The Dream of the Decade

Extract from The Dream of the Decade by Afshin Rattansi
ISBN 1-4196-1686-2
Library of Congress Control Number 2005909384
All Rights Reserved (c) 2005 Afshin Rattansi

from Book Four - "Good Morning, Britain", first sixteen pages

" Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever. "Noam Chomsky

There was a garden at TV Centre. He remembered a children’s television programme that nurtured the garden from seedlings to bushes and trees. The aim was to teach children about botany. Each week, soil was painstakingly levelled and branches were pruned. Flowers were fingered as young viewers learnt about nature. One week, the entire garden was vandalised and destroyed. He laughed when he remembered this.
Jonathan had been a lucky man. He still had dreams of falling now and then, a hangover of some harder time. But by chance, he had got himself a life in the capital.
Apart from the day of his interview, Jonathan had never been to Television Centre. He knew that the world’s first television service was launched there and he had seen the building on thousands of programmes as a child. Twentieth century British history had often been made there. But he had never seen how much the building looked like a ship, one that might wearily tell tales of iceberg collisions and lightning. When Jonathan arrived at the interview, he was too nervous to search around too much. His recollections of the place, as he returned on the tube, were only as if he had been in a series of exceptionally open-plan offices. TV Centre had been like a hollow shell.
Interviews at the Corporation were called boards. It was a measure of how far Jonathan had come that he knew this. Jonathan’s board was in a shabby office. Next door to it, a man toyed with a video-recorder. He was surveying the latest footage from the world’s war-zones to censor actions too unpalatable for the country’s breakfast tables.
There were about seven people arranged in a semicircle in and as he entered, the irises of his eyes must have looked like skidding pebbles as they cast about the room. His glance was quite involuntary as he was quite expecting there to be a number of people. He had seen a few boards before and had heard about how they went at the bars where he had met journalists over the years. He had even experienced one, at a different office, in a different time. That attempt had not been successful. During conversations with the board members he realised that his knowledge of world news, current affairs and history had little bearing on the invitations to the board. He hadn’t had any idea about for what programme he was being interviewed. That board came about because Jonathan had had the good luck to work as a silver service waiter at a party to launch a new charity and there he had met a famous television personality. The man’s fame stretched as far as the county lines, but in a county where the capital is the capital of the country, his fame was sufficient to secure a board.
That time, the board of seven or eight shuffled their papers enough to cause a breeze as he had entered the room. The other candidates for the job had filled out proper application forms, detailing qualifications, hobbies and referees. What reached the top of the interviewers’ papers when Jonathan had entered the room was a single sheet of paper, hand-written and outlining to the presenter that he had met him at a party, that the famous man had got rather drunk but that there were no hard feelings. Eyebrows had searched the ceiling when the breeze subsided.
This time, Jonathan had done more work than before. He had researched a plan. He had a dim memory of a long ago office he had known which had neglected their forward planning. Jonathan believed it to be the reason for their failure. His plan was to impress upon each of the board members that he was not human, not such a hard task given his character. He was sharp and self-conscious and sometimes it felt like most of his brain was concerned with how to get ahead. Jonathan’s interview method would involve showing a complete disregard for correctness. There would be no pleasantries. He would try to appear as if, for him, other humans might as well be stone, albeit stone from which blood could be obtained.
Jonathan surmised that any imitation stone required high pressure, in this case the pressure of “truth”, the stuff that television believed it knew most about. Jonathan would have to seem weighed down with it and he believed that if one used a barometer calibrated by time, he was surely, by now, made of stone.
For the board, the truth was also like a pearl. They wanted someone who could dive deep enough to net the oyster, sharp enough to then cut it open and devil-may-care enough to chuck the oyster away once the pearl was out. Living things were as nothing compared to semiprecious truths. This was how Jonathan explained news coverage he had seen
Jonathan, himself, was not sure what truth was.
When it came for him to sit down in the chair he looked around, realising that shaking hands would exhaust the time permitted for the board. He folded one smart, dark suited leg over the other, adjusting his tie as he did so.
“Hello, we’ve all got copies of your CV in front of us. Perhaps, you could tell us your experience in television,” said a woman who would later turn out to be from the human resources’ department. He glared at her.
“Please?” a man said, thinking that Jonathan was merely nervous as opposed to acting tough.
Apart from the human resources manager, the others were all men. They dressed differently, with concessions to the twentieth century’s sixties, seventies and eighties. Their faces were taut, ready to bounce back any raindrops or flippant remarks.
“If I’ve come here to be asked about my experience,” Jonathan turned to the woman from human resources, “I shall leave now, if you all don’t mind,” he replied.
There was a slight pause as one of the number looked upwards and smiled, as if with recognition. “I’m terribly sorry. Why don’t we start with a hypothetical story?” He was taller than the others, leaner and yet puffier in the face, with red eyes and yellowing teeth.
“Very well,” Jonathan said, allowing his tone to soften.
“The national currency has devalued, how do you treat the story?”
He looked up, then across the pairs of eyes awaiting him. Stifling the urge to say he couldn’t give a toss about the national currency, Jonathan told them what a serious matter such a crisis was, whom one would call for comment, whom one would call for facts. In this way, he alerted them to his understanding that fact and comment were different.
“I see. And how would you try to balance your report?” said a man, wearing a thick woollen poncho.
“I would ask spokespersons from the other political parties how differently they would have handled the events leading to the crisis.”
