Dead Famous

lay minister, he never failed to visit a war memorial on Armistice Day, and he grew plants from seeds rather than buying them ready-made from a garden centre.

The fact that it had fallen to Coleridge to watch the entire available footage of House Arrest. To sit and watch a group of pointless twenty-somethings living in a house together and subjected to constant video surveillance was a cruel joke indeed. It was safe to say that under normal circumstances there was no other show in the history of television that Coleridge would have been less inclined to watch than House Arrest.

Coleridge gripped the handle of the proper china mug he insisted on using despite the fact that it required washing up. “When I want your opinion, Hooper, on train drivers or any other subject for that matter, I shall ask for it.”

“And I will always be happy to oblige, sir.”

Coleridge knew that the sergeant was right. Who could blame today’s youth for its lack of sober ambition? In the days when little boys wanted to grow up to be train drivers they had wanted to grow up to be the master of a vast machine. A fabulous spitting, steaming, snarling, living beast, a monster in metal that required skill and daring to handle, care and understanding to maintain. Nowadays, of course, technology was so complex that nobody knew how anything worked at all except Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking. The human race was out of the loop, to employ a phrase he often heard Hooper using. No wonder all young people wanted was to be on television. What else was there to do? He stared wearily at the huge piles of video tapes and computer disks that seemed to fill most of the room.

“Well, let’s go back to the beginning, shall we? Attack this thing in order.” He picked up a tape marked “First broadcast edit” and put it into the machine.

One house. Ten contestants. Thirty cameras. Forty microphones. One survivor.

The words punched themselves onto the screen like fists slamming into a face.

Frantic, angry rock music accompanied the post-punk graphics and the grainy images supporting them.

A spinning hot-head camera.

A barbed wire fence.

A snarling guard dog.

A girl with her back to the camera removing her bra.

A close-up of a mouth, screaming and contorted with rage.

More big guitar noise. More jagged graphics.

Nobody watching could be in the slightest doubt that this was telly from the hip and for the hip. The message was clear: boring people should seek their entertainment elsewhere, but if you happened to be young, bigged up and mad for it, this was the show for you.

Nine weeks. No excuses. No escape.

House Arrest.

A final blast of swooping, feedback-laden guitar and the credits were over. For one last moment the Peeping Tom house was empty and all was calm. A big, bright friendly space, with a wide tiled living area, pleasant communal bedrooms, stainless steel washrooms and showers and a swimming pool in the garden.

The front door opened and ten young people spilled through it, spreading out into the large open plan living area. Ten people who, the pre-publicity had assured the nation, had never met before in their lives.

They whooped, they shrieked, they hugged, they said “Wicked!” over and over again. Some went into the bedrooms and jumped up and down on the beds, others did chin-ups on the doorframes, one or two stood back a little and watched, but everybody seemed to be of the opinion that the adventure of a lifetime had just begun and they simply could not be starting off on it with a more wicked crew.

Having clearly established the fact that the viewing public were in the company of a party crowd, the camera began to introduce the housemates individually. The first to be picked out was an impossibly handsome young man with soft puppy eyes, boyish features and long shoulder-length hair. He wore a big black coat and carried a guitar. A graphic stamped itself across the man’s face, letters made out of bricks, like prison walls.

David. Real job: actor. Star sign: Aries.

“Pause, please, constable.”

The image froze and the assembled officers studied the handsome face on the screen, a face disfigured by the angry graphic stamped across it.

“Real job: actor,” Coleridge said. “When did he last work?” Trisha, a young detective constable who had just finished pinning up the last of the seven suspect photographs, turned her attention to David’s file. “Panto, Prince Charming. Two Christmases ago.”

“Two years ago? Then it’s hardly a real job, is it?”

“That’s what Gazzer says later on in the show, sir,” Hooper chipped in. “David gets quite arsey about it.”

“Arsey?”

“Annoyed.”

“Thank you, sergeant. It will speed matters up considerably in this incident room if we all speak the same language. Is there any evidence that this boy can actually act?”

“Oh yes, sir,” said Trisha. “He had a very good start. RADA graduate and quite a lot of work at first, but recently it just hasn’t been happening for him.”

Coleridge studied David’s face frozen on the screen. “Bit of a come-down, this, eh? I can’t imagine that appearing on House Arrest was what he had in mind when he left drama college.”

“No, it does look a bit desperate, doesn’t it?”

Coleridge looked once more at David. The face was flickering and jumping about because the police VCR was old and clapped out and did not like pausing. David’s mouth was slightly open in a grin and the effect made him look like he was gnawing at the air.

“What does he live off while he’s doing his real job of not acting?”

“Well, I wondered about that, sir,” said Hooper, “and I have to admit it’s a bit obscure. He doesn’t sign on, but he seems to do pretty well for himself – nice flat, good clothes and all that. He told Peeping Tom that his parents helped him out.”

“Look into it, will you? If he’s in debt or steals or sells drugs and one of the other people in the house had found out… Well, there might be something, the ghost of a motive…” But Coleridge did not sound convinced.

“The telly people would have heard it, wouldn’t they, sir? I mean, if another inmate had found something out about him? Don’t they hear everything?” Trisha asked. “Not absolutely everything,” Hooper, who was a reality TV buff, replied. “They see everything, but they don’t hear everything – most but not all. Sometimes, when the inmates whisper, it’s hard to make out what they’re saying, and every now and then they leave their microphones off and have to be told to put them back on. And they sometimes tap them when they speak. The contestants in the first series worked that one out. Remember Wicked Willy? The bloke who got chucked off for trying to manipulate the votes? That was his little trick.”

“Well, that would be worth watching out for, wouldn’t it?” Trisha said. “Microphone tapping – very conspiratorial.”

“Unfortunately most of the bits where you can’t hear weren’t stored on disk because they were useless for broadcast.”

“Oh, well,” said Coleridge. “As my mother used to say, life wasn’t meant to be easy. Next one, please. Move on.”

“Check it out, guys! A swimming pool!”

Jazz had opened the patio doors and spun round to announce his discovery. The graphic punched bricks into his handsome young face:

Jazz. Real job: trainee chef. Star sign: Leo (cusp of Cancer).

“This is better than Ibiza!” He performed a little acid-style dance on the edge of the pool while doing a convincing vocal impression of a drum and bass track. “Duh! Boom! Chh chh boom! Chh chh boom! Chhh chhh BOOM!”