are being met. It’s no good going into a meeting with the intention of making someone squirm — you will not get the best out of them that way. Aggression should be used sparingly, and even then only when dealing with those who are impressed by it, Americans say.

  ‘Can’t we make it the end of the day? I lose a day’s writing if. I come up to the West End for lunch, and I’d have to get a new inner tube.’ Neil was very hot o
n environmental issues, and political and gender issues. Well, any issues really.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do. How’s tomorrow looking?’

  ‘You should know, Guy, you’re my agent, man.’ I hate being called man.

  ‘OK. I’ll call you straight back.’

  The end of the day for Neil means five o’clock, just around Grace time for me. Time to go and relieve Liz of the adorable little devil before her brain turns completely to jelly. In any case, I know there’s no way I’m going to get Marc Linsey to come up to the West End at the end of the day — he lives beyond Wimbledon, family man — and it’s important not to go and meet him on his home territory, at his leathery board room in Kensington. Firstly, he’ll be overconfident there and may call in the contract. And secondly, Neil always gets wound up by those large designer buildings. He’s liable to smoke, or criticize the furniture or something. He can be charming and funny with a couple of glasses of Chardonnay inside him and I’ve got to keep it on a carefree wavelength. Got to let Marc think all is going well. Nothing heavy, keep it light and wacky. It’s got to be with food. We are over a year past the delivery date after all.

  ‘Hi, Marc, me old mucker? It’s Guy! How the devil are you? How are Beccy and Sidney?’ These days the business has changed; one has to take an interest in the whole person. Tough ‘lunch is for wimps’ talk is last week’s teabag, and a little extra family chat is cost—effective.

  ‘Guy! I was wondering when you’d call. I’m fine. Seem to be encrusted with children these days. Just got back from Florida, of all places. Disneyed the little buggers … I’ve done my bit for this year.’ The public-school drawl of the publishing world.

  There followed a minute or two of nice caring stuff about Marc’s wife and kids, Beccy and Sidney, whose names were punched up on my Psion in front of me, although I didn’t need to look at them. I have a hard disk of a memory for names and phone numbers when I need them. Unfortunately, it is only available to me when necessary for work; it lets me down socially, much to Liz’s annoyance — I need a larger power chip. I arranged a lunch for the next day at the Soho House and called Neil back to tell him. Grudgingly, he agreed to come.

  There is a sort of code to the truth and lies in agenting. You can always lie for your client but must never lie to your client. Would that things were so clear in personal relationships. Now, technically speaking, I had just lied to Neil. I told him the only time Marc could make was tomorrow lunch, when of course I hadn’t actually asked for any alternatives. However, I justified it to myself with the thought that I knew the weakness of Neil’s negotiating position. He was a year late with the manuscript. It wasn’t the manuscript that he had been asked to provide, it was a dark and depressing dirge, instead of a light and frothy romp. It was about 6o,ooo words short, but most importantly, he had already had the signing fee. I really didn’t want him to have to pay that back.

  A lunch in the West End might just save his streaky bacon. So in this sense, although I was not telling him the entire truth about the meeting time, I was undoubtedly acting in his best interests. Lying both to and for my client, if you like — in any case saving him from himself — and I liked Neil, even if he did need saving from himself rather more than other folk I could mention. I found him when he was doing his own sort of performance-art/mime thing, and after a fair amount of input from me he’d become a more than adequate comic turn. When I say I ‘civilized’ him, I mean it purely in the television sense of the word, in that I feel I had enabled him to make whatever he had to offer acceptable to a greater number of people. There had been client satisfaction in that. He seemed to have foundered on the rocks recently though. Gone all political. Too much navel-gazing. All this self-awareness lark, v. bad for business. He had the required oodles of talent but had started questioning everything, analysing his own motives. Risky as hell in light entertainment. Blind talent or complete lack of talent are easier to deal with. Certainly easier to exploit. I hate that word ‘exploit’ and I use it here strictly in its business sense: the exploitation of talent for the benefit of all concerned. ‘Nurture’ sounds too New Age, but that’s what it is. I suppose, as a good agent, I should invent a new term, more fitting with the caring nineties, because it’s true that five years ago the word ‘exploit’ would have sounded perfectly alright. ‘Expand’, maybe, or ‘mine’, or ‘broadcast’, even. Yes, that’s good. Thankfully, most of the eighties terminology is now dying out. We no longer talk about ‘getting into bed together’ with a TV company over a project, or ‘getting a director pregnant’ with the idea of casting a certain actor, but vestiges of eighties-ism still remain. I must remember to expunge them from my vocabulary when they come up.

