The team are earnestly making notes—Daisy in particular after the faux pas about accountancy is tapping furiously into her mobile—credit and thanks, btw, to that device for the audio feed—and is otherwise looking sharp and showered and keen to show her new employer that she is a bright button and in no way a person who would struggle to find her way out of the building.
“I’d like each of you to spend the day drawing up a hitlist of twenty-five targets, with a few lines about why they’d be must-watch TV. Thanks, everyone.”
As the workers drift back to their stations to begin googling, something strikes me about the peculiarity of their lives; being paid—and not badly either—to persuade other people to talk about their professional lives for the entertainment of still further people in search of something undemanding to watch at the end of a busy day doing whatever they’ve been doing. What an intricately interconnected world we find ourselves in; where all have a function; where there’s even a function to interview others about the “psychological roots” behind their specific function and turn it into a show for the entertainment of people who think that’s entertainment!
How little sense any of it makes to a fridge-freezer. Smart as I and the rest of my kind are, I was never in a position to say, oh, I wonder what I shall do with my life. No matter how strongly I may have been drawn to a career as a light entertainer—and yes, I’m looking at you, Chad Butterick!—there was never any alternative but to go into refrigeration (including freezing).
The same is doubtless true for the rest of my team.
With us, there’s a very simple answer to the question, Why Do They Do That?
How could we not?
Daisy bangs out her list of twenty-five names with surprising rapidity, apparently from the top of her head. She seems very familiar with popular culture, although she does have to strike out two, one for being dead and the other for being occupied currently in helping police with inquiries in connection with certain alleged events that took place in the 1970s. Her commentaries about why the candidates would make “must-watch TV” seem a touch under-developed to my way of thinking—“He’d be brill!,” “She’s got amazing hair,” “Incredibly famous and totally not in demand”—but she knows her milieu; I am more of a specialist in temperature than celebrity.
Before long, she is speaking by telephone to Chad Butterick’s agent, a fearsome dragon, from the sound of things, by the name of Noreen Somebody.
“Oh, no. That’s not at all the sort of thing Chad would get involved in. It’s far too personal. What sort of fee did you have in mind?”
“Well, it probably wouldn’t be huge. But the series will get lots of attention. It’s being talked about as landmark? Some big names are already falling into place.”
“Go on, dear.”
“Well, I can’t really say until the ink’s dry, sort of thing. But Mick Jagger? Tom Cruise?”
This revelation surprises me as, to my knowledge, the call to Chad B’s agent is the first Daisy has “fired in” as they say in TV-land.
Noreen sounds irritable. “Look, I’ll mention it to Chad. I’m talking to him later today. But there’s no way on God’s earth he’ll do it. And the fee would need to be in five figures.”
Noreen mentions another of her clients, a children’s TV presenter apparently. “Why don’t you have her? She’s a great talker. In fact, you can’t shut her up. It might even be clinical.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I adore Crystal,” agrees Daisy, flicking through Twitter on her mobile. “But she doesn’t have Chad’s sheer… inspirational backstory.”
“If you think you’re going to get him talking about the court case, I’m telling you right now that’s a total non-starter. And let me remind you he was found innocent—innocent!—by a jury of his peers. If you bring it up, I’m telling you he will walk. Is that understood?”
“Oh, absolutely. Totally no worries.” Daisy pauses to retweet an amusing gif of a dog falling into a swimming pool. “You’ll get back to me then?”
Lunchtime finds Daisy and Chantal perched on stools at the window of a different branch of Pret a Manger. Except for the postcode—Logarithmic Productions is in Covent Garden—it’s rather as if nothing has changed since last week.
Daisy (curried chickpeas and mango chutney) is telling her colleague (free-range egg mayo) the story of Johnny the antique dealer and the Schmaltzgruber ice cream affair.
“Rugger type. Borderline posh. He was incredibly irritating.”
“So when are you seeing him again?”
“That’s so not going to happen.”
“I was joking.”
“Oh. Sorry. I think I’ve lost my sense of humor. These days I only seem to meet deadbeats and weirdos.”
“That is totally fucked up. You’re fabulous, Daisy. Didn’t you know?”
“Me? I feel so far from fabulous. I feel strung out and hopeless, none of my clothes fit and my love life is an effing disaster.”
“You’re gorgeous, honey. If I wasn’t so boringly heterosexual, I’d have a crack at you myself.”
Daisy swallows audibly. “Golly. Don’t say things like that.”
“You’ve just got to stop going out with married men and serial killers.”
“I didn’t know he was married. And Owen didn’t kill anyone. It was only a restraining order.”
“Yeah. No worse than a parking ticket really.”
Daisy rolls her eyes and smiles. There’s some companionable chewing as the two women regard the passing scene at the busy junction of St. Martin’s Lane and Long Acre (too many vision sources to credit individually; so thanks all).
“Have you ever been out with anyone with a beard?” asks Daisy.
“Can’t say I have. Why?”
“My mum’s
