‘Give her something to make her shit.’
‘We did. It didn’t.’
‘I have a life, Arnold!’
‘And I have a crew and if this pig takes much longer to take a dump we’ll be running into some serious overtime here.’
The crew in question were attempting to shoot a scene for the final episode of the current season of
The Blenheims
, a ‘reality’ television show featuring the ‘real life’ trials and tribulations of a dysfunctional show business family. One of the most popular themes of the show had proved to be the ubiquitous incontinence of the family’s numerous pet pigs and when storyboarding the closing episode everybody had agreed that pig shit must provide the principal source of humour.
It had all sounded so good at the pitching meeting.
‘So Beryl is all dressed up to go with Serenity to the Recoverers’ Ball, right?’ Arnold explained. ‘But the new pig keeps taking a crap so poor Beryl has to keep getting down on her hands and knees in her jewellery and evening gown to clean it up and when she finally gets into the car to go to the ball she still has her Marigolds on! And Serenity says, “Oh my God, Beryl, people will think we’ve come to clean the toilets,” although it will sound so much funnier when she says it.’
‘Do you think Serenity can remember that many words?’ Beryl had enquired.
Arnold assured her that it was actually funnier when she didn’t.
And so the shoot had been planned accordingly, though not for the day of the Recoverers’ Ball. Obviously, if Beryl Blenheim did clean her own house, which she didn’t, she wouldn’t do it on the day when all of LA’s première casualties gathered together to celebrate their collective triumph over the self-inflicted wounds with which decades of gargantuan personal indulgence had marked them. Beryl Blenheim, ex-druggie, ex-alchie, ex-food addict, ex-sex addict, ex-rock star and, most famously of all, ex-man, was after all the poster transsexual for the whole grand affair.
The plan was to shoot the pig shitting and Beryl cleaning it up a week earlier, when Beryl had an afternoon window, and then pick up the pay-off shot of Beryl going out still wearing her gloves on the actual night of the ball, which would have the added bonus of giving Beryl’s wife Serenity a week to learn her line. Accordingly, on the day in question the crew had assembled at the Blenheim mansion to shoot the footage.
When the show had first begun, three seasons earlier, the camera crew had spent a substantial amount of time with the family, but as things progressed it became easier and easier to plan and storyboard the shows, until a tight professional working pattern had been established that was economical with both time and money.
‘I’ve scheduled an hour for Flossie,’ Arnold had said as he and the crew arrived. ‘We have three cameras, so she only needs to shit once and we can use three different angles to establish the three separate craps. We only need to tie you to the first one, Beryl, we’ll take the other two shits on close-up. Then we can use chocolate pudding to clean up.’
Unfortunately the pig had refused to cooperate. The crew plus Beryl had been following the little pot-bellied creature as she wandered about for two and a half hours and still she would not defecate.
‘Look, I don’t have time for this,’ Beryl finally snapped. ‘You’ll have to use some stock footage, then shoot me cleaning up the pudding separately.’
Arnold was dubious.
‘The whole point of you being here in your party gown, Beryl, is to
tie you to the turd.
If we have to shoot you and the turd separately we really don’t have a story at all. The audience is just too media-savvy these days. Remember when we got burned cutting in shots of Serenity snoring through an all-night family row and forgot to adjust the clocks? “All night” was clearly only five minutes and those shots are still all over the internet, making me look like a dick.’
‘Well, I can’t stand here all day waiting for the pig to shit!’
‘Stock footage is high-risk strategy, Beryl. I mean every shitting shot we have is
out there.
They are TV
classics.
We have them featured on a special bonus DVD. I just don’t think we could get away with using them again.’
‘I knew when we started this we should have gone with shitting dogs like the fucking Osbournes did.’
‘Please, Beryl,
as if.
The whole pig thing has
so
given you the edge. They’re much more rock ’n’ roll and their DNA is really close to humans’, which helps you with the mum thing.’
‘I don’t
need
help with the mum thing. I’m a fantastic mother. I’ve won awards.’