“A million people die in Africa,” another man said, this one with blue eyes that sparkled in a fat thick set face. “A million men, women and children die in Africa, and a train crash in London kills ten people and—it is a good news sort of day—seventeen people die up north. What’s your lead story?”
“Ten in London, followed by the story in Africa.”
“Good. And your reasons?”
He waited, perhaps for Jonathan to say that Africa was where black people lived and people north of London were not immediate concern. There was an answer on those lines that Jonathan had formulated but he could already tell that some of the men were concerned that he was reckless. They seemed confused that he was offering them the right answers but along with them, strange distortions of his face. “The local-ness of news is more important than just cold figures of casualties.”
“Er, deaths.”
“That’s right, deaths. There’s no point in ordering stories just on the number of deaths. A million is important, of course. But our viewers want to know about British people, English people, London people.”
“Of course, if the seventeen up north had died in a particularly gruesome way, perhaps a serial killer, it might be different?” the lean man said, moving his head as if confiding something in Jonathan.
“That’s right,” Jonathan said, stony faced, knowing that these policy decisions were matters of pragmatism in a busy newsroom more than anything else.
After two more questions, Jonathan looked at his watch and said he had another appointment. Human resources looked troubled, having stared at him ever since Jonathan had spat out the word ‘deaths’.
He left the interview room and noticed that the staff working in the newsroom shared an important news gathering feature, the ability to focus along with the ability to ignore.
Jonathan wouldn’t remember what he did after the interview: a kind of electronic hibernation was how he lived. He did some freelance crime reporting and newspaper sub-editing to earn his living expenses. He was lucky to know a few friendly commissioning editors and because of a unique housing arrangement, he had no rent to pay.
He tried to monitor every news programme. He would concentrate on word-choice and running order, emphasis and picture selection. As the days went by, he became more unsure, gauging that the chances of his getting the job were slim. But he was lucky. A month or so after the interview, he received a letter and a plastic folder. The letter said he had been appointed as a producer, the folder said they could terminate his contract when they wanted to.
Jonathan celebrated by having dinner at a local Indian restaurant, shifting the pages of the Radio Times magazine. He had hardly any friends so he asked one of the waiters to sit with him and have a beer to toast his success.
On his first day, he wore his interview clothes, not realising the complex dress code that sets producers apart from reporters and reporters apart from production assistants and porters. On the tube to an area of the capital known as White City, he felt himself involuntarily nodding to passengers he thought were heading to Television Centre, rather than to the sweep of government housing adjoining it.
He had a purposefulness about himself when he marched into the air-conditioned room that sat beside the main gates to Television Centre.
“It’s my first day, I don’t have a pass,” Jonathan smiled at the fortyish woman behind the counter, then glanced at some people sitting on the couch. While the receptionist turned away to select a file from the cabinet behind her, he looked at those waiting, at their cheap clothing and their unhappy faces. Presumably they were cleaners or porters on short term contracts, waiting to clock in at the appointed time. Jonathan remembered when he had jobs like that.
“Do you know which department?” she said, bring the lenses of her large clear plastic glasses closer to her eyes, magnifying them some four times.
“Yes, Good Morning, Britain,” he said.
“Do you have a phone number? Well, I’ll look it up…here it is. Hello? I’ve got a person here who says he starts today. Right. Okay.” She laughed a little as Jonathan signed the list and was pointed towards a black machine constructed of steel.
In a few seconds he was walking through the security scanner. It was the kind they have at airports, except that there were no signs calming those with pacemakers. He didn’t know it then, but it was the only such security feature at Television Centre—anyone in a taxi could get through the main gate without a pass.
That day there was a problem with the main front doors. Wooden blocks had been placed crossways against them to warn anyone who might think of pushing their way in. Others wishing to enter, including a news-reader, a comedian and an actor in costume, as if from a Victorian literary adaptation for the screen, walked through a side door and he followed. After a circuitous ten minute stroll through some corridors he found himself by the front doors again. Looking up, he noticed what looked like asbestos caving in from the ceiling. Since everyone around him was by now wearing masks, he hurried away.
In the corridor, Jonathan passed a newsagent, a dry-cleaners, a barbers’ shop, a travel agent, a photocopiers’ and a wooden case filled with awards. Then he met the group of four lifts on the ground floor. It was crowded here and illuminating. The settings for lifts in news organisations can say a lot about the efficiency and prioritising of newsgathering, he thought. He had read that the management consultancy firm used by the Corporation was working on lift-settings. Jonathan was already very much looking forward to their research.
Unlike at some other offices, seven minutes’ wait didn’t cause anyone to take the stairs. They waited patiently, watching the spin of the three digital numbers adorning the tops of the lifts. Jonathan thought they looked like graphic devices for teaching children about memory.
Inside, the crowded lift, a male computerised voice announced that they were on the ground floor and then read out the date, the time of day and the outside temperature in case a passenger hadn’t seen the ominous electronic displays by the doors. These acted as state-of-the-art reminders that the architects of Television Centre had foreseen the birth of a new window tax some time in the late twentieth century.
After a twenty minute walk, he found the right room. The door to it was emblazoned with a big “no smoking” sign and what looked like an old promotional sticker that had been designed to advertise the programme when it was launched a decade or so before. Behind the door was a room the size of a middling church hall, brightly lit by mercury lights and furnished by paper-strewn desks that had been jammed together. There was a computer terminal beside each chair and a couple of video editing machines stuck in en suite cubicles.
