Dour Saturday

It’s Saturday night and these are the outpourings of a disaffected mind.

I’m sitting here trying to fill in a job application form that would take me back into Further Education where I would be teaching English Literature at GCSE and A Level. You might wonder why a man in my station would choose this path but it’s something I’ve always considered taking up at some point in my life. It’s not as high as my qualifications would allow me to teach but it’s better than Channel 4 and is a unique opening for a man of my peculiar character. It would also be good money and security for when Alastair Darling’s financial crisis hits the hardest.
Yet as I sit here and write, I’ve got the TV tuned to Channel Five. I’m watching ‘Britain’s Most Haunted’ hosted by Paul Ross. And therein lies the reality of my life. Here is my problem writ large.

The Channel Five studio is filled with a sample of the Great British Public, eager to hear of haunted houses and the afterlife. For whatever reason, the GBP buy into the scam. A ‘superfan’ is interviewed. She’s bought all the videos and DVDs, hundreds of T shirts. She’s invested money into this show whose message seems to be that life is only made bearable by the promise that death is just another state of being. I respond with my usual outburst of swollen invective that human longing makes fools of us all. We dream for the impossible, believe in the ludicrous, and invest in the ridiculous.

Nothing gets me more agitated than seeing desperate people having their fears exploited. It feels like we’re back with Chaucer’s Pardoner and I want to cry something obscene about his relics. I was in a bookshop yesterday that was advertising a weekly séance with a nationally known psychic. ‘More popular than the book club’, I was told. ‘Less homework and a bigger payoff.’

I can’t be like that but it’s the reason why I’m such a bloody awful position.
I’ve never been good at making compromises. I fail to adapt to situations in which, to use the term I hear so often, ‘I need to bullshit’. Even if it means money in my pocket, I fail to jump through those hoops. It doesn’t make me belligerent in a bad way. I’m easy to get on with in everyday life. I am what you see. There’s very little facade, not too many pretensions; just a sometimes gruff, often serious, but usually likable chap who is likely to make you laugh. But in terms of work, I’m unemployable. I have so many transferable skills that I don’t know what I’m cut out to do anymore. I have no career, just an excess of ability. I have passion but no professionalism. The nation is constipated by professionalism.

Let me give you the example that’s making it hard for me to fill in this job application.

There are two students sitting down to take a GCSE in English Literature. One student is one of those intelligent, sensitive types that have always traditionally excelled at the subject. He has a genuine understanding for poetry, has an ear for the language and can analyse poetry on the go, tying meaning with lexical choices. The other student struggles. He doesn’t enjoy literature but there’s nothing wrong with that. However, I’ll be honest as say that he goes into the exam with barely an original idea in his head. Both students answer the same question about a range of poems by some modern darling of the examining board. The student with a good grasp of poetry writes intelligently on three poems he has obviously read, internalised, and thought about. His answers are original and stunningly good. The second student, the one who despises poetry but has memorised the right things to say, answers on four poems. His answers are rehearsed and staggeringly unoriginal.

No here are the rules. Here is the crux.

Student 1 can never get over a grade C. To get higher, he needed to have answered on four poems. No matter how intelligently he wrote about three or the reasons for limiting himself to that selection, the examiners wanted an answer based on four.
Student 2 answered on four poems. He gets higher than a C because he fulfilled the examination criteria. Accordingly to the results, he’s better at English than Student 1.

Life moves on. The results stand. The injustice is served.

Now, how do I write a covering letter, knowing this? How do I explain why I want the job but also why I don’t want to be accessory to the crimes committed in the name of education? It’s why I’ll probably fail to get the post. I’d speak up when I think something is wrong. Do I want an income so badly that I’d be happy to break the spirits of independent young minds? Could I programme them for the end of year exam? I’d work my hardest to see them succeed, encourage them to achieve something meaningful in life, to make the most of their gifts. Yet the sad reality is that students are probably better off without my advice. They wouldn’t fulfil the criteria.

