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CHAPTER FOUR

  The Channel 8 studios stood on the top of Knobs Hill, looking westwards to the blue haze of the mountains and eastwards, like Kipling’s pagoda, to the sea. When they’d been built in the mid-1950s, it was a district of farms and market gardens on the edge of the city but now they were in the midst of middle-class Sydney suburbia. The grounds were still extensive, however, and the marshy bit down by the creek occasionally stood in for tropical Queensland when drama required a cheap location shot. There was also a helicopter landing pad in its own little compound and several huge satellite dishes gathered news from around the world and bird droppings from a more local source.

  The first time Rob had seen the studios it had been early morning as he walked nervously up the hill from the railway station ready to tackle his first script conference for the Network. The buildings had risen through the mist, so it seemed to his excited eyes, like many- towered Camelot. He soon found out, of course, that there was no Round Table, chivalry was in short supply and the Holy Grail was nothing more precious than winning the 7pm time slot in every major capital city. On the other hand there was a Siege Perilous. On which his backside now perched uneasily.

  Sitting with the indicator flashing, waiting for the sluggish traffic to clear so he could make a right turn, he looked up at the huge billboard in front of the studio gates. Staring back at him was a designer-stubbled bloke wearing checked chef’s pants and a blue, flour puffed singlet. His teeth gleamed like a cannibal’s necklace and his tattooed arms, pumped in the gym and photo-shopped in a computer, were folded across his chest in the manner of Chopper Read. Instead of guns he grasped seeded baguettes in both hands. The poster bore the legend: Luke North – The Master Baker. Underneath, it continued: “Weeknights at 7.30 – Only on 8 – Your Master Baking Station.” Bloody reality TV, Rob thought unkindly as he turned into the studios.

  Finding a shaded parking spot near the tennis courts didn’t make up for the lousy start he’d had to the day. As he climbed out of his air-conditioned sanctuary, the Network chopper rose from behind the bushes, did an about turn, and climbed into the empyrean, sunlight bouncing blindingly off its nose and rotor blades. He sniffed the hot, humid air: ah, nothing like the nauseating smell of aviation fuel first thing in the morning.

  He trudged up the incline towards the studio, shirt glued to his back. Leaves, dry as old bones, crackled and disintegrated under his feet. Scabs of bark hung from the eucalypts and the air vibrated with the harsh trill of a million cicadas. He’d tried joking with the police officer that he wasn’t actually talking on the mobile, he was listening to a lecture from his wife but he’d been handed the penalty notice without even the hint of a smile, just a perfunctory: “Have a good day, drive carefully, sir.”

  More trudging took him past the tennis courts and the audience reception area through the windows of which he could see some of the cast rehearsing. God, it must be so much easier to be an actor than a writer. Nicer. More pleasant. Look at them - drinking coffee, swapping stories, laughing, flirting. Camaraderie. Now, there was a word you rarely heard among the writing fraternity. Fraternity. There was another word you rarely heard. He saw Shane, one of the older actors, turning a script over to look at the title page, holding the script lightly by the corner, the way he might have held a soiled nappy. It might be paranoia but Rob could only think that it was because Shane wanted to know who wrote this shitty episode. Distracted, he wasn’t aware of the red sports car hurtling towards him till it skidded to a halt in a squeal of ceramic brakes and shredded tyre fumes.

  “Bloody hell!” He leapt as though a hot iron had fallen on his foot.

  The tinted window buzzed down. “Need to see you this morning,” said Nev Beale from the car’s white leather interior. His tone was that of a vivisectionist inviting a beagle to his laboratory. Rob leaned down to the window’s level but backed off slightly as pungent, cloying fumes wafted towards him.

  “Oh, right. What about? Anything in particular?”

  The window buzzed back up and the car sped off. Christ, what did he want now? A peremptory summons to Nev’s office could mean anything from a severe bollocking on the quality of the scripts to a slap on the back for a job well done. And in between, it could get seriously weird. The half hour he’d once spent being harangued for letting scripts go through with semi-colons in them came to mind. Rob had felt like a character in a Kafka novel, accused of a crime he didn’t even know existed. “Semi-colons”, spat Nev, “are for Jane fucking Austen not serial TV.” Now there was a motion to put to the Oxford Union.

