This Is Your Life (23 page)

‘Really?' she said.

‘No, I was joking.'

‘Oh, right, well, that's your main job now, I suppose. Are you planning to stay on here part-time at the school or will you finally be moving on to better things?'

The dogs on her desk were staring at me. They expected a straight answer to this question.

‘I dunno. I hadn't really thought about it. But don't worry. I'll give you plenty of notice.'

My wages at the language school depended on the number of lessons I taught, but my regular income was just enough to keep me in dog food, even if dinner guests often expected something nicer. Of course, I had various other investments. My foreign currency reserves would have been worth a small fortune if any of those drachma coins or lire notes had still been legal tender in their respective countries. The success of
my other investments was dependent on the correct six balls falling out of the machine on a Saturday evening. So when I was asked if I was interested in meeting an advertising agency who'd had the idea of getting me to do some stand-up comedy for a television commercial and when I was told how much money would be involved if I became the face of the campaign I had to give it very serious consideration. The ad would involve two days' filming. To earn the same amount of money at the language school would take sixty-two years and three months.

‘Half a million pounds' was the figure I had heard on the phone. There were all sorts of other words and phrases, such as ‘residuals' and ‘dependent on repeats' and ‘if the contract is renewed', but none of them had lodged in my brain quite as firmly as the phrase ‘half a million pounds'. I tried to imagine what on earth I could buy with so much money. My imagination knew no bounds: that amount could buy me half a million of anything in the Mr One Pound shop. In fact, I could buy Mr One Pound outright, except that as a long-term investment it was probably a bad idea because in a few years' time you'd have to change the name to Mr One Euro, which didn't have the same ring, quite apart from having to cut your prices by forty per cent.

It was so much more money than I could ever possibly spend that I thought I'd probably just give a lot of it away. All my friends were so short of cash all the time it would be great just to share it out among us and see all our problems simply melt away. I tried to picture the faces of Norman and Chris and Dave and, most of all, Nancy; it could so transform her life if she wasn't always struggling to buy Tamsin everything she wanted. I didn't need much money. I'd just get myself a nice house and a decent car and that would do me. Just a house
and a car and some new clothes. And a laptop computer, and maybe an MP3 player, but not a flash one or anything. And a CD writer – it would be great to do compilation CDs of all your favourite songs. But apart from those few essentials for myself, I'd just give the rest away. I certainly wouldn't waste it on anything vulgar or extravagant. I mean I know a jet ski might seem like a rich boy's toy and, sure, we always used to sneer at the yuppies who whizzed up and down the coast on them, but in practical terms it would probably be a really quick way of popping over to Brighton, so in many ways a jet ski would be a sort of investment.

No, no, I had to tell myself, I didn't want any of that rubbish. If I was going to do this commercial I'd do it for my friends. Nancy had had Tamsin at the age of nineteen and not spent any money on herself since. What was two days' work to me? I'd spent longer than that trying to put up a curtain rail for her. Anyway, I hadn't even landed this commercial yet. I was getting carried away. The producer from the advertising agency wanted to meet me to discuss their idea. ‘Do you know the Savoy Grill?' he asked me. Unsurprisingly I didn't know the Savoy Grill, although it sounded very expensive. I hope the cost of this lunch won't be coming off my fee, I thought. As it turned out he wasn't talking about us having lunch together but a ‘working breakfast'. This is like a normal breakfast but instead of feeling guilty about sitting in the café before going to the office, you get to feel self-righteous about what long hours you're working instead. I did actually have plans for eight o'clock on Tuesday morning: I'd planned to be in bed asleep, but I feared they might not consider this a sufficiently important appointment to justify moving their meeting.

I turned up embarrassingly early and found myself sitting
alone at a table waiting for the posse from the agency to arrive. Glancing around at the other diners I realized that the Savoy Grill did not have as strict a dress code as I'd imagined, so I propped my big menu up on the table and slipped off my tie.

‘Jimmy, hi – you beat us to it,' said a tall man in jeans and a T-shirt, holding out his hand for me to shake. ‘I'm Piers,' he said as I stuffed my tie into my jacket pocket and surrendered my hand to a vigorous squeezing. There were six or seven of them who introduced themselves to me and then proceeded to order coffee and croissants.

‘Coffee and croissants, Jimmy?'