And let’s face it: who even gives a damn about literature these days? I have learned the hard way that ambition leads to disappointment. The world teaches us that the path of least resistance is the way to go. And we’ve got ghosts to chase instead.

A Lawn Mower At The Crossroads

I was spying through the garden fence this morning when Ian Hislop caught me.

‘Just admiring your new lawnmower,’ I said, though I confess, I was blushing just a touch between nose and ears for reasons other than guilt at the thought that he might suspect I was trying to get writing tips from his wife, Victoria. I had a far more likely reason to feel embarrassed .

Since the Hislops bought the big property that backs onto our garden, I’ve been trying to avoid letting him know we were neighbours of his. I feared that viperish wit he's known to dole out on those mentally inferior to him. One withering remark from him and I might begin to feel bad about my life and my part-time office job in Manchester.

‘And why, pray tell, were you examining my lawn mower?’ he eventually asked in that high-handed way he has which involves energetic fluttering of his eyelids. ‘What, exactly, were you doing?’

‘You mean doing generally or in particular?’

‘I mean doing in that garden,’ he said. ‘God in heaven! You don’t actually live here, do you?’

‘Comes as a bit of a shock, doesn’t it?’

‘Just a bit,’ he answered.

‘Well, I do live here and so does Judy. This is our home. We also have a beaver but it lives in our pond. We’ve named it after Stephen Fry. Not the pond, of course. Fry deserves nothing smaller than a lake or large inland sea. I mean the beaver. It’s called Stephen Fry. We’ve lived here ages. Buried plenty of skeletons in this garden, I can tell you... Though not literally. That would be murder. I just meant metaphorical skeletons... And, anyway, if I did have to get rid of a body, I wouldn’t bury it in my garden. I’d bury it in somebody else’s... Though not yours. Although I’m sure it’s a fine garden for that sort of thing. No, I wouldn’t need to because I haven’t killed anybody... But I might have accidentally drowned Fred Talbot when I scuttled the “This Morning” map in the pond. I’ve written about it on my blog....’ There was a long silence during which I probably did too much grinning. ‘Do you have a blog, Ian?’

That’s typical of what happens when you meet Hislop. He’s got this way about him that makes you confess to the most ridiculous things. His place is really with some police force. Stick him in a room with an innocent man and, I swear, inside the hour they’d be doing vocal gymnastics like a canary in counterfeit sweatpants.

‘Well, jolly good,’ said Ian, climbing astride his lawnmower. (I looked away as he did his striding. When a man wearing shorts starts to stride, I find it’s always better if you look away.) ‘If I were you, Richard,’ he said as he began to rev the throttle, ‘I’d seriously think about getting yourself a job. You’re going to rot, standing around at the bottom of your garden and spying on other people’s lawnmowers. And if you ask me, there’s also something indecent about it.’

And with that he was off, the editor of the nation’s premiere satirical magazine, cutting a swathe of green in his own rather overgrown back lawn.

Now, you might say that I’m a stubborn old sod who never learns his lesson. Yet this encounter did teach me two things. The first was that Ian Hislop loves a noisy lawn mower as much any celebrity who happens to come in below five feet in hip-cropped shorts. The other is that he’s acutely perceptive about a man facing a crossroads in his life.

You see, we’ve again reached the point of the week when I go down to the bottom of the garden to do some thinking, a little planning, and spread the occasional smatter of tears. Tomorrow is the day when I shed the skin of the lovable TV host and become, for a better want of words, Elberryesque, as I challenge my knees to the long trudge to the station and then a day working on the dark side of the moon which, in this case, looks remarkably like Manchester.