“Hello, I’m joining the team,” Jonathan said politely to a man dressed like a secondary school mathematics’ teacher. He was flicking through the last of what looked like his holiday snapshots. His bushy eyebrows turned up as if to escape the static electricity issuing from his double-breasted blue suit.
“You’re the first to arrive, why don’t you sit down and log in to the computer, so that you can find your way around?” he said, turning to look at his exposures again.
Jonathan sat beside what was the main table in the office and looked down at the grimy keyboard. He smiled as the computer recognised his name and password, his eyes resting on the top right of the green screen monitor. It was here that flashing capital letters announced new tragedies from around the world.

Nuclear—France-Test-Urgent
Sport—Glance
bc-fin-money-newyork
XMS DAVIES ARGENTINA
NUCLEAR-FRANCE-TEST-URGENT
BC-USA-MURDOCH
+ROVER CAR PACK
Yugo-Bosnia scheduled
C* 2300 BOSNIA ATTACK
EU HUNGARY COA
bc-oilprice 9-5 0489
Corporation C MOROCCO-FLOODS 2=
BC-USA-MURDOCH

These were “wires”, news-stories penned by correspondents and news agencies from around the world and of all the wires being sent into the Corporation’s computer system, these wires were deemed “flash” or “priority”, which meant they were the most newsworthy items currently available.
He selected a different “queue” on the system, one relating to the morning breakfast programme. Under the military-style heading “Debriefs”, was a list of dates. He accessed the most recent:

“Another good programme.
Oh, there’s a leaving party at one o’clock for Sam Jones, who’s leaving to take up his new PR post at Arbiter.
First off, Ireland. Not a good news day, so I suppose it’s passable. Bad cut to David though. Is Camera Two all right?
Alfred’s piece was good but why no real people. This isn’t a text book, it’s television.
ALFRED writes: fuck you, I’m leaving
EDITOR writes: Yup, either that or you’re fired.
Newspaper reviewer guest was crap, banned from now on. Too many puffs for his own paper.
And can they please use the Tokyo feed time. We’ve only got it for a few more weeks, why can’t they get some pieces about funny Japanese or something?”

As he read through it, some of the other newcomers arrived. They looked sheepish and rich except one of them who turned out to be a trainee who wasn’t being paid.
“Right, we’re doing a course this week. We didn’t have one last year and we think a lot of people didn’t know what to do for the first couple of months which was a shame. Hopefully, this time they can start out a bit better,” the teacher-like man, Peter, said. “If someone can give me a hand with some of these boxes, we can go down to the room we’ve hired.
The corridors of Television Centre were a maze but no one admonished Peter for moving too fast. Instead, the group of new boys and girls tried to stick together as best they could as they followed him down into the basement, some seven floors below the main office.
***
“Right, we’ve still got some people to come, but we had better get a start on,” Peter said. It was then that Jonathan realised how stern the man was, how he could ask whether you wanted a cup of coffee and make it sound like he was threatening your mother. During the course, Jonathan realised how strange it was that he should have this effect, he seemed to have so little cause to be angry.
“Now, I remember when I first came to the Corporation. I had just left Bolt Today, a trade paper. Anyone read it here?” Everyone in the room shook their heads. “Well, it’s a pretty good paper, deals with construction projects, usually in the Gulf, Arab countries that kind of thing. It was a good grounding in journalism for me because it gave me a firm grounding in the need to be accurate. Accuracy, that’s important at the Corporation.”
Jonathan took out a pencil from his inside pocket, noticing he was the only person in the room without a clean pad in front of him. Accuracy, he told himself, was important.
“Now, let’s start by going around the room and announcing names and new jobs and where you’ve come from.”
“I’m Elizabeth and I worked on the Children’s Cartoon Network. I’m going to be news producing here”, said a petite blonde woman who looked like she had scrubbed her facial features away that morning.
“I’m Nigel and I’ve just graduated. I’m going to be producing, as a trainee though.” Nigel looked downwards. He was wearing a thick jumper and his stomach and eyes seemed to be separate only by twelve centimetres.
“I’m Sally Colon, I worked as a production secretary in repro on the fourth floor and I’ll be researching here.”
“I worked at the Management Consultants firm, MacKnife and Faytel”
“I’ve just graduated from Durham in history”
So it went on, each description eliciting a kind of surprised sigh in the room. A couple of new recruits had copies of the Daily Mail newspaper in their bags and three of the group had rolled up copies of Hello! Magazine in knapsacks. They all seemed like reasonable people, Jonathan thought. He liked them already.
The men seemed deliberately to dress down as if to demonstrate that hardworking journalism was their game, not the vanities of television presentation. And yet, their dressing down was too calculated, almost as if they had been dressed up as a new fashion trend, one that encompassed a new mood of awkwardness, disorder and colour-blindness. The women all dressed up, their ambitions not so well concealed. Their jackets and tops were too new, the cases they had brought in too shiny. One thing the men and women shared was a decisive rejection of spectacles. Uncomfortable eyelash fluttering would benumb the week-long course. Participants, it seemed, already knew where to pigeon hole themselves. There were naive men, boffin men and men with authority. For women, there were pretty women, glamorous housewife types and older “sensible” women. In this class, the women tried to be pretty types whereas amongst the men, there were twenty year olds trying to look like seasoned ex-Vietnam reporters and forty year olds trying to look like bouncy travel reporters.
