Butternut orbited around a nucleus of
tension between Kenneth and Roger as they sat in a perpetual standoff, facing
each other behind their huge square desks. Although only a few feet apart they may have as well have
been on different continents for all the conversation that passed between
them. A reluctant acknowledgement
of each other’s existence when they arrived, and another when the left for the
evening, was all their sacred vow of non-communication allowed. Anything else was relayed via their
staff, mutual friends or clients.
All in all this arrangement worked quite
well. If there was something that
the other needed to know they usually found out about it sooner or later –
often too late, but it was probably healthy to release the glacial tension that
formed between them every now and then with a cataclysmic row. This state of affairs had the
additional benefit of perfectly preserving the company under a think layer of
stasis. While the economic tide
went about its business of washing competitors away and delivered bright new
prospects into the market place, Butternut just sat there like a rusty oil
platform, sucking just enough revenue from the financial services sector to
keep it afloat.
And it was into this frigid atmosphere that
Rupert injected the latest draft of his script before retreating to the
relative safety of his own desk in the production office. He leafed through his copy of the
document trying to imagine what Kenneth was thinking. Once again he experienced the feeling of being invaded by
Kenneth, of suddenly noticing the flaws that would soon be brought to his
attention. Once again he felt
Kenneth step through the printed page into his mind and stride through his
argument prodding and scrutinising each idea and assertion. During these
inspections Rupert was reduced to a state of dithering anxiety, incapable of
doing, or thinking about, anything else.
“There goes another packet of custard
creams”.
His reverie was interrupted by Noreen, the
Office Manager, who strutted across to her desk and locked Rupert into her
deadly parasitic gaze. My
God! Wasn’t it enough to have
Kenneth rampaging through his psyche without Noreen attempting to suck his body
mass out through his eye sockets?
“Oh dear,” he said, with just enough
concern to show he cared (which he didn’t) but not enough to invite a full
explanation of what had just gone on in the ladies toilets (which he got
anyway). It kind of made sense
that the chairwoman of the regional sugar craft guild should disappear into the
toilet with a packet of custard creams rather than a bottle of Vodka.
“I can’t help myself. I had to make myself sick again, but at
least I managed to eat them all first.”
Lovely. Rupert managed to prize himself away from her stare, the
majority of his body weight still intact.
A muffled sound like a toilet flushing in a padded cell emanated from
Noreen’s stomach as her preventative plumbing kicked in. Twelve months earlier she had been a
bouncing twenty-two stone. Rupert
and his colleagues had been repeatedly subjected to the video of her launching
herself like a jet propelled hot air balloon off the diving board of her local
swimming pool.
But the big Noreen had had a slim-line
version of herself in mind and had a valve fitted to bring about a more
decorous size twelve. But as the
folds of fat evaporated away her appetite grew even more voracious, fuelled by
her growing dread of what she saw in the mirror. Her skin too failed to downsize in proportion to her mass,
beginning to hang loosely from her withered frame like a collapsed
spinnaker. Her stomach was stapled
to take up the slack, but her face took on the miserable demeanor of a bereaved
seventy-year old. She was only
forty-three.
“How about a coffee Noreen?”
“Don’t think I could stomach it.”
“No, I mean for us.”
“I’ll have to wash the cups up.”
She busied herself collecting the empties
and headed off with the washing up bowl.
Rupert didn’t see her take it, but he knew a packet of Jammie Dodgers
had gone with her as well.
“Right.”
Kenneth emerged from his office with the
script in his hand. Strange,
Rupert hadn’t felt him leave his brain.
Perhaps he was still there.
“Shall we go in here,” Kenneth said,
leading him into the meeting room next door. Rupert had long since given up fantasizing about him
striding out of the office, slapping the script on his desk and saying “Superb
Rupe Boy! Go shoot the
thing.” Instead, draft after draft
would ensue, until the week before the shoot Kenneth would stay at home for an
afternoon and write the thing himself.
Still, it was an interesting exercise.
Kenneth shut the door behind them. This was going to be a long one. Rupert glanced at the buttress-topped
walls of the prison across the road from the office. ‘Lucky buggers!’ he thought.
A short and unsightly figure Kenneth smelt
as if someone had emptied a carton of yogurt over him many years earlier but
never got round to taking him to the dry cleaners. His nose was obviously built with a larger head in mind and
had sprouted a thicket of nasal hair in protest at its misplacement.
“Did you see Question Time last night?” he
asked, pushing the script away from him to signal that they had far more
important things to talk about. “I
have to say that Dennis Skinner was absolutely right…” He always seemed to prefix his views
with phrases like “I have to say…” and “In my opinion…” and “I cannot accept …”
as if in some way his opinions actually mattered. That he had been asked to appear to express them for the
edification of the general public.
