Big Beacon, page 12
Down I go. Further and further. Into the soft musk of her hollows. Her fingers clasp my hair, messing it up as if that were fine, but instead of complaining I just issue a quick tut then tenderly place her hand by her side so I can correct the parting with the palm of my hand – all of this as I continue to provide stimulation to her groin, the vibration of my voice conjoining with expelled breath as if I am playing her like a giant kazoo.
I roll away from her, my frenum (the band of tissue that connects the tongue to the floor of the mouth) sore from over-work. ‘Sore frenum,’ I groan. She nods and rolls me onto my back to return the favour.
I look at my Apple Watch. ‘I think I did about six minutes, so if you do broadly the same we should be about even,’ I gasp accurately. ‘So until twenty-five past, basically.’
I lie back, and she does as mandated.
At twenty-five past she stops and lie back on the bed. I stand, find protection in the slit of my wallet, sheathe, squeeze the teat which apparently removes any build-up of air from the rubber and therefore prevents popping, and crawl back towards her.
We dock seamlessly, her hand helping to welcome me within her, her touch as smooth and effective as a shoehorn. Breath becomes sound becomes song becomes cry, the crescendo of our voices rising along a steady gradient.
We are in a room of our bodies’ making. Our torsos are like two walls, but in the space between us, the gap between my tummy and hers, my face and hers, my mouth and hers? That is home.62
On the horizon, climax comes into view and we race towards it, giddy as teenagers, jerking and bucking and galloping against one another. What had been a gentle rolling boil is now a red-hot saucepan, fizzing and spitting as bubbles hurtle to the surface.
‘Christ.’
‘Yep.’
‘Christ.’
‘Yep.’
‘Christ.’
‘Yep.’
‘Christ.’
‘Yep.’
‘Chris.’
‘Yep.’
‘Chriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiist.’
Silence.
‘Yep.’
Then we sleep, or I do and she goes on her phone, and we fall very much in love.63
* * *
61 One night, while perusing the plans of the lighthouse, my assistant took off her spectacles and said: ‘Are you sure you want to be doing this? I mean, I wouldn’t want you embarking on this as a way to distract yourself from the heartbreak of losing your career, and also as a quite childish way to get revenge on This Time by stopping them buying the lighthouse as they’d planned to.’ I took off my glasses too. ‘I actually find it quite sad that you’ve said that, because a cynical thought like that can only have come from a very warped, very damaged mind.’ I told her I’d be booking her in for some counselling, and although she didn’t want to go, she’s now been attending once a week for nearly two years.
62 Some of this passage has been composed with the help of a creative-writing class I sometimes attend for a laugh. Not all of the passage was mine, but I was jotting it down as fast as I could and I think they’re by and large what we said in the room.
63 Funnily enough, I did actually mispronounce the fifth Christ as Chris. But after explaining that I don’t know anyone called Chris, we were able to laugh about it.
CHAV
Summer 2016
Chav – what does chav mean? The Oxford English Dictionary says that it derives from the Romani word ‘chavi’, meaning child. Some wrongly suggest it stands for Council-Housed And Violent, but we can all make up snazzy acronyms. Curry House Asbo Vandals, Cheeky Hoodlums Are Volatile, Chickenshop Hangerarounders Arguing Vociferously, Can’t Handle Authority Verywell or simply Chips, Haddock And Vinegar.64
It’s a loaded word. Or rather, it’s problematic – which is what we say when we mean it’s not racist or sexist but they’ll come up with a label for it soon.
But you also have to understand the culture it is delivered in. In Norwich, men of my age use it almost as a term of endearment. We mumble it all the time. Market trader’s van is blocking your car? Hurry up, chav! The gardener is putting his prices up? The cheeky little chav. Someone is wearing a tracksuit but with black school socks visible at the ankle? Get some sports socks, you chav! There’s a new show on ITV? ITV is for chavs.
Nothing offensive is meant by it. It’s no harsher than scamp, wally or apeth. And if you can’t call a teenage boy a wally, then really what have we come to? And yet just when I needed a ladder to scale the dizzy heights of TV renown, I had landed very much on a snake. Marvin the snake.