  He traipsed round to the front of the complex where it was all glass and chrome and the flags of all nations flying from lustrous white poles. This was where the VIPs and visiting celebrities were meeted and greeted. Or should that be met and gret? Rob had been passing once and seen Kevin Costner trip over a flower tub. If you looked up (today it was too much effort) you could just see the edge of the shrubbery surrounded balcony behind which the network owner, Stan Drake, had his rarely visited office. Stan had made his fortune out of recycling rubbish so the move into television was a rather obvious sideways one. The rumour mill had it that Stan now wanted to sell the land on which the studio stood for property development in order to bolster the other bits of his business empire which were sagging like a pregnant cow’s udders under the weight of enormous debts. Rob found it hard to sympathise. Anyone who developed property was bound to be as bent as the beckoning finger of the Grim Reaper.

  He slopped round to the loading dock where the hoi polloi made their exits and entrances. Bits of scenery and equipment for OB shooting were being loaded onto trucks while nicotine addicts puffed away outside the huge roller doors, working on their emphysema and flicking their butt-ends into the potted plants. Terry was swapping racing tips with one of the scene shifters. He looked up as Rob passed by.

  “Here, when you going to write me a part in that show of yours?”

  “When we can get Robert de Niro to do the maintenance round here. He’s coming in for an interview on Friday.”

  Terry chuckled. “Don’t forget your footy tips.”

  “I won’t . Go the Rabbitohs”, said Rob, giving a raised fist salute. He had no interest in rugby league but felt an instinctive empathy with floppy eared, cotton tailed varmints as opposed to Sharks, Dragons or Bulldogs. Passing into the blessed shade of the hangar-like workshop area of the studio, he paid no attention to the kangaroo smoking in the corner.

  “Hey, Rob, mate. Wait up!”

  The kangaroo hastily stamped out the cigarette under its giant paw, pushed back its head so that it hung from its shoulders and loped after Rob in the boundless way that an arthritic kangaroo might lope. Rob half turned and recognised, with the slightest of grimaces, the head that now protruded from the kangaroo costume.

  “Greg, mate! What are you doing in that get up? Skippy, the Wilderness Years”?

  Greg, big, flat feet flapping, fell in alongside him.

  “Nah, new kids’ thing. Yeah.”

  “Great”. Rob kept walking, hoping to appear a man in too much of a hurry to detain.

  “So... you had chance to read my submission yet? Not, you know, being pushy or...”

  “Sorry, mate, been flat out like the proverbial lizard.”

  “Right.”

  Oh, god, thought Rob, don’t look so utterly disappointed and deflated.

  “I’ve glanced at it, though”, he said, looking for something placatory. “Formatting, layout’s good. Which is important. Very important.”

  “Layout, yeah.”

  They walked on past the carpenters’ shop with its heady smell of sawdust and resin. Inside, chippies were working on a giant model of a skating shoe for the upcoming new ice dancing show – Australia’s Got Cold Feet.

  “Look, I promise I’ll get back to you by the end of the week.

  They were paused at the bottom of the steps leading up into the script department, surrounded by the monster bric-a-brac shop that was the props area.
Bus stops, footballs, books, crockery, surf boards, heart monitors, beds, a “trespassers will be shot” sign, an MG car bonnet, rolls of “crime scene” tape, a stuffed dog, tins of beans, spaghetti and spam, bicycles, a model of Phar Lap’s heart, a wind-up gramophone, sepia-tinted photographs and a cardboard cut-out of Russell Crowe were among the treasures on display in this shed of sheds.

  “Yeah, sure, no worries. It’s just, well, I really think I can write for the show, know what I mean. Christ, I was in it for six years, should know it backwards, eh?”

  “End of the week, promise.”

  Greg nodded and trooped back towards the loading dock. Once there, he reached into his pouch, which technically speaking was superfluous on the male of the species but nevertheless handy, made sure no-one was looking and took out a small bottle of Bundy. It was a wretched life being a macropod.

