18. Charlie
18
CHARLIE
‘Richard?’ says Nate. ‘You still with us down there?’
Noah nudges me. ‘Charlie, give him a kick, will you, to see if he’s sleeping?’
I laugh and look down at the floor, where Rich’s head currently lies a few centimetres from my shoe on the writers’-room carpet. ‘I’m awake!’ he shouts, from his prostrate position under the table. ‘I’m just thinking!’
It’s Monday morning – only my fifth day at Punching Up, but after spending so much time in this little room, I’ve come to realise that every writer on the team has a different technique for drumming up ideas.
Nate and Anna are pacers. They walk briskly around the table, or up and down the side of the room, chewing their pens, muttering, stopping occasionally to write something on the whiteboard if they deem it good enough to get on the show.
Noah is a bouncer. Whenever a funny thought hits him, he leaps out of his chair and starts explaining it while bobbing up and down on the balls of his feet.
Talia is a doodler. She stays put in her seat, scribbling everything from concentric circles to elaborate cartoon characters on her notepad while she throws out ideas during a brainstorm.
Kerri does origami. Seriously – that’s her thing. She just sits there, next to Talia, carefully folding sheets of paper into delicate little swans and boats. She’s probably the quietest member of the whole writing team – she’ll sometimes go twenty minutes without saying a word, just nodding, smiling and swan-crafting while everyone fires gags back and forth around her. And then, out of nowhere, she’ll come out with a joke or a line or a thought that is so ridiculously funny it breaks up the entire room. She’s like a comedy sniper. She only needs one bullet.
Rich, on the other hand, is a comedy machine-gunner. On his good days, he can rattle off ideas left and right, mainly terrible but occasionally hilarious, until one snags the room’s attention. On bad days though, when he can’t think of anything, his preferred position seems to be lying prone on the writers’-room floor.
Which is exactly where he is right now. Whenever a punchline is proving particularly hard to find, Rich stretches out horizontally on the carpet beneath us and closes his eyes. ‘I do my best thinking down here,’ he told me the first time I saw him do it. ‘This is where the best ideas are.’
As for Nell . . . To be honest, I have no idea what her writers’-room ‘thing’ is, because I’ve barely seen her in here. It always seems to be me who gets sent into the writers’ meetings, while Bishi usually has Nell doing some other errand. Since last Friday was the day after the live show, none of the writing staff even showed up; Bishi said they usually worked from home on Fridays. I was quite glad to be sitting in the nook by myself all day, just tinkering away at some boring social-media stuff for Bishi. And I was worried the writers might ask me why I hadn’t shown up to the filming of the Lina episode on Thursday evening. Maybe it seemed rude – or just plain weird. But I couldn’t face it in the end; the thought of seeing that Ed Sheeran thing played out in front of a live audience, and having all the writers slapping me on the back and congratulating me for something I hadn’t even done . . . It made me cringe just to think about it. So when the clock hit 6 p.m. I ducked out and headed home.
But now it’s Monday morning, and no one has even mentioned the Ed Sheeran thing, or my no-show at the filming. It seems like once a show is over, everyone forgets about it and moves straight on to the next one. Like each new week is a blank slate. Which suits me fine. The talk with Nick on Thursday nagged at me all weekend. I want more than ever to prove him wrong. I want to impress these people under my own steam, without his help. I even spent an hour on Sunday watching clips of the show on YouTube, trying to drum up some ideas to suggest. A few of them aren’t bad, I reckon. I tried them out on Merlin, and he laughed – though, to be fair, Merlin finds the Shipping Forecast hilarious, so he may not be the most reliable test subject.
Nate is pacing in front of the whiteboard, chewing his Sharpie lid so ferociously he’s in danger of swallowing it. The photo of Lina on the wall has been taken down, replaced by a picture of this week’s guest host, Jed Greening. He’s this mega-famous billionaire who invents ridiculous hi-tech gadgets and owns pretty much half the internet. He’s constantly in the news for saying something unbelievably offensive or right-wing. Or both.
The team are trying to break a sketch about Greening’s latest invention – a foldable e-scooter branded as ‘unstealable’ – but it’s not really going anywhere. Nate sighs and says as much. ‘OK, let’s park this scooter thing and come back to it.’ He runs a hand through his hair and looks out at the table. ‘Shall we go through THT stuff instead?’