“I’m going to start by showing you a video that they shot in the office that should explain the sort of days or nights you are going to have here.” Peter said, bending down and checking the connections between the video recorder, the television monitor and the wall socket. After a little head-scratching he was on the phone calling an engineer. After silent anticipation had reigned for half an hour, he called another. The first had got lost in the TV Centre labyrinth. After a while, there was a knock at the door and a man in blue overalls carrying parcels and letters came in looking alarmed.
“Hello,” he said looking around the room, “this is the first time I’ve seen anyone in this room and I’ve been delivering mail here for twenty years.” He went to the back of the room and the class followed his slight frame as it crouched. Then, they all noticed the six foot pile of buff coloured envelopes and tan coloured bubble packs. He laid some of the letters down beside the dusty pile and then walked back to the door. “Bye, then.” He said.
After half an hour, a fuzzy video image came onto the TV monitor and Peter told the class that this was the best he could do for the time being. And so the film began. To the tune of some xylophone music, a man read a newspaper. Then there was a green screen like the one Jonathan had been using earlier and then the man was leaving the office and getting into an estate car that shot off out of view. Back in the office, Peter, himself, could be seen co-ordinating, pointing at things, looking glum, looking pleased. A researcher frowned with a reporter. A journalist carried a tray of steaming polystyrene cups. Eventually, a new team arrived, followed by presenters. Presenters liaised with editors. Suddenly the theme song to Good Morning, Britain segued from the xylophone music and the two presenters “wished a warm welcome” to viewers. Then Peter switched the television monitor off and smiled.
“Quite good, wasn’t it?” he said. The xylophones still resonated in his pupils’ ears.
“Now, I’d like to introduce Dave who’s a cameraman…he should be here in a few minutes.” After a silent couple of minutes during which faces nervously turned, Dave walked into the room, carrying a tripod, a video-camera and a lightweight waterproof bag. “Dave, always on time, huh?” said Peter, his words hanging in the air for a few seconds. “Well let’s start with what annoys you most about television producers when they’re with you on a shoot?”
Dave, his check shirt collars peeping from under a grey pull-over, did not look happy. There were umber marks on the knees of his jeans that matched the shade of the few hairs on his head that were not grey. His eyes looked tired and weary. His face looked as if it had been thumped into shape by a Playdoh machine.
“Hello.” The sound of his voice was as if he were in a far off lavatory-cubicle. “I’m Dave, I’ve been here thirty years and I’m going to show you what cameramen, camera people, do when they go out with you on shoots.” He began to set up the tripod and camera. “The first thing to remember is that our equipment is very expensive, so though you must help us carry it, you had better carry it safely. Look at this.”
We all inclined forwards to see what he was doing.
“This is a fluid head. It costs a lot of money. So don’t put it in the way of other people. I remember one producer taking it out of the car boot and placing it in the road. The whole thing was ripped off. RIPPED OFF!” he said, his voice emerging from the cubicle and into the wash-basin area, just for an instant.
“Now, there are ‘x’ basic shots. Head and shoulders, interviewee; head, interviewee; reverse two-shot; and that’s about it, or at least that’s all that you have to worry about. I don’t want to see any budding Spielbergs with me like last year. Then there are noddy’s, when you speak to your interviewee and I shoot him, saying nothing and vice versa. Also, remember that because it’s not film that we’re using,” he looked down for an instant, tears glistening on his eyelids., “we can hardly ever shoot an interviewee in front of a light source, such as a window. Also, if there are going to be computer screens in the shot tell your cameraman to bring a ‘shutter’, that stops the screens from flickering.
“Now, sound.” Dave had recovered his composure. “We’ve got radio mikes, lapel mikes and boom mikes. Usually, the mike on the camera can record atmos.”
As he spoke, his gaze wandered to Peter whose furrowed brow and deep-set eyes were levelled sternly at Dave.
Meanwhile, the others in the room, except for the seasoned-looking twenty year old, whom Jonathan noticed had a packet of Woodbines cigarettes in his padded waistcoat, were frantically writing Dave’s words down.
“The most important thing to know is don’t tell them what to do, tell them the effect you want. There’s nothing worse than a young producer ordering around an experienced cameraman,” said Peter, “any questions?”
“Hi, I’m John. How often has your camera gone down in the past thirty years, then?” asked the man with the woodbines, smirking and then turning his head from left to right as if seeking approval from the rest of the class.
Dave turned sadly to Peter, his moist eyelids stretching as far as they could go. There was silence.
“That’ll be all then,” Peter said and Dave quickly began to pack away his things before sloping off.
“Right, now onto the next video,” Peter said, pointedly ignoring John who was whispering to Elizabeth and crossing out some of the notes on her pad with a smile.
“Hazards. You will encounter many hazards and there are a number of courses such as Bullet Penetration 0200 and Swampland 530 and Air attack 50. But, I’ve always thought that it isn’t the war-zones that are the most dangerous. Everyday scenes can be the worst. Take a look at this.”
The class peered at Peter’s rolled up sleeve and then they peered a little closer in confusion.
“I got that graze, on a splintery door post in Guilford, shooting a piece about the rate of inflation.” Peter said. With his left elbow pointing to the class he used his free arm to reach over to press the play button on the video recorder. By the time he had lost balance and fallen to the floor, the film had started.