  Rob, meanwhile, continued on up the stairs. Why do all actors think they can write? Just because you can recite vast tracts of Shakespeare and Ibsen while avoiding the furniture doesn’t automatically give you insight into the writing process. If only he knew what did.

  Trent Creek, now starring as an FBI operative with psychic powers in the hit American show “Mental Agent”, had written a submission when he was in Rickety Street. He’d included a ten minute unplotted conversation between two abattoir workers on the music of Buxtehude. Rob liked to think that his succinct critique of Trent’s effort had helped concentrate his mind on acting.

  He hated reading submissions, mainly because he hated having to tell the writers that their effort wasn’t good enough which, in nine out ten cases, it wasn’t. It wouldn’t be so bad if he then had time to take them aside and point out where, in his opinion, they were going wrong. To encourage them. To give them hope and sage advice instead of treading on their dreams and seemingly dismissing their efforts as unworthy. There was something Darwinian about it, of course, with only the fittest (read stubborn, pig-headed, insensitive to criticism) persisting. Unfortunately, ipso facto, that meant that the sensitive souls with a feeling for words and an insight into human nature ended up sobbing into their word processors and taking up jobs in call centres. Ah, well, such is life, as Ned Kelly almost certainly never said.

  At the top of the stairs he shouldered open the door to the Script Department above which a sign in bold, Latin script proclaimed “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate”, “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here”. He’d bought the sign himself from a garage saIe in Leichardt. He’d only been in the job a month at the time and thought it might be amusing. It had been part of a pair and he’d hung its partner above his desk at home: “A correre e cagare ci si immerda i garretti” it said. Roughly translated, or so he’d been led to believe, it counselled that “he who runs and defecates at the same time ends up with shit on his heels.” He didn’t think it came from “The Divine Comedy” but he could be wrong.

  “Morning, elves”, Rob called out with forced enthusiasm as he entered the Main Office. “How goes the day?”

  The “Ricketty Street” Script Department was little more than a portakabin on top of scaffolding that had been hastily erected when the studio began to run out of space during the mid-eighties. It still had that provisional feel to it and any morning he felt he might turn up and find empty space where his office used to be. It was also quite possible that the vibrations from a passing truck would send it crashing to the ground while he was having his mid-morning Kit Kat.

  Adam, early twenties, dressed in black from boot to T-shirt, bearded in the manner of Cardinal Richelieu, spoke without looking up from his computer.

  “Studio need ten minutes cutting from Wednesday’s ep and five minutes adding to Thursday.”

  “I’m sure you’ll cope.”

  “Have you thought any more about my story idea?”

  “It’s growing on me, growing on me.”

  Adam typed on. He was an enigma to Rob. Did his still waters run deep or were they just puddles in the playground?

  Sally, late forties, dressed like Mary Poppins’ spinster sister, hair pulled back in a bun so severe that she had no need of Botox, was putting the phone down.

  “John Clinton needs an extra week to finish his script. Flu.”

  “Flu, my arse.”

  Sally sniffed and gently dabbed at her nose with an aloe vera infused tissue. She sniffed a lot, did Sally, and there was often a tear drying in the corner of her eye. She reminded Rob of earlier generations of women whose fiancés had marched off to Gallipoli and the Somme or gone off to fly Lancasters over Germany and never return.

  Hope, twenty two, fresh out of university at Bathurst, eager to please, poked her head out from behind a huge pile of scripts.

  “Block’s come back from the printers with half the pages missing.”

  “Production’s problem, not ours.”

  Sally ripped a post-it note from her desk.

  “That mad woman’s rung up again complaining about the sex and violence in last night’s episode”

  Rob took the note from her, screwed it up and tossed it in the bin.

  “I hope you told her we couldn’t possibly cram any more in.”

  He was nearly at the door to the inner sanctum, the Writers’ Room, when Adam called out.

  “And we’ve had a letter from the Dubbo Citizens’ Action Group.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  Adam, still typing with one hand, waved the missive in the air.

  “They’re objecting to last week’s episode where Justin called Todd a, and I quote, “dubbo.”