And so it began again; Kenneth talking, and Rupert’s mind wandering in
and out of his argument, showing just enough interest to fuel the ongoing
monologue with utterances like “yes Kenneth I see what you mean,” and “that
would certainly seem to be the case,” and “yes Kenneth what you’re saying is
definitely correct. I fail to see
how anybody as intelligent and educated as us two could possibly think anything
else”.
When he wasn’t listening his mind sometimes
wondered off to the other end of the long table, sat down and pointed an accusing
finger back at himself saying “Call this working in telly?” For this was not what Rupert had had in
mind for himself. As a teenager
things had looked fairly bright.
He could paint good pictures from his imagination and put together a
catchy, if basic, ditty on the pianoforte. Not exactly Elton John but enough to summon a tear of pride
(or was it embarrassment?) to the eye of his mother at school musical
evening. He could also write a
decent poem (many of which still adorned his mother’s fridge) or short
story. Unfortunately these
abilities failed to grow and mature along with those special centrally located
areas of his anatomy. In fact,
when it was time to call upon them to inspire his choice of career all they did
was blow a raspberry in his face and hop away trying to avoid the cracks in the
pavement.
He felt like one of those signs that twirl
in the wind outside second-hand tyre companies and used car lots. His said GENIUS on one side and NO
HOPER on the other. When it began
to spin in the winds of change that signaled the end of his sixth form career
he fell into the category of NGOEHNOIPUESR. And like all the other ngoehnoipuesr’s around a career in TV
seemed like the only real option.
At University he made several half-hearted
attempts to immerse himself in TV-related activities; staying sober just long
enough to co-write a film review for the Film Soc magazine, spend an afternoon
squeezed into a dark alleyway with the entire TV Society trying to shoot a
neo-gothic post-modern psycho-drama and fail three auditions at the University
Theatre, the most embarrassing of which involved failing to get the part of a
horse. But despite his failure to
achieve anything much apart from a generally poor state of health and life-long
aversion to cheap whisky he still believed that, come the day of reckoning, a
career in TV would just fall into place.
But he was soon to discover that bringing
on fresh new talent was not at the top of the TV companies’ agenda. The only people they were taking on
where people who knew how sack lots of people – legally. True, the BBC was training six people a
year in a secret bunker in Buckinghamshire (later to be repurposed as the set
for Teletubbies), but demand was so high that it made the queue for NASA’s
first Martian package holidays look like the Afghan Airways check in at
Heathrow. But undeterred Rupert
felt compelled to write long letters to them all, pointing out that although he
had no relevant skills and knowledge, the sheer variety of his irrelevant skills and knowledge
illustrated his inherent flexibility and willingness to learn. He got no response.
But a mixture of extreme self-confidence
and a vague notion of divine providence left over from Sunday School left him
in no doubt that the way forward was laid out before him – he just needed to
find the light switch.
The light came while he was naively ringing
round all the local Corporate Production companies in the area and happened
upon Butternut. Had Rupert
believed in a rational and well-thought out approach to life’s big decisions he
would have asked a few questions of those who knew and deduced that Corporate
Television was not a root into broadcast TV. Exactly the opposite – it was the escape route for a large
proportion of those it had legally disposed of. Not being that kind of person, and trusting his own worst
instincts, he happily boarded the lifeboat without even setting foot on the
liner itself.
Partner Kenneth Nutall was planning a
personal crisis of the mid-life kind in the near future. Recognising himself in Rupert’s green
intellectualism he invited him in for a chat. With his outer coating of
academic achievement still shiny and new Rupert dazzled Kenneth with his
ability to analyse any given subject to within an inch of its life, not to
mention his willingness to submit totally to the partners’ superiority and make
them tea while being paid practically nothing. Kenneth wielded a deadly arsenal of opinions and, as nobody
else in the office would talk to him, he needed someone new for target
practice. So he bought Rupert.
And so he sat, obediently issuing
auto-responses as the sun circled around the Butternut offices, before
bunkering down behind the prison at the other side of the dual carriage way,
which clogged then gradually cleared as the good people of Leeds drained away
into the night. But there
was no escape for him.
Coming straight from university and without
any real views relating to real-world issues, Rupert was powerless to
resist. The effect of the Great
Vowel Shift on the vowel sounds of Early Modern English did not constitute a
realistic defense against Kenneth’s opinions. He’d also committed the cardinal sin of not being born until
1972, thus failing to be old enough to savour the benefits of a Labour
government when there still was one.
Luckily, Kenneth had taken it upon himself to fill that gap in his
personal history, plugging it with an appreciation of the sheer lunacy and
damn-right evil of the Thatcher years.
Rupert had always assumed that opinions
were developed over time through debate and the careful sifting and
consideration of others’ views.