Beryl Blenheim was extremely sensitive on this issue. No matter how hard she worked to establish herself as an iconic matriarchal figure and truly modern mum, she would for ever be handicapped by the fact that she had, for most of her life, been a man. Her offspring were not hers by blood, but Serenity’s, by a previous marriage. When Beryl had met her (his) wife, Serenity had been married to the owner of a chain of fried chicken franchises in Missouri, which Blaster Blenheim (as was) would patronize when swinging through the Heartlands on his Seventies Rock Revival tours. Blaster’s heart had been won by Serenity’s space-hopper-sized false breasts and ability (when drunk) to fart ‘The Battle Hymn Of The Republic’. Serenity, for her part, had been wooed by Blaster’s English accent and the fact he could get an entire red-hot chilli chicken into his mouth. They had run away together and Serenity had obtained a quickie divorce, having threatened her husband that if he forced her to sue for it she would claim infidelity and name a longhorn bison as co-respondent.
Blaster and Serenity were married at the Love Me Tender Chapel in Las Vegas and in the years before his sex change Blaster had been a loving, if drunken, stepfather to Serenity’s twin girls, whom they had renamed Priscilla and Lisa Marie. Serenity had naturally been surprised when Blaster, in an effort to revive interest in his flagging career, had announced he adored fanny so much that he wanted one of his own, but being an amiable sort and completely fucked up on drugs and fried food she had gone along with the new arrangement. Priscilla and Lisa Marie had suddenly found themselves with two mothers, a situation which they were forced to deal with very publicly after Beryl (née Blaster), enamoured of her new role as housewife and matriarch and jealous of the success of other self-publicizing rock mothers, had taken the decision to place the entire family on reality TV. There weren’t many children who were forced, as Priscilla and Lisa Marie had been, to go to school knowing that the previous evening all their classmates had watched their stepmother demonstrating with the aid of a sausage and two new potatoes how she had had her dick removed.
‘Forget the pig,’ Beryl snarled. ‘Put some pudding down and I’ll discover it. Then stick the pig outside in a hedge and shoot her like she’s trying to hide.’
‘Once maybe but three times, Beryl? Three times you clean up the pudding but we never see the pig shit? That is
so
lame. This is our final programme of the season. If we’re to buy the fact that you’re late for the big dinner because three times you had to clean up pig crap then
we have to see the pig shit with you in shot
.’
‘Well, it isn’t happening, is it, Arnold?’ Beryl shouted, pulling on her Marigolds. ‘And I have a doctor’s appointment. So just lay down some chocolate fucking pudding and I’ll wipe it up.’
‘I just think that this is the most horrendous artistic compromise,’ Arnold protested.
‘Do it!’ Beryl replied, picking up her bucket and her Spray & Wipe.
Just then, the pig shat.
‘Shit,’ said Arnold.
‘Did you get it?’ Beryl asked.
‘What do you mean, did I get it? I’m standing here in front of the camera. This is a
reality
TV show, Beryl, you can’t have the director in shot.’
‘Don’t talk to me like that. I sold forty million albums when I was a man!’
Just as things were beginning to turn nasty the cameraman pointed out that Flossie was still hovering about admiring her steaming shit and that if Arnold gently edged himself out of the shot and Beryl then walked into it they could still tie the star
and
the pig to the turd.
‘That’s right,’ Arnold agreed, hurrying behind camera. ‘If we can get you, the pig and the turd in the same shot, we have our story even if we didn’t see her shit. So take two steps back . . . Is Beryl out of frame?’
The cameraman announced that she was.
‘OK, Beryl,’ Arnold continued. ‘Step back in shouting, “I’m coming, Serenity . . .” then see the pig, see the big mountain of shit, curse the pig and clean up the turd.’
It worked like a dream. The agency pig even cooperated by suddenly positioning her back end over her turd as if having just dumped it and then, as Beryl entered shot, turning round and sniffing it in what looked like a deeply satisfied manner.
‘Coming, Serenity!’ Beryl shouted convincingly as if reacting to some angry off-camera summons. ‘Don’t be so fucking impatient! You want me to look fabulous, don’t you?’
Then she stopped dead and looked down at the pig in horror.