I’ll be working up there for two days but my nights will be spent looking for work. I hope to find something to rescue me from what is rapidly taking on all the characteristics of a rut. I want work that challenges me. Creative work. Work for a man who writes 2000 words of a blog before breakfast and then invents illuminated liquorice sticks in his garden shed before noon. I don’t mean temping work; shuffling files, euthanizing fax machines. I want work that tests a man with my unique qualities. Judy thinks I’d be a whiz as a copywriter or design guru. Give me the next Pepsi campaign and I’ll give you Leonard Cohen singing before a wombat chorus. Never been done before. Bound to be a hit.

Only, the trouble with being so famous in one line of work means that it’s hard to find work in another. I have been sending my CV to different companies in the hope of landing some small role in advertising. They usually send them back thinking I’m joking. When I do get an interview, it’s more out of fascination and the chance to get an autograph.

‘But haven’t you got a show on Channel 4?’ they ask.

‘I’m looking for a change,’ I tell them. ‘It’s very well for the press to say that I’m earning a few million a year but I’d be much happier if could clear twenty grand on a regular basis.’

‘That’s rather hard to believe,’ they say. ‘You’d rather have less than the UK’s average wage instead of these huge contracts?’

‘That’s just it,’ I tell them. ‘The contracts are all in Judy’s name. I’m just an honest Joe without a penny in his pocket.’

‘Do you have any qualifications?’

‘Honorary or academic?’ I ask but at this point they usually close their files and show me the door.

Oh, I could write more of tonight's rambling post but I’m merely delaying the inevitable. I have to go to bed. I can hear that Judy will soon be finished on the trombone so I’ll simply say that I’ll see you on Friday, if not sooner. I’ll try to post tomorrow night from Manchester but if you don't hear from me, I'll have emptied the mini-bar in room 318. And if anybody fancies joining me, I'll be taking my travel Scrabble...

On Stephen's Podcast

A sleep has rid these bones of the aches and shivers brought on by two days in a cramped recording studio and other associated duties of a man employed by others for tasks not of his own choosing. Damn it all to hell and back. This is no life for a monkey. Not even a handsome monkey with an artificial mane culled from the heads of Taiwanese virgins.

I'm now bound to a different kind of desk; one piled high with good books and assorted manuscripts of my own terribly overactive imagination. To tell you the truth, I'm feeling quite relieved this morning that friends haven't exposed confidences. I've just chuckled my way through the first of Stephen Fry's podcasts. Not that I found his quite obvious pain funny. I was merely relieved that our adventures together had been compressed down to his confession that he 'spent time with friends'. I'd been sent a warning earlier in the week that the podcast would be appearing but my work commitments stopped me writing about it as I normally would. If my first thought was a quite selfish one about exposed confidences, my second was the worry that there would be many more contradictions from the version of the Great Man's story I'd already published. In the end, I think our two narratives join neatly together. Indeed, as neatly as two pieces of bone held together by screws and plates. The only point where our stories diverge is in the moment of the accident. Naturally, Stephen displays Stephen's usual forgiving nature and lays no blame at the hand or flipper of the manatee. I think we all know different and should continue to show our support for the man by continuing our reverse boycott, by buying all goods made from the manatee.

Listening to Stephen has also given me new ambitions. The last two days of hard work pales when one considers Stephen's schedule. I would offer to take some of his duties from him but I fear he's protective of the little niche he's made for himself as the nation's most ubiquitous fitting, suitably for schedules both evening and daytime; bathrooms and kitchens too, I imagine.

All of which has inspired me – if that's the right phrase – to be more productive. There's nothing like a spell of toil to stiffen the resolve. That's why this is a shorter than normal post from me today. I have something much larger I want to work on. You may get to see it in good time. You might not. I might release it anonymously to the underground and let it become a cult classic among bikers and university drop-outs. Do I hear you ask me about a title? Well isn't that obvious?

'This is no life for a monkey.'

Carrion Comfort

I’ve had a dizzying twenty four hours and hardly enough time to write about it. There are moments like this when the impetus to write is at its lowest. I'm talking, of course, about those moments when ‘the Real World’ puts its considerable weight against your door and forces its way inside.