It was in better focus than the previous one and began with a series of bright explosions before the title “Hazards” scuttled up the left hand side of the screen. A Six O’ Clock News presenter began narrating.
“Hazards and hazard control are part of your job. There are no honours for getting killed on an assignment. Take a look at this.” There followed two minutes of men and women getting their limbs blown off or cut apart. Gun shots, mines, building demolition, detonated bridges, helicopter crashes were all shown. Perhaps the most interesting segment involved three journalists standing two yards apart from each other on a field.
“Okay, keep calm,” said the first.
“Just don’t move, you keep saying. Well what should we do then?”
“Look, Harry just walked onto that pebble and he was fine. Just follow him onto the pebble. The white one over there.”
“What pebble?”
“Look, just follow him.”
Each of them walked one step forward: they were all immediately killed.
“Now that’s not the way to do it,” Peter said later, before emitting a loud chuckle.
In another segment, a multi-storeyed building was on fire, the sky seemingly illuminated by fireworks. The film cut to a correspondent Jonathan had seen on television for years. He rapped his knuckles on a hotel room door. He was shouting an Arab name, imploring him to come out and go filming with him. “We’ve got to, they have to, come on!” he shouted.
When the man came out with his gear they went and found another Arab man in the canteen, a sound-man by the looks of his equipment. He immediately, got up and joined them, walking through a hotel lobby.
“I remember telling them, go closer, go closer,” the reporter said beside a destroyed wall, obviously in daylight and filmed much later. “I stayed back and then,” the reporter looked down and paused before returning his eyes to the camera, “there was a bright flash and both of them were killed. It was terrible.”
Only John was smiling when the video ended. Peter then handed out some laminated cards, covered in yellow and orange symbols. “This will be useful. Keep it on you and you can tell what kinds of hazards are around you. It describes what the markings on missiles, planes, mines and shells actually mean so that you’re not caught out.”
Jonathan shivered slightly as he imagined himself digging in a minefield to look at what stickers were on the mines beneath him.
“Now, they obviously give you a kit when you go into a dangerous area and this is it,” Peter said, proudly lifting up a small cloth bag. Inside it is all you need to protect you against the hazards that may await you. There’s a pair of eye-protecting goggles,” he took out a pair of cheap looking imitation Ray-Ban sunglasses.
“There’s a life jacket.” A dusty orange bib failed to inflate as he yanked a cord that had sprung from the bag. Peter then began to blow on what looked like a kazoo.
“There’s a bar of chocolate,” a fragment of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate, the size of a small finger nail was unwrapped and consumed.
“There’s a sun hat with protective covering,” he brought out a floppy white sun hat, the top of which was made of yellow acetate, the kind one finds in file-dividers.
“A box of matches with which to light fires.” A small hotel matchbook was produced.
“Some plasters.” A single waterproof Elastoplast in a small cellophane packet came out of the bag, “very useful that’s been,” Peter added.
“Various screws and bolts, a bottle of ink, another whistle, some aspirins, a packet of playing cards, a roll of film, a cotton-reel, three pairs of handkerchiefs and a woollen mitten.”
So strange was the recitation that Jonathan, too, was now writing the contents of the “hazard” bag down on a bus ticket he had found in his inside pocket.
“Obviously, a proper half-day hazard course will be paid for by us so that you will have more training in this field.”
“So, what happens if someone gets hurt while we’re shooting? I’m on a short contract, so I wondered what sort of insurance we get,” John asked. He was for the first time looking perturbed by the show.
“Oh, you’re fully insured. However, you’ll find out more on your course. But the camera, the rest of the equipment, that’s definitely all insured. So don’t worry about having to stump up the cash to pay for a forty thousand pound camera when you get blown up,” Peter smiled.
“What about previous accidents?” asked John, refusing to let go, “what happened to them?”
“Well,” Peter smiled, “I know of one story where a producer was out filming on a public street and he left a tripod in a dangerous position. An old lady tripped over it and sprained her leg and then sued.”
“Sued the producer or sued the Corporation?”
“Sued the producer in the end,” Peter mumbled before saying sternly, “The Corporation isn’t there to protect you.”
Jonathan looked troubled.

***

There is no map of Television Centre.
Jonathan asked receptionists, personnel departments, secretaries, production assistants and they all said that, unfortunately, there was none and, in addition, there were no plans for ever producing one. Another producer who had been getting lost a lot joked to his editor that if, somehow, everyone at the Corporation died, they would have to send explorers into the building to map the place out, in the manner of Vasco da Gamma or Columbus. The editor stared at him for an instant and then left the newsroom. Jonathan didn’t laugh either.
The office, though, was mapped out. On one set of twelve desks, pushed together, World Service Television News people sat at all times. On a set of four desks, sat the Good Morning, Britain people and on a set of eight sat production staff from an odd lunchtime programme that no-one knew anything about.
He was assigned the Good Morning, Britain desk and sat at the computer, still baffled by the news-wires flashing on the screen. A bit of exploration of the computer system offered stranger things still. There were diaries, one for foreign news that usually concerned America, Japan, France, Germany and Italy. Another was for home news, and each day’s entry began with a list of royal engagements throughout the UK. There was also an Economics diary, perhaps the best kept of all and one that was certainly more international. And then there was a special asterisked queue devoted to detailed information about the rapes and murders of a particularly grim serial killer who had been convicted some years ago.
Another queue was reserved for staff comments, a place where mutinous employees deployed stinging invective against their bosses. Jonathan laughed out loud on reading one comment about an editor.