Still, I took my punishment like a man, or a very strong woman, and stayed away from the station for the mandated fortnight.
What I refused to do was lie low. To shrink away from public view, to hide away under a rock like a terrified chicken or just crabs generally – it wasn’t my style. So instead I brazened it out, making sure I was seen laughing with a woman at a coffee shop, or browsing premium wines in the Waitrose booze section. I had my hair styled just so by a man who usually specialised in the rigid volumised hairdos of female politicians such as Penny Mordaunt, Nicola Sturgeon and Michael Fabricant. I wanted my hair to look as proud and confident as I was. I also wore a bomber jacket with ‘North Norfolk Digital Summer Roadshow 2012’ on it to remind people I was a much-loved local DJ.
I even had my ringtone changed to Chumbawamba (surely the anthem for the thrusting take-no-shit broadcaster) and instructed my assistant to call every ten minutes so people would hear it and I could make a big deal of taking it out and barking, ‘Yello!’ like I’d once seen a drunk Alan Yentob do. In short, I wanted to project sass.
And it seemed to work. In my peripheral vision, I could see people looking impressed as I acted the big man around town – although by its nature peripheral vision isn’t the most reliable. How many times have I seen a jellyfish in the swimming pool, only to realise front-on that it’s a verruca sock or just a bit of water. Likewise, long after my wife left the marital home, I would see her in the corner of my eye and make a loving quip in her direction, before realising ‘Carol’ was actually just an apron hanging on the back of the kitchen door and my quip was either wasted entirely or would have to be used on the next day’s show. Still, I remain convinced that I was the recipient of admiring glances Norwich-wide.
All I had to do was show no contrition and this would surely blow over. So I’d said ‘chav’ on air once? Big deal. Is it worse than Dave Clifton vomiting on the microphone and crying as he cleaned it up? Or Barbara Bickerton making another snide remark about men being useless? No. This was just a minor faux pas.
But then – in an incident that beggared belief – I made a similar mistake three days later at a golf club dinner.
I love golf club dinners. While no fan of the sport itself – golf buggies have a top speed of just 13mph – I enjoy the company of golf players and golf administrators immensely. The Jackie Weavers of this world probably find them disagreeable, but the combination of rules-based fastidiousness65 with drunken, red-faced jollity has always been a sweet spot for me. It’s fun but ordered fun.
Somehow, on the night I attended, that order broke down. I was there to give out a few awards and make a brief speech to get the party started. I’d hosted the event in 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2007 and 2006.66 It had always been an easy gig and more importantly a safe space.
Not tonight. The club rules dictated that mobile phones were not permitted in the clubhouse by order of the club secretary, DGP Holston – a man whose surfeit of initials felt reassuringly ‘officer class’. Unfortunately, his instruction – a direct order – was flouted. And someone filmed my remarks, most damagingly my gag that ‘you come here to get away from chavs!’.
Why had I said it again? Was it a form of Tourette’s – an urge to say the most destructive thing I could utter? Was it that I’d allowed myself a few drinks too many in my glee at being surrounded by likeminded bachelors? Or was it just that my transgression in the radio studio was still at the forefront of my mind, and forced its way out like the red bit of a dog’s dick when it’s aroused? All equally plausible.
Whatever the reason, it soon found its way onto the popular video-sharing platform YouTube and within days had been viewed dozens and dozens of times. I’ve never seen my assistant so angry.
‘You have to do something,’ she harrumphed. ‘You can’t bury your head in the sand.’
‘I will bury my head,’ I insisted. ‘I’ll bury my head so deep I can’t breathe anymore, and when you find me I’ll be dead on all fours with my head in a bucket of compacted sand like a human pot plant.’
I didn’t mean it. I was trying to guilt trip her. That’s how bad I felt.
And, on that, like the bit fifty minutes into a Netflix documentary about a successful financial services company, the whole house of cards came crashing down.
Norwich is a cold and lonely place when you’re ostracised. Suddenly, I had a real insight into what life must have been like if I lived in Norwich but was black or was that Chinese family who moved in in Holt. Friends wouldn’t take my calls.