The Madeley attitude towards the Real World is a rather naive one: I try to avoid it whenever I can. A frigid shoulder is the best the Real World can expect from me. Yet yesterday it had me cornered and I could tell by the look of malicious intent in its eye that I would be lucky to get away without serious damage to my ego. Where it bit me, I prefer not to say. That it bit me at all is enough for you to know.

As you’re no doubt aware, the imminent arrival of 2008 has had me feeling deeply anxious about my future. It came to a head around midnight on Christmas Day. I was sitting at the bottom of the garden, a bottle of whisky on one knee and a garden gnome on the other. As I emptied one, I confessed my problems to the other. Neither offered much of a solution. Yet my sobbing must have carried up to the house because not long after I’d emptied the bottle, a figure of hope came looming over my shoulder.

‘Don’t let Cilla get you down,’ said Fry. ‘She doesn’t mean anything by it. How was she to know you’re a quarter Russian?’

‘It’s not that,’ I said, wiping a tear from my cheek.

‘Then why the tears and the need for a gnome?’

‘I’m broke,’ I confessed. ‘I need to find work or all this will come to an end.’

‘Ah,’ said Stephen, sitting at my side. He took the gnome from my knee and threw it into the shrubbery. ‘There is no need to confer with the little people when Fry’s around. If you need money, then you only need to find some work. Take me as your model. I’m always running low on funds but there’s work out there for men of reasonable intellects.’ The sight of a smile of my lips confused Stephen into thinking I was happy again. He slapped my knee and stood up. ‘Now come on back into the house,’ he said. ‘If we don’t stop Cilla’s 60s medley, she’ll start into the hits of the 70s and I can’t be sure that Titchmarsh won’t snap in a most violent manner.’

How that I wished it were all so simple!

With the Channel 4 contract running out in the Summer, I’ve become preoccupied with my finances. Now, no doubt you are sitting there, wrapped in the warmth of your semi-detached in some lovely London grotto, quaffing quality brandy while a large wolf hound sleeps by an extravagant fireplace. You think to yourself: what is Madeley blathering on about? Surely the £500,000 advance for his biography was enough for him. And what about the millions he has earned during his stint at ITV and Channel 4? You might even wonder about the ‘You Say, We Pay’ monies. Where are they now, you might uncharitably ask?

Well it’s nearly 2008 and that means it is time for brutal honesty. The Madeley funds are low. Lower than low. Were I an office cleaner, tethered to a vacuum for £5.50 an hour, I might consider myself comfortably off. It has got to the point where I need to act or prepare for a life wrapped in cardboard and selling matchbooks. Even blogging is becoming a luxury I’ll be unable to indulge for much longer. That’s why I spent yesterday making a full inventory of my skills and why I intend to make use of them in the near future.

I scribbled down the list yesterday morning. After half an hour’s consideration, I had the following laid neatly out on the back of one of the Tesco shopping receipts I so assiduously keep on me.

Full Name: Richard Caesar Madeley

Sex: Alpha Male

Occupation: Talk Show Host

Qualifications: Honorary doctorates from five universities, plus ‘O’ levels in carpentry and English.

Skills: listening, interrupting, pontificating, writing (questionable), loyalty, intelligence, computer literacy, expert on every conceivable subject, established contacts in light entertainment.

With my curriculum vitae complete, I folded it up and stuffed it down my sock. Half an hour later, I was in a nearby metropolis and had found myself an employment agency.

‘Hello,’ I said to a lively twinset sitting at a desk by the door. ‘I’m looking for work.’

The woman gazed up at me and within the space of the word ‘blink’ she was screaming my name.

‘Richard Madeley! Oh my God! It’s you, isn’t it? It’s really you!’

‘Guilty as charged,’ I said, ‘though I was let off on appeal… Irresistible sex appeal.’

‘Oh my god! What are you doing here?’