His amusement was interrupted by the arrival of a researcher and day editor. They were each carrying copies of the far right Daily Mail, the newspaper of choice amongst many staff. Mondays, Jonathan would learn, were different. The first weekday was reserved for earnest reading of The Guardian newspaper, which published its television jobs’ section on that day. Also in the hands of today’s shift were hot-off-the-press copies of Ariel, the Corporation staff paper.
“Well, read the papers then,” said the day editor who later introduced himself as Julian. “We’re story hunting and if you don’t find anything by eleven o’clock I’ll send you out to do the new chocolate bar that’s being launched by Clover’s. Apparently, it’s soft on the outside and hard on the inside.”
“That sounds great,” said Anne, the researcher, “have you had one? Will we get any to taste?”
“They sent me a whole box. I brought some in last week…it must have all gone.” said Julian, peering over a loose gossip column page from his paper. Now, come on, settle down and get some stories. I’m going to have my hair cut and if you haven’t got a story by the time I get back, it’s chocolates.”
“How about this?” Jonathan asked, “this bank that’s gone under. There’s a final judgement that comes tomorrow?” Jonathan was interested in banks. Over the years, he had accumulated a few thousand pounds in savings through thrift and solitude.
Julian put down the paper, his hazel eyes looking like they were deep in concentration. The researcher looked up from the newspaper she was reading. In the silence, Julian began to peer upwards, as if searching for dirt on the ceiling.
“I’ll tell you when I get back, but try phoning for some comment.” Then he got up and left.
Jonathan looked around the office. All the important stories were continuing ones: wars, budget crises, cease-fires and so forth. During the day, they would have to take “feeds”, three minute video-packages that had already been completed overseas. They also had to call up and reconfirm guests that had been booked the previous week to appear on tomorrow morning’s programme. The package they had to come up with was an “extra”, a piece to fill up the air time or, if luck would have it, an unprepared-for news story that looked like it was going to break in the night.
“This is GNS!” Pause. “Reports are coming in of new shelling in Sarajevo. Casualties unknown at the moment.” The announcement came over the Tannoy speakers that sat like gun-turrets on the newsroom wall. For an instant every person in the room halted in hope. The interregnum that lay between the activating of the announcer’s microphone and the movement of his lips to speak was a long one. Suddenly, in that pause, everyone became part of a huge lottery syndicate, the balls in a Brownian spin. Would he be announcing imminent nuclear Armageddon or the arrest of a soap star?
But, today, the balls landed like clay for the kiln. What the announcer offered was merely news that had already been served on the wires. Over time, Jonathan would realise that this made a mockery of the Tannoy-man’s urgent tone. Though he could say the words ‘We are getting reports of…” like Orson Welles, he could never match sombre mood for information. Perhaps his worst performances were when he had to announce the “To be or not to be” of public address announcers. No week passed without the urgent recitation: “This is a test! This is a test!”
The bank story Jonathan had picked up on was not new either. It had broken years before as the worst bank collapse in history. What was new was that there was going to be a court ruling that might compensate savers at the bank. This was his story, or at least the story the newspapers were pursuing. He selected a name from the list of action groups on the computer and dialled.
“Hi, I’m calling from the Corporation. We’re looking to do a story on the court ruling tomorrow. I just wondered about your thoughts, which way it‘s going to go and so on. And whether there was anything new that’s come to your notice?”
“Oh, hello. Yes, yes. Shut up, Harry, it’s the Corporation, hang on.” There was a pause, a dog barking, the sound of a police siren. “There’s quite a bit. You see we’ve got papers showing the Bank of England was completely negligent, that they withheld information, that the whole regulatory regime there is useless.”
“Well, obviously, that would be very interesting,” Jonathan replied.
“You people usually want a saver, I can help out there. There’s a good woman who’s been quite active. I’ll call her and tell her to call you back. In the meantime, perhaps I can fax this stuff over to you?”
“That would be great,” Jonathan replied, already looking forward to Julian’s return. He smiled at the researcher, who looked up from the paper and bit into a crisp.
Julian returned with a fiercely short haircut, making him look like Peter, who had been quiet all day, just mechanically tapping numbers into a nearby computer. Julian agreed to go ahead with the story and told Jonathan to get moving. Jonathan arranged two interviews, one with an investor who had lost everything and another with a banking analyst at one of the City’s merchant banks. “Always get an analyst,” said Julian.
“And take Jane, she’s the assigned reporter, you’ll find her in the Economics Unit on the other side of the corridor. And call John, who’s our camera-person,” said Julian, as Jonathan declined a cup of coffee from a researcher on another desk. The offering of coffee was an intermittent comma that punctuated life in a newsroom without a coffee machine. Not an hour went past without someone asking a select number of people whether they wanted a cup of coffee. Even to Jonathan, who had started life in London making coffee, he would come to see that the offering of coffee was a momentous ritual.
Right across from newsroom was the Economics Unit, a place that inspired fear in producers because of its power and the strength of its views. Those who were employed there were known to have close links to the Corporation hierarchy and they were also known to have a single view about how the economies of the world should be run. Their office was much neater, a sign in itself of the power of the department. In it, reporters sat waiting to be collected by producers, en route to the car park downstairs. Jane was fortyish, toothy and with mousy, flyaway hair.