‘Flossie, you flea-bitten little ratbag. I’ll have you sliced up for bacon burgers.’
And then with genuine abhorrence, for this was after all a real pile of shit, Beryl knelt down and cleaned it up. When she had done so she even had the presence of mind to coo at the pig in her famous sexy mumsy voice.
‘I forgive ooo, ickle Flossie-wossie.’
When the shot was complete there was much joy and celebration.
‘We can dub on a beeping car horn later and shoot Serenity calling for you next week,’ said a jubilant Arnold.
Then a small voice piped up.
‘Sorry, but I don’t think we can use it.’
The voice was that of the continuity girl.
‘What do you mean, we can’t use the shot?’ Arnold cried impatiently, for it was the lot of continuity girls always to exasperate their directors by pointing out that supposedly perfect takes were unusable because somebody had changed hats or walked out of the wrong door.
‘Beryl had her rubber gloves on as she
entered
shot,’ the girl replied miserably. ‘I tried to say but you’d already turned over.’
‘What’s the problem?’ Arnold demanded. ‘She’s supposed to be cleaning up shit, isn’t she? You want her to do it with her bare hands?’
‘Well, no, but our story is that Beryl is on her way to the car when she
discovers
the doo-doo. She’s even shouting at Serenity that she’s coming. Why would she be wearing rubber gloves to the Recoverers’ Ball
before
she sees that the pig has been to the bathroom on her floor?’
There was an angry pause as everyone worked the story through in their heads and was forced to conclude that the girl was right.
‘Fuck,’ said Beryl.
‘Maybe she’ll do it again,’ Arnold said, but Flossie had already retreated. In the end they were forced to make what for Arnold was the heartbreaking compromise of shooting all three of Beryl’s cleaning shots using chocolate pudding – with no pig in shot at all. After that, Beryl rushed off to try to retrieve her cosmetic surgery appointment and one of her Mexican maids cleaned up the chocolate pudding and pig shit properly.
The Other Bloke
‘Any messages, Maureen?’
Rodney Root was trying to sound casual and relaxed as he strolled into his Berwick Street office. As if it was all the same to him either way; messages, no messages, whatever, he was far too big a fish to worry about whether anybody wanted to communicate with him. Sadly, the truth was the opposite. Rodney was not busy, he was not in demand. He knew it and Maureen knew it, but the fact was never acknowledged. It was the elephant at the dinner table of their professional relationship. Rodney had spent nearly two hours over breakfast at Soho House, delaying his arrival at the office until almost 10.30am, in the hope that by mid-morning something interesting might have come in. He had eaten a full English fry-up, sausage, bacon, black pudding, soda bread and two eggs, putting on countless kilos he could ill afford, and for what? Nothing. Nothing had happened.
‘Your dress suit is ready at the dry cleaner’s,’ his faithful secretary told him, attempting to make this innocuous piece of information sound urgent and interesting.
‘Right. Good. Very good. That’s good,’ Rodney replied, as if his suit’s condition was all part of a larger game plan and everything was falling into place nicely.
‘And Iona rang. She wants you to call her.’
Rodney’s face darkened. If there was anything worse than no messages, it was a message from Iona. Nothing excites a man less than the object of a passion spent, particularly one to whom many promises were made and a shedload of guilt is attached. Rodney had come seriously to regret his affair with Iona Cameron, which had blossomed so publicly after Iona’s band, Shetland Mist, had been ignominiously ejected from last year’s series of
Chart Throb.
Rodney had been, briefly, deeply infatuated with the pale young Scottish girl and, like many infatuated men before him, had made something of an arse of himself. Lost in the rosy haze of love he had publicly announced that, despite Beryl’s bullying contempt and Calvin’s studied lack of interest, Shetland Mist would surely be stars and that he, Rodney Root, pop Svengali and the ultimate rock ’n’ roil insider (as Keely habitually referred to him), would make it so. Rodney’s gushing pronouncements on live TV of faith in Shetland Mist’s talent had been accompanied by an equally clear and slightly toe-curling enthusiasm for Iona’s personal charms.