anything whatsoever that might justify their comfortable and socially exalted existence.
Therefore, despite her low opinion of my fertility, Lucy wants it to be presented honestly and for this reason the zinc and the multivitamins have been ditched. Also (rather splendidly) she’s told me to keep drinking. Although only at normal levels, whatever they may be. I find it almost impossible to work out how much I drink. I mean I know it’s not that much, but how much is that? If ever I ask myself “How many did I have last night?” I always answer, “Oh, only a few.” But when you actually try and work it out, check how much you spent, the state of the whisky bottle still on the kitchen table, the various places you’ve been, suddenly you’re worrying that you’re an alcoholic.
Anyway, Lucy’s decision not to let me prepare for my test has certainly made life easier. I’m particularly pleased to be able to give up the Testicular Workout. It promised firm, full and rounded testicles in a wrinkle-free scrotum inside one month, but it required a kind of tensing of the arse and lower gut muscles which made me frown furiously. I’m glad not to be bothering with that any more. I have enough new lines on my face without deliberately grimacing for ten minutes a day.
Anyway, in four days’ time it will all be over. Which means from tomorrow onwards I’m not allowed to ejaculate. Apparently a three-day period of being left alone in quiet contemplation will give my sperm time to consider their characters and pull themselves together a bit. No great hardship, this abstinence. Sex for Lucy and me at the moment is rarer than a decent sitcom on ITV and I’m usually too tired to be bothered with slapping the monkey.
No reply yet from Tosser, or indeed the Channel Controller, but I take this as no slight. They’re both very busy men, very busy men indeed, as, of course, am I.
Dear Pen Pal
I gave blood today. This test is to consider my hormone level to see if I ovulate. I did it at an NHS Female Health Clinic in Camden. I didn’t do it at my normal GP’s because Dr Cooper is on holiday and I don’t really like Dr Mason (nothing specific, just don’t really like him).
God, Camden’s getting gruesome. If you’re not out of your brains on drugs the police stop you and ask if you’re lost. I walked up the High Street holding my copy of the Big Issue as a sort of shield. So depressing, all those homeless people. How did it happen? Thatcher, I used to think, but she’s been gone for donks and they’re still here. You give money to a couple of them but you can’t give money to them all and when you’ve run out of change you want to say to the ones you haven’t given anything to that you’ve already given money to the previous ones, but why would they care?
The clinic was depressing, as it would be. All these women having their bits and their boobs checked, or barren like me. One tries to maintain a positive outlook but it’s not easy.
There was an old TV Times in the waiting pen (I won’t call it a “room”, that would make it sound too cosy; it was just a sort of square of plastic chairs with a couple of broken toys on the floor). Anyway, the TV Times contained quite a good article about Carl Phipps, when he was still in that awful thing Fusilier! on ITV. Quite nice pictures, although I must say I prefer him now he’s got longer hair. That crew cut was rather brutal. Still, his eyes haven’t changed, still soft and limpid. He knows how nice they are, though, like David Essex used to. I’ll bet he uses twinkle drops. The text went on and on about how girls are always getting terrible crushes on him. You can see how they might, but God, some women are stupid.
Dear etc.
Quite astonishing development at work today. I’ve been to Downing Street. I didn’t meet the Prime Minister, but it’s still amazing. It completely took my mind off my sperm test.
It happened like this. I’d just sat down to another morning of brooding over the lack of direction or passion in my career, leafing through another pile of scripts, wondering why the hell I can’t seem to find it in me to write one myself, when Daphne said that the Channel Controller was on the line. Well of course I was thrilled, he could only be phoning personally to accept my dinner invitation! I was mentally leafing through Delia as I grabbed the phone and had already decided on the salmon mousse to start when it turned out that Nigel had called about something even more exciting! He was phoning from Barcelona, where he was (of course) attending an international television festival. Perhaps the single greatest perk of being at the Beeb is the international festival circuit. The BBC don’t pay you much, but they do let you lig. Even I get to go to a few. Lucy and I had a fantastic weekend in Cork last April, except that she thought she was ovulating so I wasn’t allowed to drink. Controllers, being an altogether superior breed, of course, virtually spend their lives at festivals. You can always find them in some exotic location bemoaning the fact that Baywatch is the most popular Programme in the world and that cartoons are the sickness at the heart of children’s broadcasting. Anyway, this was why Nigel was calling from Barcelona.