There’s a murmur of assent from the whole team as they yank sheets of paper out of their bags or pull out their phones to brainstorm for the Tomorrow’s Headlines Today segment. I clear my throat. This is the bit of the show I had some ideas for.
I feel something brush my feet and look down to see Rich stretching across to dig his iPad out of his rucksack. When I look up again, Nell is at the meeting-room door. She knocks and walks in. ‘Sorry I’m late, just had to do something for Bishi.’
‘No worries, come on in,’ says Nate.
She hurries into the room, looking like she’s just sprinted here from whatever Bishi had her on. Her cheeks are pink and a few strands of her dark hair have wriggled loose from her topknot. It makes her look even prettier than she normally does. Talia pulls a chair out for her, and Nell grins at her as she sits down. As usual, she pays me absolutely no attention. My whole theory about Nell maybe, possibly, ‘playing hard to get’ is starting to look less likely with every passing day. It seems like she just has no interest in me whatsoever. She takes a notepad out of her bag and then sits straight-backed in her chair, all her focus on Nate at the front of the room.
I try not to look at her, but it’s basically impossible. I have to concentrate pretty hard to achieve it even for a few minutes, because if I don’t my gaze seems to just drift automatically back in her direction.
‘OK, headlines,’ Nate says. ‘Let’s go round the room. T-Double?’
Talia looks down at her notepad and then up again. ‘I’ve got: “LEGO slammed for promoting ‘unrealistic body image’”.’
The whole room explodes into laughter. From under the table I hear Rich chuckle. ‘That’s fucking great.’
Nate grins broadly as he writes Talia’s headline up on the whiteboard. ‘That’s the one to beat. Noah?’
Noah consults his phone and says, ‘What about: “Rogue cursor ruins Netflix movie”?’ There are a few scattered half-laughs at this, which is Noah’s cue to jump up to his feet and start bobbing on the spot. ‘You know what I mean though?’ he says. ‘When you’re watching something on your laptop and you can’t get that fucking cursor to disappear?’
A few more laughs. Nate nods. ‘Yeah, the idea’s good. Maybe we just need to tweak the wording?’
There’s a ponderous silence while everybody bobs, doodles, paces or origamies. I risk a glance at Nell. She’s just staring into her notepad with a furrowed brow. An idea hits me, so I call it out: ‘What about: “Enjoyment of movie ruined by lurking cursor?”’
It gets a pretty big laugh, and I feel a zip of pride at that. ‘I like the “lurking”,’ Anna says. ‘As if it’s sentient. Like it’s actually trying to annoy you.’ There’s more laughter, and I notice Talia looking at me with her eyebrows arched, a half-smile on her lips. Another zip of pride. I’m surprising them. Proving that I’m not just a spoilt rich kid who’s here because of his dad. Nell looks kind of shocked too – her eyes narrowed and her mouth slightly open. But as soon as I look at her, she looks away.
Nate writes my line up on the board. ‘Yeah, that works great. Nice one, Charlie. Did you have anything else?’
‘Er, yeah . . . Well, I had this thing about Duolingo,’ I say. ‘I tried learning Spanish last summer, but as soon as you miss one day, Duolingo literally bombards you with these passive-aggressive reminders.’
‘It’s so true!’ Noah chimes. ‘They hit you from all sides – emails, texts, notifications, everything. It’s ridiculous.’
I nod. I’m getting quite into this now. ‘Exactly! So, I thought maybe we could have a headline like: “Man applies for restraining order against Duolingo”.’
It gets another laugh from everyone – and I swear I see Nell chuckle too, before she puts her hand over her mouth and coughs. Talia’s eyebrow arches even higher and I feel my chest swell as Nate grins at me.
‘That’s honestly great, Charlie,’ he says. ‘Only problem is, I know for a fact that marketing are trying to get Duolingo on board for a sponsorship thing. So I don’t think we can rip the piss out of them, unfortunately. But that’s exactly the kind of tone we’re after – keep throwing the ideas out.’
I nod, feeling pretty chuffed with myself. Nate turns to Rich. ‘Richard? What about you?’
From under the table, I hear Rich clear his throat. ‘“Other soft drink cans think San Pellegrino is an arsehole”.’
Kerri snuffles into her origami boat. ‘What are you on about?’