‘Er, sorry, I was a bit early, I've already ordered,' I said as double egg, bacon, sausage, black pudding, mushrooms, tomatoes, baked beans and two slices of fried bread were plonked down in front of me. ‘Er, I decided against the croissants. Trying to cut down on my wheat intake, you know. Excuse me, are these fried slices rye bread?'

‘No sir,' apologized the waiter. ‘We can do you some rye bread if you prefer.'

‘Oh not to worry,' I said magnanimously.

With nobody else eating and the focus so completely on me, I did my best to carefully time the moments when I popped a big forkful of food into my mouth. Somehow I got it wrong every time. So when Piers said, ‘What did you think of the show-reel we sent you, Jimmy?' I just raised my eyebrows and mimed an enthusiastic ‘pretty good actually' sort of face while inside frantically chewing away at large pieces of sausage and bacon. Six faces were staring down the table at me to see what their guest was going to say about their edited greatest hits and I worried that it must look as if I was deliberately stalling for time because I hadn't liked it. I tried to mime a more
detailed response combining a seriously impressed expression with vigorous nods but my repertoire was soon exhausted and I was reduced to having to do an apologetic point at my bulging mouth. This managed to elicit a rather forced smile from the woman who'd brought her own herbal tea bag.

Finally I managed to say that I thought it was really good and hoped that would be the end of the matter, and they seemed reassured as they all popped sweetener into their black coffees. ‘You didn't think it was at all a bit same-y?' said Lucy. The bastards! They had got me a second time – a whole slice of fried bread folded over a large piece of egg was working its way around inside my mouth. I managed an outraged surprised grunt at the very suggestion that it was all a bit same-y, then shook my head vigorously, furrowing my eyebrows in a serious emphatic way. I was communicating like Guy the Gorilla, though with slightly worse table manners.

It transpired that they had sent me their show-reel because it was they who were trying to impress me. I had gone along imagining that I'd be trying to persuade them to put me on some sort of shortlist but it turned out that the agency were on a charm offensive. They were desperately trying to convince me that I really ought to do this advertising campaign and be paid hundreds of thousands of pounds for a couple of days of work. Boy, did they have to twist my arm.

‘The idea, Jimmy, is that the ad opens with you on stage in this comedy club, and you're getting laughs, you know, and then we reveal that you're surreptitiously writing a text message on your mobile phone at the same time. And the strapline is: “Visit the bank while you're at work today. Text message banking from the C and P.'” A forkful of fried egg was hovering in midair, waiting to see if he was going to ask me a question or begin another monologue. ‘I know what
you're thinking,' said his assistant, though this was unlikely because what I was thinking was: ‘Phew! Managed to eat my egg in time!'

‘. . . you're thinking, which bit of my stand-up do they want me to use?'

‘Er, yeah, well, that is an issue I suppose,' I conceded.

‘Is there any particular routine of yours that springs to mind?' asked Lucy. I placed my hand on my chin and feigned an exaggerated ‘thinking hard' expression while staring into the middle distance. ‘Ummm . . . well . . . well ... let me see.'

‘What about the fish stuff?' ventured Piers.

‘Ooh, I dunno about that,' I said. ‘I'd never be able to do it in a club again.'

‘What's the fish stuff?' said Lucy.

‘That's one of Jimmy's most famous routines.'

‘Oh, I love animal jokes, tell us the fish routine, go on,' and there was a murmur of agreement around the table.

‘You can't expect him to perform an entire stand-up comedy set sitting down to breakfast at eight in the morning,' said Piers, coming to my rescue. I let out a huge sigh of relief. ‘Just give 'em the best bit, Jimmy,' he added, and all the heads along the table leaned inwards in anticipation of this hilarious routine that everyone talked about. They were grinning in a ‘this is going to be really good' kind of way and the only way out seemed to be to give them what they wanted. I cleared my throat. ‘The thing about fish,' I began, hoping that a well-observed, yet surreal, word-perfect monologue on the subject of fish might suddenly pop into my head from nowhere. There was a chuckle of anticipation from the end of the table. ‘The thing about fish is . . .' and then unsurprisingly the words dried up. There was a moment of awkward silence.

‘Can I get anyone more tea or coffee?' said the waiter, and
there were groans all around the table. Isn't it always the way? You're just about to tell the punchline of a joke and the waiter interrupts and shatters all the tension. ‘Oh no, I can't do it now, the moment's gone,' I said, and then I deflected the attention by asking about why they thought I was right for the job.