Yet Kenneth seemed to have been born with his, leaving Rupert to curse
his father for the ambivalence of his gene pool. So he settled into the role of Kenneth’s full-time firing
range, exposed to a continuous barrage of in-bred views. Unopposed, many of his doctrines took
root, his friends and family noticing a mysterious red colouration seeping
across his character.
By the time Kenneth looked again at the
script in front of him the dual carriage way was quite and the prison walls
were etched black against the fading pink dusk. Kenneth nibbled the edge of a large ready-salted crisp like
some kind of grotesque humanoid hamster.
“Anyway,” he said as the fury of social
injustice slowly drained away and he focussed on the stapled slab of A4. “I
don’t want to spend too much time on this so let’s keep this brief.”
Outside the last of the street lamps opened
its blood-shoot eye and blinked a few times to accustom itself to the
gloom. Kenneth’s biro meandered
over the opening paragraph as he read.
It progressed swiftly on to the second, weaving its faint trail over the
first sentence, then the second, then the third. Looking good, thought Rupert. Perhaps a few tweaks needed, then into production. He began to feel quite good about the
whole thing until suddenly the third paragraph bit back at the biro’s wandering
tip which retreated back into its lid and decided to play dead on the table
top. Kenneth pushed the document
away again. He had exposed himself
for long enough to the idle scribbles.
Putting the half nibbled crisp back into
the packet he lowered his head, clamped his hands together and wedged them
beneath his nose in a gesture of worshipful concentration.
“What is this actually about?”
Thus the document was declared
untreatable. Rupert was already
towing it away in his mind to throw on the growing heap of discarded write-offs
which characterised his time at the company.
“It’s about minimising the risk imposed by
bank raids both in terms of financial loss and psychological trauma,” he
recalled from the Aims and Objectives section of the project proposal. Kenneth frowned with disdain. Strange, thought Rupert. He
wrote it.
“Okay,” he said, trying really hard not to
dismiss his apprentice’s feeble efforts.
He gave him another chance – “And what else is it about?”
“It’s about preparing staff for the
eventuality of a raid by showing them what happens during a typical raid in a
hard hitting and memorable way…you know…the fire drill principle.”
Surely this was what Kenneth was driving at
– the corner stone of communication theory that had been drilled into him from
the first day he set foot in Butternut:
To read is to forget. To be told is to forget. To be told and then shown is to
remember for a couple of days and then forget. To be told, shown and then talk about it for a while is to
remember at least until the next big drinking session. But to do is to remember, and
keep on remembering.
But Kenneth was still not satisfied:
“And?”
“Showing staff how to behave in the event
of a raid to minimise the danger to themselves and their colleagues.”
“Yes, that’s important. But what else?”
“Providing guidelines on the simple
measures that staff can take to help identify the offender after the incident…”
“Diligence.
That’s what it’s about.”
Oh no. That word again.
Di’ligence n. doing more than one strictly has to
in order to keep one’s job and get paid every month. That holy grail of the professional trainer. That baffling
concept, unavailable to the majority of staff.
“It’s easy to get stuck in the rut of our
daily routines, carrying out the procedures we’ve been trained to do to the
best of our ability,” said Kenneth, taking on the ultra-patronising Michael
Buerke tone that could only mean that an unimaginable disaster was just around
the corner. “That’s all fine in
the normal course of things. But what about when something extraordinary happens?
What then? How can we train
staff to expect the unexpected?”
This wasn’t a question aimed at
Rupert. He was out of the equation
now. Kenneth was homing in for the
kill. This was his baby now and
all Rupert needed to do was watch and admire.
“Umm...,” he volunteered, respectfully
tongue-tied.
“Remember that mystery shopper video?”
“Umm… Yes. I think so.”
“Remember the effect that had on customer
care standards?”
“A very high effect…yes.”
“Why?”
“Umm.
In what sense do you mean ‘why’ here?”
“Why did it work so successfully as a piece
of communication?”
“Because they were scared…?”
“No!
Because it made staff aware of how they came across to customers. It created a context within which that mattered. They could be caught on film acting like a cretin.”
“Yes, Kenneth. That was really good…”
“What we need to do is change the mind set
of staff. Make them take a look at
themselves in a different way. Are
they complying with the Bank’s security regulations? Do they really know what to do if someone shoves a sawn-off’
in their face?”
Kenneth was spitting now. Rupert got that strange feeling deep
down that someone was going to get hurt here.
“Remember the fire drill principle?”
“Yes, I mentioned it a moment ago…”
“Come on,” he wailed out of pure misplaced
frustration. “You’ve got to
remember these principles. They’re
your friends. Use them.
We’ve got to bring the idea of armed raids alive to staff.
“Really scare them you mean…”
“No! This isn’t about fear. It’s about diligence.”
“No! This isn’t about fear. It’s about diligence.”