Cancelling is nothing new. I’ve been at the other end, having to tell people with regret that they were no longer part of the in-crowd. As a Scout, I remember telling the youngest lad in our troop that he couldn’t come to camp. He’d been horsing around on the last trip and flouted some of the fire rules, which I had detailed exhaustively in the minibus. And people expected a reaction.
‘Kenneth,’ I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘You’re gonna have to sit this one out.’
‘But please,’ he pleaded. ‘Please.’
‘You put your fellow Scouts in harm’s way. I wouldn’t be looking out for them if I didn’t make sure there were consequences.’
‘But all my friends are going.’
‘They ain’t your friends, Ken. Friends don’t wave a sparkler around near a flammable canvas tent; friends don’t kick hot embers near another boy’s sleeping bag; friends don’t play with matches EVER.’
‘You fucking dick.’
I could have replied with, ‘No, you’re a dick,’ but I didn’t. I rose above it, cast my eyes downwards and did a small smile of disappointment, which was clever because that’s effectively the non-verbal way of saying, ‘No, you’re a dick,’ except they can’t get you for it.
He turned on me. ‘Does [Scout master] Darren know about this?’
‘I’ve spoken to Darren and suggested he call your parents. Where’s Darren? They’re on their way to collect him …? Yep, they’re on the way to collect you. You shan’t be joining us on the minibus.’
‘What am I supposed to do all weekend?’
‘If I were you? I’d think about fire safety, then make a collage about it to show you’ve actually learned something.’
I’m pleased to say Kenneth made that collage and to this day it’s one of the best collages I’ve ever seen – certainly about safety.67
So cancel culture is nothing new. A superb book, which I must read one day, by high-voiced broadcaster Jon Ronson is all about this. In it, I imagine, though can’t confirm because, like I say, never read it, he talks about how it happens and feels.
And now I, Alan Partridge, know how it feels too. Because although I hadn’t done a heck of a lot wrong, perception against me hardened.
Unfortunately we live in a world where people live in fear of stepping out of line. They dance the dance of performative disapproval, even when I’m pretty sure they’re relaxed about the so-called wrongdoing. For example, Dominic Aldridge from Triffic Tiles on the A140 had been a friend and a long-time sponsor of the mid-morning entertainment news. He was the first to break ranks, issuing a statement on his company website saying ‘as the father of teenage girls …’ he had decided not to continue with the sponsorship.
I respect Dom immensely, certainly more than he respects his teenage girls. I just wonder how he squares his heroic moral stance with the fact that he has sofa cushions embroidered with golliwogs – and they are golliwogs, he can insist they’re black teddies all he likes. That’s not me trying to get him back. I just want to know how he squares that. I also wonder how the father of teenage girls can be so comfortable with mauling and groping every waitress who comes within arm’s length of the table. Maybe I’ll ask his wife, see if she knows.
Aldridge wouldn’t be the last. Soon, others followed suit, literally joining the feeding frenzy against me – Chaucer’s Country Kitchen, NPP Escrow, and United Farm and Animal Feed were companies I’d enjoyed long, warm relationships with. Good companies, local companies. For Christ’s sake, I was godfather to Doug Chaucer’s kid (maybe still am, must check – also check name). Each of them dropped me like a sack of shit/hot stone.
But now, I was haemorrhaging support like a cheap shopping bag haemorrhages tins of food when the bottom bursts open. In my home office, I set up a nerve centre to manage the fallout, with a team of trusted advisors. My assistant was responsible for scouring the internet and correcting negative perceptions but without saying she worked for me. Judy Gabitas, widow of my late best friend Pete came round because I still hadn’t told her I didn’t want to sleep with her anymore, and I let her buzz round and make cakes and sandwiches. My financial adviser, Ken Scullion, was on hand with sage business advice and a running spreadsheet labelled ‘How fucked is Alan?’.
Eamonn Holmes, this was when we were getting on great guns, was also there, as a kind of helper without portfolio, basically just sending out positive vibes, saying, ‘Come on, gang, keep at it!’ and eating all of Judy’s sandwiches. Former Radio 1 DJ Mark Goodier was there as well but not sure why. Barely know the guy.
