The one thing I didn’t spot nestling amongst the knickers and the gin as I rifled through Lucinda’s luggage on Friday morning was the 'Paper Brick', a.k.a Admirable Productions 10-year Business Plan. She dropped it in my lap at the most unwelcome moment late yesterday afternoon, just as the sun was losing its sting and E and I were gathering our energies to mosey on down to the tennis court in the village for a set or two in front of the disapproving stares of the local pétanquists. “I think you better stay here and do your homework,” Lucinda said, appropriating my racquet and balls and putting a faintly predatory arm around E, who shrank from her visibly. My first instinct was to tell her to shove her monstrous document very firmly where the sun hasn’t shone since Bill the Banker left her, but then I reflected on whose divorce settlement was bankrolling this whole independent production malarkey (thanks Bill!) – at least until a commission or two is forthcoming – and I decided to bite my tongue and knuckle down to my reading with what little grace I could muster.
It’s not exactly a secret that I don’t really do strategy. The extent of my forward planning during three decades in television has been leaving room for pudding. So to say I found the work heavy going is the mother of all understatements. The turgid, Birtian prose numbed my brain, the endless charts and spreadsheets swam before my eyes. By the time Luce and E returned from my game of tennis (she puce and impossibly sweaty, he like Kurtz after confronting 'the horror') I was fit for murder.
“Who wrote this awful shit?” I demanded of her, not bothering to wait until poor E was out of earshot. “Damian did,” she barked back, anticipating my mood and ready for combat. “And he’s not expecting to be paid for it so you could be a little bit more grateful.” Damian is one of Horsman’s protégés who has somehow attached himself to Luce in Bill’s absence; he’s typical of the wonkish, asexual little worms that have infested the BBC and Channel 4 with a plague of PowerPoint presentations over the last few years.
Oh, he’s expecting to be paid for it all right, I thought, but restricted myself to saying, “Hasn’t he heard of an executive summary?” At that, Luce stomped off in a tremendous bate, leaving me simmering, but she came back in half an hour, in a more emollient mood, after a shower and with a good slug of gin inside her. “Just leave the business plan to me,” she said, making the wicker creak as she leaned her considerable weight on the back of my chair, “but please don’t say we don’t need one. Get this wrong and you’ll be living hand to mouth from one Dispatches to the next, putting all your assets in your wife’s name for fear of going into liquidation and shopping at Morrisons.”
“Good God!” I shuddered.
“Precisely, darling. But get this right and we could be Pat Llewellyn, with so much money gushing out of her 'wazoo' she can afford to blow a million quid building an impossibly large glass box on the back of her house to showcase her impossibly tall, impossibly bald and impossibly grumpy husband and still have enough left over to buy up most of southern Wales.”
At that, Luce went inside, leaving me with plenty to ponder, including the shape and scope of my favourite Welsh woman’s ‘wazoo’. I love Pat, but I think Tim Hincks may be a better, more gender appropriate role model for me. Now where can I buy a beige Nehru jacket and a fluffy white cat?
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