But oh, such news! It turned out that the Prime Minister’s office had been on to the BBC about the PM appearing on Livin’ Large. Livin’ Large is our current Saturday morning kids’ pop and fun show and every week they have a sort of interview spot where the children get to ask questions of a celebrity. Now, unbeknownst to me (surprise, surprise) our PR people had had a brilliant idea. (I must digress here to remark that the fact that our PR people had had a brilliant idea was shocking news in itself and evidence of how much things have changed around the old place. BBC press and public relations used to consist of an office with a large enthusiastic woman in it whom everyone ignored. Now it’s a huge and entirely separate company called something like BBC Communications or Beeb COM, whose services I have to hire. It’s quite extraordinary. In order for me to ensure that BBC shows are plugged in BBC publications I have to pay BBC money to BBC Communications. It seems loopy to me, but George assures me that it’s cut away a lot of “dead wood”.)
Anyway, BBC Communications’ idea had been to ask the Prime Minister if he would like to appear on Livin’ Large and take some questions from “the kids”, thereby cutting through all that cynical adult bullshit and plugging in to the pure unsullied enthusiasm of youth. Astonishingly, it seemed to me, the man was considering it.
The problem for Nigel (the Controller) was that Downing Street (which is a vigorous, “can do” sort of a place these days) wanted to meet today! and no other later date would do because the PM’s diary is chockablock with summits and Cabinet crises right through till Christmas. Nigel had of course tried to get a flight back from Barcelona but there was a football match, or the French air-traffic controllers weren’t letting anybody out of Europe today or something. Anyway, the upshot of it was that I would have to go to the meeting!
Well, I spent the rest of the morning phoning my mum and Lucy and everybody I knew and trying to get my tie ironed. Of course, one might have thought that in the heart of one of the largest television studio complexes in the world getting one’s tie ironed would have been easy. To get someone from wardrobe would, one might imagine, have been the work of a moment. Unfortunately “wardrobe” no longer exists as such. It’s a separate company called Beeb Frox or else something equally awful, and one has to negotiate with it. This Daphne, my wonderful secretary, duly did, and came back with a quote of ?45. It seemed a bit steep to iron a tie but apparently Beeb Frox claimed it would scarcely cover their paperwork. I told Daphne that seeing as this was the Prime Minister and all, she’d better get on with it, but it turned out not to be that simple. In order for my office to generate a payment from finance (BeebCash Plc) I needed first to prove that I had secured the most competitive tender for the work. Daphne said that she was required to approach a minimum of two outside costumiers to see if they would iron my tie more cheaply than Beeb Frox. Only when we had three estimates to compare could we commission the work. Meanwhile, it would also be necessary to decide out of what programme budget the ironing of the tie was to come. Clearly this would have to be Livin’ Large, but if that was the case their Line Producer would have to sign the chit. Also, Livin’ Large was not made in house but by an independent company called Choose Groove Productions. Incidentally, I must add here that this does not mean that Choose Groove Productions make Livin’ Large in any practical sense, oh no, the BBC make it, with BBC staff in a BBC studio, paid for by BBC money, the only difference being that some bloke with a ponytail in Soho takes a thirty-grand-an-episode production fee and gets to stick his company logo on the end of the programme. It was to this lucky recipient of the BBC’s forced entry into the marketplace that Daphne would have to go to get budgetary authorization for my tie to be ironed.
In the end, Daphne flattened the tie underneath a pile of old copies of Spotlight for a