By lunchtime the next day we were exhausted, and we tried to survey the wreckage of my career and reputation. The best idea we’d had was to publicly reposition myself as the very thing I’d been accused of smearing. Just as no Jewish man could be accused of antisemitism, surely no – excuse the term – ‘chav’ could be accused of undermining the plight of his own people.
So, over the next five days, I sought to align myself with the – again, sorry – chav community, fostering the sense that I was ‘one of them’. I used public transport, audibly dropped my aitches and said less when I should have been saying fewer, I went for lunch in a Wetherspoons pub – a fucking dreadful experience – bought an electrical item (and meat!) from an outdoor market, smoked a cigarette, wore sportswear in a down-market supermarket called Asda and watched a couple of shows on the ITV channel. In desperation, I even wore a sandwich board bearing the words I’M SORRY I MADE A MISTAKE in the hope that abject pity might be a way back into the good books. But still the snubs kept coming.
It was almost a week later, after being uninvited to a charity auction hosted by Howard from the Halifax adverts, that I admitted defeat. They hated me. The people had cast me out.
‘I’ve not seen a backlash like this since Ron Atkinson,’ piped up Mark Goodier, who I swear to God I’d not realised was still in my house. ‘You’ll have to do a documentary learning what chavs means!’
He laughed and then explained what he meant. Racist comments uttered on a ‘hot mic’ on an ITV football game had seen Big Ron dismissed by the low-rent broadcaster and his work and brand affiliations were pulled. But then, ingeniously, Ron and his team struck TV gold. What if Ron could front a documentary learning about where he’d gone wrong, fess up, go on a journey of redemption, and get paid for it?
My team were enthused. Me? Well, all I wanted to do was be better. If there was a TV format and healthy fee to leverage from that journey, that to me was by the by. All I wanted to do – literally the only thing – was make things right for Marvin and the whole whatever you want to call his community.
And so we set about calling in favours. Within days, we had assembled a rag-team of otherwise unemployable crew members who would work for free or near as dammit. Like The Dirty Dozen, these were outcasts who operated outside the parameters of polite society. Each one of them guzzlers in the last chance saloon, they were more likely, I figured, to be desperate to do a good job. And desperation is a wonderful motivator.
I nicknamed the crew ‘my merry men’ because ‘dirty dozen’ reminded our sound guy of his arrest for wanking in an egg farm. And ‘merry men’ they certainly were. Our Little John, if you like, was camera operator Mario Sheen, a gentle giant who had a brother in prison and had been out of work since he used a BBC camera drone to drop a cache of skunk and SIM cards in through a window at Belmarsh.68 Our Will Scarlet was Noa Gibson, a hot-headed line producer who had thumped the actor James Nesbitt – and like Scarlet had a hair-trigger temper and few friends in the industry, although you’d think she’d be quite popular after the Nesbitt thing. Our Friar Tuck (this is the last one, I promise) was paunchy hair and make-up technician Dennis – a former gayman, he had renounced his sexuality after finding the Lord and was now so virulently anti-gay as to make him unemployable in the gay-friendly world of TV. I’m gay-friendly myself, and only employed him once he’d assured me that he’d try to stop going on about how sinful it was.
The documentary would explore how a schasm had formed in Britain between the haves and the have-nots. So it just seemed logical to head to the spiritual home of the deprived, to the Mecca of Mecca Bingos on a Hajj of the Haven’ts. Yes, we were heading to Manchester to meet with supermarket workers, youth offenders, single mums and bin scroungers.
I would be away from home for a fortnight, which caused a slight headache in terms of dog care. My big brown dog Seldom couldn’t be left with other people and would need feeding at some point. The solution? Bring him along for the ride and weave him into the overall fabric of the show. Years later, several of the 1,080 people who watched the show have come up to me and said the shots of Seldom were among their favourite parts of the programme. I maintain that bringing him with us was the right thing to do, even though the cantankerous canine landed us in hot water when he broke free of his lead and accidentally ate a man’s sheep, the subsequent hush-money payment eating up half our budget faster than Seldom had eaten the sheep’s body.