‘Because we can't afford Elle MacPherson!' said a wag on the end of the table who wasn't there at any subsequent meetings.

‘What is precious about you, Jimmy,' said Piers, casting an annoyed look down the table, ‘is that you are well known to our target audience around the country but
not
via the television screen.' Privately I wondered whether they needed to fire their market researchers, but I nodded modestly as if I was flattered but unable to contradict them.

‘Everyone who's been to your gigs in all those little clubs around the country, they're suddenly going to see you telling them to switch to text banking and because subconsciously they already trust you, it makes the message far more potent.'

At this point I wondered if what I was now involved in could possibly be construed as some sort of commercial fraud. This agency were prepared to pay a lot of money because they valued the reputation I had built up in the provincial comedy clubs. They would be paying me for some unquantifiable aura that I didn't actually possess; they were prepared to shell out for a fame that I had invented. That meant I would be trading under false pretences. You could go to prison for fraud. Unless you were famous, of course. Then you generally got let off. So if I was found guilty, the jury would have also decided that I wasn't much of a celebrity. I tried to imagine the judge passing sentence in the packed courtroom. ‘James Elliot Conway: you are a duplicitous con artist who deliberately undertook an
elaborate and perfidious fraud in order to swindle this poor defenceless advertising agency out of hundreds of thousands of pounds. Furthermore, millions of television viewers, many of them pensioners, were also taken in by your pathological lying and may have lost their life savings by mistakenly sending their money to someone else's account while they were attempting to master text message banking. I therefore have no choice but to pass the maximum sentence for this offence. You will taken from this courtroom, thence to a place of execution where you will be hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God have mercy upon your soul.' And throughout this speech my useless defence lawyer would be shaking his head in disappointment because he'd just coloured in the wrong bit of the animal silhouette in his copy of
Puzzler
magazine.

I pushed the remainder of my fried breakfast away and resolved to dissuade the assembled company from this crazy course of action. ‘Look, Piers, I don't know what your focus groups or whatever are telling you, but I don't think I'm as famous as you think outside the narrow circles of Medialand. I mean, some of these provincial clubs only hold about a hundred people and I've not been gigging that long,' I pleaded.

Piers was reassuring. ‘Jimmy, it's not all focus groups and market research, you know. I want you for this advert because I think you'd be the best person for the campaign. I don't know how you do it but you just have an “ordinary bloke next door” quality about you. You're smiley; you're appealing.'

‘And you're very good looking!' blurted out Lucy and then immediately turned red.

‘I was in the audience for the ‘Biz awards,' continued Piers, ‘and when you did that gag from the stage, I thought, Yup,
we've just found the person we are looking for. The fact that you're a popular stand-up and have just won an award reassures the client, but sure, this campaign will obviously still have to work for those viewers who don't know who you are. Yet.' And the word ‘yet' was left hanging there meaningfully; the bait of greater fame that this repeated exposure would bring was dangled tantalizingly in front of me.

Piers wanted Jimmy Conway and no one else for this advert. He was a very persuasive person, so confident that when he asked for the bill he didn't even do a mime of scribbling on a little pad. He tried to get me to agree in principle there and then. I said I would sleep on it, but I didn't sleep at all. Deceiving people is one thing, but deceiving people and getting large amounts of money for it suddenly felt like a far more dangerous game. I realized that it wasn't the principle that was keeping me awake here; it was the price. If the advertising agency had shoved three twenties into my hand I would have thought, Brilliant, what a result! The trouble with their offer was that it was too high. Was I nervous about all this money because I still considered myself to be of so little value? If I was really going to become a celebrity shouldn't I force myself to try and start thinking like one? This money might seem like a fortune to Jimmy Conway, the part-time TEFL teacher from Seaford, but to Jimmy Conway the top club comedian – well, it was barely enough to keep him in jet skis. And then I considered the morality of what I was about to do. I thought how Nancy's life could be changed if she could afford a few things for herself once in a while, if she could have a little car and maybe move out of that oppressively cramped flat she shared with her mixed-up daughter. She needed the money more than this agency. I got out of bed and went downstairs to ring their office. I left a
message on their answerphone saying I would be delighted to be the public face of text message banking.