  It was a shame about Neil. He was a funny man. Not Stephen Fry by any means, nor even Hugh Laurie. But he’d had a certain amount of exposure — another horrible eighties word. I should start making a list. His trouble was that he didn’t quite fit into an easily identifiable image category. He hadn’t been to Oxford or Cambridge and hence lacked their sublime diffidence and fogeyness. But neither was he from Liverpool or Belfast or some chip-on-shoulder-worthy place. He was middle-class, educated and — probably the worst attribute for a really stonking career —he had a social conscience. And then he’d got this idea to write a novel. In theory I’d been all for it: raise the profile — another horrible expression for the list — possibly leading to a more broad-based career. And there’s another one. He’d stopped doing stand-up gigs altogether and concentrated on writing. I hadn’t been able to achieve one of those massive TV-star’s-first— book advances for him, but he’d been happy with that, saying that he didn’t like the idea of that kind of pressure, but also that he didn’t want it to seem that he was only being published because of his television ‘visibility’. That’s another obnoxious term and I’m sure he wouldn’t actually have used it. Being Neil, he would probably have said something along the lines of ‘I’d rather be judged on the merit of the work.’ Absolutely right sentiment but a very difficult one to explain to the marketing department of someone like Hodder Headline or Random House.

  In the meantime, I wouldn’t have to worry about what to do about Neil until tomorrow lunchtime. I put his rather thin manuscript into next day’s script pile and wrote the lunch down in my mini-Filofax. On the whole, I still prefer pens and pencils and paper to the Psion, and wherever possible, I use my notebook or little green diary, certainly when meeting clients. It looks more personal than anything digital and people relax more when they see that you are human. Of course, everything’s logged on an Apple at the office by Joan anyway, so we’re covered.

  At the conclusion of this bit of business the thought of Saara Henderson and her three little tartan boys came blowing back into my mind like the aching sough of wind in high trees.

  ‘It’s your favourite person on line three,’ Joan sniggered at me.

  ‘Oh, not fucking Marcus Mortimer again,’ I said, putting the unhappy Hendersons on my back burner where they couldn’t grind at the machinery of the day.

  ‘Uh uh. Female.’ Tilda, who’d been going though radio schedules with me in my office, raised her eyebrows suggestively and left the room, grinning to herself, and through the glass I saw our accountant Tania’s eyelids drop swiftly back down to the computer screen on her desk. She shared the joke with all the women in office. It must be Susan Planter, Jeremy’s wife. Jeremy Planter. Yes, he’s one of mine actually. Even Naomi thought there was something between me and Susan, and in a way, I suppose there was. Something. Not sexual, as my female colleagues would have it, but an understanding, a sympathy. I didn’t fancy her at all but I did like her, do like her, and she likes me, I know. We can talk. She’s interesting and, blessed relief, nothing to do with the business, unless, of course, you count being married to Jeremy Planter, who was fast becoming Mullin and Ketts’ top-earning client.

  Terrible bloody name, Jeremy Planter, terrible couple of names actually. As if Planter wasn’t bad enough, to prefix it with a
Jeremy should have been show-biz suicide. Originally we advised him to change it but that was ten years ago and we were wrong. Jeremy has had a Dr Faustus of a career for the last year or so. After years of playing second or even third fiddle on other people’s shows, there suddenly seemed to be nothing he couldn’t do. Mind you, he wouldn’t attempt anything that he didn’t know he could excel in. He was a dream client in that he knew his limitations. The total opposite of Neil: no two-year sorties into the world of novel-writing for Jeremy. Nor months in Hollywood trying to swim amongst the sharks without armbands like Doug Random, my little Brit-pack movie star —cover of Esquire last month, by the way — which of course has been the sinking of many promising careers. Not everyone has Doug’s ability to deal with loneliness and American sincerity; Doug Random’s the exception. No, Jeremy had a totally practical attitude to his talent, if you can call it that. He was quick-thinking and, despite the generally awkward appearance —the terrible physique and the speech impediment — hugely attractive. There are those who say he is difficult to work with, and he can be, I’ve seen it, but he is, to fan the embers of a cliché, a perfectionist, and has no qualms about making someone’s life a misery until they get it right. It’s going to be his reputation on the line at the end of the day after all and, since the cliché is well and truly alight now, I might as well add, he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. I’m very proud of what we’ve done for Jeremy. He’s virtually become a bloody brand name, for Christ’s sake. In fact the other day I even heard someone on Loose Ends, John Hegley I think it was, describe a certain way of pausing before a punchline as ‘Planter-esque’. You can’t get much better than that. Funny to think that the famous Planter timing actually comes from a stammering cure programme which Jeremy was put through by his mother in his early teens. But he’s amazing like that. He can turn even his worst flaws into advantages. The millions of people who watch his game-show regularly have actually begun to love him, I believe. They have taken him, or what they think is him, into them by a sort of drip-feed. Maybe they can sense how much he needs their approval, their adoration. And he really does need it, more than food, or sleep, or even sex. I could go all analytical, as Sunday journalists have tried recently, and make connections between his humble origins in a two-bedroom flat by the railway at Mortlake, the fact that he was an only child abandoned by his father, da di da di da and so on, but what would be the point? He was probably making all that stuff up anyway, and who cares? Jeremy Planter is a phenomenon. It must have been a nightmare for Susan being married to the bastard all this time.