“Hello, I’ve just been told you’re one of the Breakfast reporters, we’re doing a piece about the court decision over the collapse of…”
“Yes, I know. Julian told me. Right, let’s go. Have you got some cuttings?” She stared at him suspiciously.
Jonathan handed over a copy of today’s newspaper and as she glanced at it, he could tell she regarded him as so much grime.
“It’s quite interesting because the real story is to do with the Bank of England which let the bank continue for longer than it should have,” Jonathan said, excitedly.
“Hmm…” she said dubiously.
“Well, I told John, who’s our camera-person, we’d be down in five minutes.”
“Well, we’d better get going then. I know John, I haven’t seen him for a while.” She smiled a toothy grin, as if her whole set was about to leap out and fall on to the keyboard of her computer terminal. Jonathan walked towards the door, noticing the other reporters, each sporting either sceptical or smiling mouths. Some of them were reading tabloid papers, others chatted loudly on the phone in confident but at the same time, unintelligible, voices.
“Are you coming with us?” Jane asked to Jonathan’s surprise. She was pulling herself into her long black coat.
“I thought I would,” Jonathan replied said rather unsurely.
She moved her head as if taken aback and then slowly nodded with a frown. She was a quick walker and was out of the office and at the lifts a minute before Jonathan, even though they left the Economics Unit at the same time.
“There’s really no need for you to come along you know,” Jane said to him as they waited, side by side.
“But I know the people we’re going to talk to.”
She said nothing more and they entered the lift listening to two presenters analyse the merits of two makeup artists.
“Did he say we’d meet him at the car park?” Jane asked.
Jonathan nodded.
“That’s in the basement. Look, I’ve just got to talk to the travel agents. I’ll meet you down there in a second. Alright?” Her smile, because of her teeth, made her look like a frightening walrus.
Suddenly she’d vanished from the lift at ground level. Jonathan, alone, had arrived at what looked like a forbidding cellar on a lower ground floor. It was lit by bare light bulbs that trailed cables along the adjoining corridors. Balls of fluff, knee-high, blew about like tumbleweed and the scent of rotting wood infused the air. He ran down the corridor, thinking he saw exits further down only to find they were tricks of the lights. Where the walls were shinier, they looked like gaps. Eventually, he found a Sellotaped hatch and broke through it. He travelled through another corridor, passing the now usual hanging-from-the-ceiling asbestos-like foam. Further on, he passed noisy rooms where the walls were flaking. They housed deafening generators and shrieking air conditioning motors. Just near there, he discovered a door that led into what looked like a dimly lit garage. It was the car park. In one of the four or five spaces, Jane was already seated in an estate car, looking at her watch whilst she talked to John the cameraman. She scowled at Jonathan when he came to the window and waved a free hand at the pair of them.
“Hi!” he said, “Hi, John.”
“Hello, you can probably squeeze in the back there, but be careful not to bash the tripod,” he said, turning to Jane and letting his eyes rise to the roof of the car.
Jonathan scrambled into the back seat of the estate car, putting his mobile phone, some clippings and his notebook on the passenger seat.
“Right, where are we going?” Jane asked.
Jonathan gave John the address. The cameramen responded by drawing his pullover sleeves back from his wrists and starting the car. Jane leaned over and pressed a button on the dashboard which caused bright light to pour in from the where a large steel door was opening. They had left the building.
“It’s a little like Batman,” John said to Jonathan, “working up on the seventh floor and than taking a lift into the basement to drive out of the centre.” John laughed, quietly at first and then progressively louder. With each new volume increase came more spittle on the windscreen. Then, quite suddenly, the whooping subsided into silence and John began to wiped his face clean with a handkerchief.
Jane raised the subject of her children and John responded by talking about his. They ran through what types of clothes their children liked, what toys, what foods.
Carefully choosing his moment, Jonathan spoke up. “So, er, the story for today,” he interjected.
There were a few moments of silence.
“So, John, had any luck finding private schools in your area?” Jane asked
“Not really thought about it,” John replied.
“I haven’t actually. Although, one has to get them in early if one wants a place, that’s what my friends say.”
“Sorry,” Jonathan interrupted, “the bank story will need some…”
“Was Harry okay about you going away to do that series? I remember you were having some trouble,” John said to Jane.
“Oh yes, it was fine.”
“It’s actually quite complicated, the…” Jonathan tried to interrupt again.
“That’s good, it is quite tough on family and friends, isn’t it?”
“You see, the bank…”
“I suppose it is. Oh, look at that driver over there.”
“The questions should…”
“Nice weather today, better than yesterday.”
“Jane, I…”
“Do you remember when we were out shooting in, where was it?”
In the cramped space allowed him by the tripod and assorted video equipment, Jonathan, so rebuffed, began to doze off. He wasn’t used to getting up so early in the morning and this first day had already made him drowsy. He only awoke when his car-door suddenly opened.
“Asleep? We’re not going to get any filming done that way, are we?” Jane said, holding a menacing video light attachment in her right hand as if about to smash it over Jonathan’s head.
He clambered out, looking up and down the suburban street. Straight ahead of him, he watched Jane forcefully rap the knocker of a dilapidated-looking door. Repeatedly, she pounded it like a winning prize-fighter.
“Hello, Mrs. Clam, we’re from the Corporation. Excuse me.” Jane had barged past the frail woman, pushing her out onto her doorstep to pick up the broken knocker from the patio.
“Shall I make some tea?” Mrs. Clam asked, looking up at John, who was carrying the video camera high on his shoulder.