I put my foot on her desk and rolled down my sock to show her my makeshift C.V. Then I gestured to my surroundings, the green office furniture, the walls covered with small cards briefly describing employment opportunities. ‘I’m here seeking work,’ I said.

‘Oh, come on!’ she laughed. ‘Don’t fool with me. What are you really here for? Is it a show?’

‘No, no,’ I replied. ‘I’m really here for work. Or, at least, I’m here to see what kind of job a man of my vast experience and skills can land.’

‘You’re really here for a job?’ she asked, looking not a little disappointed. ‘Well what kind of position are you after?’

‘Ideally it would be something in presenting a national teatime chat show, perhaps on a generous contract of a few million a year. But if you don’t have that, I thought something in an office…’ I held out my details. ‘I’ve written down all my skills if that’s any help.’

She took one look at my résumé and, after making a comment about the price I pay for peas, turned it over. She seems quite impressed as she cast an eye down my qualifications on the back. She then picked up at a card she had been in the process of filling out.

‘To be perfectly honest with your Richard, with this limited skill set we’d be looking to place you in a role such as a General Catering Assistant.’

‘And what does that entail?’ I asked.

‘Can you ladle dumplings?’

‘I see,’ I replied, not immediately attracted to the work. ‘And is that it?’

‘We do have an opening for a Community Care Worker. You would get to meet a wide range of interesting people.’

‘Define “interesting”,’ I said.

‘Newly released prisoners and people with some kind of social disfunction. It’s basically work with the violent and the criminally insane.’

‘A bit too close to dealing with bloggers,’ I replied.

‘What about a Human Resources Officer working with Information Systems?’

‘Ah ! An executive job. That sounds more promising. Are there any more details?’

‘Full training will be given on site,’ she said, ‘though you might have to double for the usherette on a busy night.’

‘You mean I’d be selling tickets in a cinema?’

‘That’s what I said,’ said the woman. ‘Human Resources Officer working with Information Systems.’

‘And is that all I’m good for?’ I asked, falling back onto a chair, amazed at what I had heard. ‘Does an honorary doctorate not account for anything these days?’

‘Almost as little as a real one, I’m afraid,’ said the woman.

There really was nothing more I could say. I told her that I’d consider the job working with ex-convicts and made my way home. I got back at three to find Stephen Fry lazing in my arm chair. He was smoking his pipe.

‘Ah, the Dick of the house is now in residence,’ he said as he closed my copy of ‘Private Eye’. ‘I hope you don’t mind but I settled myself with a humourous read while I waited. Unfortunately, I’d already read that particular volume of Wodehouse and was forced to pick up the “Eye” instead. There was a joke on page seven that almost made me smile. Then I realised it was merely an errant staple.’

‘Judy not home?’ I asked as I threw down my car keys on the table.

‘She had go out early to beat the London traffic. I understand that it’s bingo night at Denise Robertson’s.’

I kicked off my shoes and made like the last English Oak and collapsed onto the sofa. Given the angle between my head and Stephen’s chair, it felt like I was about to undergo a session with my shrink. As it turns out, that’s not far from the truth.

‘Oh, Stephen,’ I began. ‘Why is it so easy for you? How did you become such a polymath? You only need to say that you’re going to do a thing and you cause it to happen. You want to publish a novel, the publisher says how much do you want as an advance. You say you’re writing a book on writing poetry and they make ready to print a hundred thousand copies.’

‘Do I sense jealousy, Richard?’ asked the Great Fry.

‘Only admiration,’ I said. ‘I’m tired of being typecast as the handsome yet knowledgeable irritant. I want the next stage of my career to bring me moderate rewards for all the work I do. Is it too much to ask that I’ll not be consigned to spending my days writing invoices and inputting data into a computer? I want to carry on writing, Stephen, but the world simply won’t allow it. Have I deluded myself into thinking that I have a talent for this work? Are those people right who vote for me to give up blogging? Should I accept my lot in life and succumb to the routine of a telesales office?’