Rich pokes his head out from under the table. ‘So, I was getting a Coke from the shop yesterday, and it made me think: surely all the Lilts and Fantas and Sprites must think the San Pellegrinos are a right bunch of pretentious twats?’
I snort with laughter along with the others.
‘With their wanky little metal hats,’ Rich continues. ‘You just know all the other drinks take the piss out of them behind their backs.’
‘That’s good,’ says Nate over the laughter, ‘but I can see it working more as a sketch than a headline.’
‘You could have the actors play all the different cans,’ I suggest.
‘Yeah!’ Rich nods. ‘Get props to knock up a silly little foil hat for whoever plays the Pellegrino.’
‘Mayb—’ Nell starts, but Noah speaks over her.
‘Yeah, props would love that! Do you remember that thing we did a couple of years back about the pirates?’
Noah launches into a story about some old sketch they did, and I notice Nell’s cheeks flush deep red as she stares down at her notepad. Am I the only one who noticed her trying to speak? I’m half wondering if I should say something, until Talia cuts Noah off.
‘Hang on a sec, Noah. Nell – did you want to say something?’
The whole table turns to look at Nell, and she seems to draw even further into herself. She glances at Talia, who gives her an encouraging nod.
Staring back into her notepad now, she coughs and says, ‘I just thought, maybe it would be funny, with the tinfoil-hat thing, if we found out the San Pellegrino was also a conspiracy theorist?’
There’s a second’s silence, and then, from the floor, Rich roars so loudly that the whole table shakes. ‘Yes! That’s amazing!’
The rest of us are laughing now too. ‘The Pellegrino’s constantly banging on about chemtrails and 5G,’ Kerri adds, and we all crack up even harder.
‘So good,’ Talia says, nudging Nell with her elbow. Nell’s face is even redder than before, but this time she’s beaming widely. She looks so happy. Oh man, her smile. It’s genuinely impossible to look away when she’s smiling. She’s got the kind of smile that’s so infectious it actually makes you smile just looking at it.
Nate turns back from scribbling ‘PELLEGRINO, 5G, CHEMTRAILS’ on the whiteboard. ‘OK, we’re cooking on gas now. This is good. Shall we get back on this scooter sketch and see if we can crack it?’
The whole room groans in unison. ‘Can we eat first?’ Noah whines. ‘I can’t possibly be amusing when my blood sugar is this low.’
‘Have a croissant,’ Nate snaps, indicating the bowl of stale-looking pastries in the centre of the table.
Kerri picks one up. ‘I think these have been here since last week.’ She knocks it on the edge of the table, and it makes a dull thud.
‘You’d think with all the BAFTAs we’ve won for them, this company could spring for more than one plate of croissants per week,’ sighs Rich. Then he pokes his head out from the under the table and frowns at me. ‘No offence, Charlie.’
There are a few awkward snickers, and I feel my face heat up, realising again that this is how they all see me. As the boss’s son.
Nate checks his watch. ‘OK, yeah, maybe we do need something to eat first. Nell – would you mind nipping out on a lunch run for us?’
Nell nods and goes to stand up, but Talia stops her. ‘Nell’s only just come in though, Nate. Maybe Charlie wouldn’t mind doing the lunch run today?’
She smiles sweetly at me, but I swear I see something flash behind her eyes. I clearly haven’t fully won her over. Yet.
I stand up. ‘Yeah, of course – I don’t mind.’
‘Oh no, Charlie, don’t worry, man, you don’t need to do that,’ Nate insists.
This time I’m pretty sure I see Talia roll her eyes. I feel the prickle of shame on my neck. I hate this ‘special treatment’ – it has Nick’s fingerprints all over it. ‘Seriously, I’m happy to go,’ I say.
‘There’ll be quite a lot of stuff for you to carry, mate,’ Nate counters. I’m genuinely on the cusp of shooting back with, ‘Well, how did you imagine Nell was going to carry it all then?’ when Noah groans loudly.
‘Look, can one of them go?’ he pleads. ‘I’m hangry, and you all know you won’t like me when I’m hangry.’
‘Why don’t they both go?’ Rich suggests from down by my feet.
I see Nell open her mouth, but before she can speak, Nate claps his hands together. ‘Great idea! Sorted. Now – what does everyone want from Pret?’