  “He called him a dubbo?”

  “Apparently”, confirmed Adam. “Blah blah blah... As the character of Todd is a figure of fun bordering on the moronic we resent the implied association with a town that is a dynamic and thriving cultural centre as well as being the birthplace of Glen McGrath.”

  “He said dumbo”, said Sally.

  “That’s right” agreed Hope. “Justin called Todd a dumbo, you know, like the flying elephant thing with the big ears.”

  “Of course he did”, said Rob. “What’s the matter with these people in Dubbo? Are they stupid or what?”

  He slipped into the Writers’ Room, which doubled as his office, and dumped the scripts and his briefcase on the table amongst the sandwich wrappers, burger boxes, biscuit crumbs, pens, pencils, highlighters, scraps of paper, timing sheets, plotting notes and other assorted detritus of a television writing life. In probable contravention of local health and safety laws and, quite possibly, several UN regulations regarding human rights, the room was windowless. A previous incumbent, in order to avoid the kind of madness that befell the Count of Monte Cristo, had crayoned a picture of a window with a blue sky and a bright yellow sun in the background and pinned it to the wall. It fooled nobody.

  This room, Rob had once reflected on a dull, dyspeptic Wednesday afternoon, was like the TARDIS. It wasn’t that it was bigger on the inside than it appeared from the outside. No, it was that its intrepid pilot, i.e. the Script Producer, travelled through many time zones simultaneously while dealing with attacks from unspeakably vile alien creatures in the shape of Network Executives. If only he had a sonic screwdriver and a sexy sidekick.

  The scribbled notes spread on the table in front of him were for episodes to be shot far, far in the future. The scripts Hope had told him about were for episodes to be shot in the not too distant future but which had been plotted in what now seemed the dim, distant past. The scripts currently being edited came from some intermediate zone as did the episodes being shot in studio. The shows going to air, on the other hand, had been created while the Earth was still cooling and fish were wondering whether to try their luck on dry land. To run the Department, one obviously needed a sense of story and structure but a good grasp of Einstein’s General Theory helped no end.

  This morning Rob was far from feeling like a Time Lord. He sank into the cracked leatherette chair like an underdone blancmange and looked at the paper that surrounded him. Reams of
it. Piles of it. Mountains of the stuff. He shivered. This is how Shackleton and his men must have felt as the ice sheet closed around their ship, crushing it. At least they had the courage to trek to freedom. He’d probably just sit here until his soul died of frostbite.

  On the desk, like an iceberg that had just calved, one script sat in splendid isolation. “Rickety Street” was written boldly on the front and underneath was his name and the expressively imaginative title: Episode 4400. This was the live episode and, he hoped, the script that was going to win him a Writers’ Guild Award. He felt he deserved one after four nominations and losing out each time to people he considered lesser lights. Pretty dim bulbs some of them, to be honest. AWGIEs didn’t quite have the cachet of the Booker or the Whitbread or, of course, the Nobel Prize but it was still better to win than not win and this episode, he felt, would tick all the boxes for the judges.

  The phone rang. He looked around for it. The phone, the phone, where the hell was it? There was the cradle, where was the handset? There it bloody well was - sticky-taped to the wall. The maturity of these young people, really.

  He wrenched it free, bringing with it a thin layer of flaky plaster. “Hello?”

  “Is that the wonderful Kevin? Gemma publicity here.”

  “Hello, Gemma publicity.”

  “Just wondering how you’re getting on with that story line for the Sydney Swans. Their people are just desperate for them to appear in the show.”

  “Are they? I wouldn’t want to disappoint their people but it’s not easy finding a plausible reason for fifteen blokes...”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Really? Well, there you go, eighteen blokes, beanpoles to a man, turning up in Rickety Street.”

  “If you could let me know by Friday so I can book some dates, I’d be ever so grateful. And a bit of a coup. You know the soldier chappie won the VC in Iraq –or do I mean Afghanistan? – anyway, apparently he’s a big fan of the show and his agent says he’s keen for a walk on part. I thought maybe he could rescue someone from a burning building, that sort of thing.”