‘You must succumb,’ said Stephen. ‘There are very few of us who can make a living by being witty. You are no different to the thousands who try and fail.’

‘You really think I’m no different?’

‘No different except you are perhaps a little more determined, rather stubborn, and have a higher tolerance for pain. Otherwise you’re born to fail.’

‘So that’s it then? ’

‘I’m afraid so,’ said Stephen as he puffed away at his briar. ‘A man must know his limitations and you do have such woefully limited limitations, Richard.’

I exhaled a sigh that would have been enough to extinguish the world’s light.

‘Oh, come, come, Richard,’ cried Stephen in reply. ‘Don’t look on this as the end of your writing career. See it at the beginning of a career in telesales! And who knows? In a year’s time, perhaps you’ll be the most famous telesales person in the country. People will be talking about your telephone manner from Wick to Cornwall, from Bright to Aberdeen.’

I sat up and gazed on his magnificence. ‘My God, I do believe that you’re right,’ I said. ‘I will do this and I will be a success. I’m going into telesales. If I can’t talk to the nation each night at five o’clock, I’ll ring them individually at inconvenient times of the day. It’s about time people stopped thinking of Richard Madeley as a man who lives only to annoy them.’

The Tramp Called Dodger

The plans for the new series get more exciting by the day and I’m pleased to announce that our’s will be the first UK show to provide regular jobs for some of London’s thousands of tramps. I admit that this was my little brainwave. I notice on the drive to the studios that London has an abundance of homeless vagrant types, wandering the streets with nothing else to do. ‘Untapped potential’ thought I as my eyes narrowed and my brain went into overdrive. This morning I asked my driver to slow down next to one of the ugliest, smelliest, and most violent individuals we could find to see if he'd be interested in filling in while Denise Robertson goes on her spiritual quest to find herself up the Andes.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, through the window’s one inch gap. ‘Are you interested in a job?’

‘A job?’ repeated the man slowly as though the word once held meaning for him. ‘Ay, I’m interested. What doing?’

‘I thought general chat about weekly new items seen from the perspective of the slightly deranged and possibly sociopathic.’

‘Sociopathic? I could do that,’ he said, fingering the knife he’d take from his pocket. ‘When would I have to do this?’

‘Possible twice a week,’ I said, ‘depending on the number of guests we have on the show. You’d probably be on the sofa between Kim Wilde and Dr. Raj. You’d provide an alternative point of view.’

‘I like the sound of that,’ said the man as he began to scratch his initials into the door of the limo.

‘Well, that’s that,’ I said. ‘Hop in and I’ll take you to the studio.’

The production meeting went fine, except for the ten minutes we spent at the end trying to get my friend to release his hostage. A half-consumed box of Jammie Dodgers seemed to pacify him and all was settled when we promised him a weekly supply of his very own.

I personally think that Dodger (as we've now christened him) is going to be a huge star for Channel 4. We’re already thinking about producing his own series. We just have to find the right vehicle for him. Perhaps something to do with home improvements. I like the ironic twist it gives to a well worn genre.

Since I’ve been light on facts the last couple of days, here’s some facts about Jammie Dodgers. They are the world’s most popular biscuit, though in American they’re known as St. James Dodgers. In Japan, they have a wing of their biscuit museum dedicated to the dodger. The jam in a dodger isn’t actually jam but a syrup. It’s specially formulated to keep the two halves of the biscuit together and is actually stronger the rubber cement. Too many jammie dodgers eaten in a day can clog up the digestion, producing dodgeritus, which is a real medical condition, the remedy of which is to gorge on fig rolls. Conversely, eating too many fig rolls can produce a condition known as figrolltiddilyitus, the cure of which is – you’ve guessed it – eating plenty of Jammie Dodgers. But once you start, you will find it hard to reach a balance. You have been warned.