“Tea, that would be lovely,” he replied, marching in.
Mrs. Clam sadly fingered the gold coloured knocker for a few seconds and followed the camera-person inside, gently closing the door.
Jonathan walked out onto the pavement and balanced the tripod in his fingers, his other hand trying to grasp his notes and a mobile phone. It took a few attempts but he eventually managed to get to the house and gently tap the leg of the tripod on Mrs. Clam’s door.
“Hello, Mrs. Clam,” he said when she had answered, “we spoke on the phone.” Jonathan looked down at the trail of muddy footprints now decorating Mrs. Clam’s fraying living room carpet.
“Yes, come in. Your people have just gone in,” she said politely. Mrs. Clam was short woman with straight grey hair on the sides of her small head and a clump of dyed brown hair on the top. She had a smooth face, small eyes and a button nose and made Jonathan feel as if though it wasn’t her fault, she thought he was somehow extraneous to the filming.
Inside, there was a desk, a white sofa and some plastic chairs. On the mantelpiece of the thin, hallway-like room, were photographs of children and an empty bottle of brandy. The bottle was green and smart looking as if its presence were to lend the room some charm. Opposite the mantelpiece was the sofa. It sat, fluffed up, under a framed A4 size magazine page depicting Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Jane jumped onto the sofa and lay down, her walking boots hanging off an arm rest where they scuffed some yellow sheeting that covered a side table.
“I’ll have some Earl Grey, please,” Jane said, letting her head fall on the other arm rest. She picked her hairclip from her head and began to examine it, accidentally pulling a tablecloth off another side-table with her elbow.
“Oh, don’t bother about that,” Mrs. Clam said, collecting the broken crockery that had crashed down to the floor. She held up a detached and somewhat ornate teapot spout and looked at it for a moment.
As Mrs. Clam’s fragile body disappeared into the kitchen, John began shifting objects about in the room, occasionally looking down at his feet to the mud that he was dragging across the carpet. “Whoops-a-daisy,” he said.
When the cups of tea emerged, Jane and Mrs. Clam sat down and were “miked up”.
“Sorry, there was no Earl Grey, I could have gone out and got some from the shop only I have to pick up my son from school at four.” Mrs. Clam frowned a little.
Jane looked unconvinced and lowered her head to her clipboard. “I’m recording this on my tape recorder for my own use so don’t worry,” she said cryptically before placing a small Dictaphone at her feet.
Jonathan stood in a corner, watching the interview.
“So how has the bank collapse affected you?” she asked to Jonathan’s satisfaction. This was the opening question he had wanted to advise her to ask in the car.
“Well, it’s been a bit hard…” Mrs. Clam’s head was inclined towards Jane’s feet.
“It’s pretty hard for everybody, you know.” Jane interrupted sternly.
“Yes…yes, of course. Well, as I was saying it’s been a bit hard but it’s hard for most people. We’re losing the flat, you see.” She looked up.
“Why’s that?” Jane asked angrily.
“Well, my husband, Johnny, he borrowed some money for his business and he used…”
“What?” Jane asked, wrinkling her nose and looking as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “He borrowed money on the house?” She tittered a little before looking stern again. “Didn’t the man realise that that would be risky? Putting you all, your family at risk?” Jane asked, more incredulously.
“Well, it was a good business. We had lots of customers and the rate offered by this bank was good, so yes…it’s all a risk and in the end I guess, well, we were just unlucky.” Mrs. Clam’s eyes were slightly watery and had begun to sparkle under John’s lights. She looked younger.
“That’s right,” Jane said in a coaxing, comforting way.
“Although, it was terrible when the bank went under. Johnny was convinced the Bank of England had been negligent, they hadn’t bothered to supervise this bank properly. He had papers showing they knew it was going under but the Bank of England refused to do anything about it, until people working there got the money out of the bank. The thing is Johnny was trying to campaign and then he had this tragic accident and…”
“We can pause there if you want,” said Jane, even more comfortingly. There had been a loud click as Jane switched off her Dictaphone midway through Mrs. Clam’s speech.
“Well,” Mrs. Clam, said, large tears in her eyes, “the papers were gone. It’s all so terrible.”
“Here,” Jane said, offering Mrs. Clam an arm rest cover she had untangled from her boots. “Wipe your nose on that. You’ll feel a lot better. Anyway, so to recap, both you and your husband realised that this whole thing was an almighty risk. What happened, this whole saga…well, basically you’ve been unlucky. If you’d been lucky, we wouldn’t have heard anything about you.”
“Unlucky. Yes…we have been terribly unlucky. Some people are lucky and others are just unlucky I suppose. We took a risk and we lost. It’s like the races, really,” Mrs, Clam looked almost cheery. “Although, I don’t know why it was us that had to lose our savings. I suppose it could have been anyone losing their savings…it’s just been God’s will really,” Mrs. Clam forced a smile.
“John, you got that?” Jane said, smiling and looking satisfied, her front tooth sticking over her lower lip.
“Let me just check,” John said before playing the footage back through his headphones. As he did so, Jonathan glanced into the distance and suddenly noticed that behind Mrs. Clam there was a glinting gold-coloured candelabra and that the camera shot must have included it. Jonathan would think nothing of this, nor the small enamel brooch on Mrs. Clam’s collar until he got back to TV Centre.

All Rights Reserved (c) 2005 Afshin Rattansi

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