Much Obliged (The Brent Boys #3)

Chapter 1

Petey

If I’d known what Eva Pilotti breaking her leg on a skiing trip would do for my career, I’d have pushed her off the chairlift myself.

I’m not as evil as that makes me sound, I promise.

I don’t know Eva, I’ve got nothing against her, I hope she made a full recovery.

But TV is a dog-eat-dog industry, and if you want to make it, you’ve got to fight for every opportunity you can get.

The fighting isn’t always fair. There’s certainly no room to be sentimental about someone else’s misfortune.

Fighting for an opportunity was precisely how I found myself in a rickety old lift, headed up to the office of Monkey Ginger Productions in a building on London’s Golden Square.

It was a fresh Wednesday afternoon in spring.

My hair was freshly bleached, I was wearing my favourite blue boiler suit and my lucky earrings, and I was clutching a laptop loaded with ideas to pitch to the company’s boss, legendary TV producer Indira Murray.

The lift rattled to a halt at the fifth floor.

“You’re a blethering idiot, Eva,” a woman with a strong Glaswegian accent shouted. It was, unmistakably, Indira herself.

“My five-year-old nephew has got more fucking brains than you, and my sister can’t stop him eating the chewing gum he finds under the seats on the bus,” she continued.

This was not a great sign. I checked the time.

Five minutes early. Not really long enough to go back downstairs and come up again in the hope things had calmed down.

I tried to extract myself from the lift as quietly as possible but got caught in the old-fashioned grille door, and it slammed shut behind me.

“I have another meeting, I have to go,” I heard Indira say.

I stood in the vestibule, staring at the reeded glass door with its gold lettering. My stomach was jittering so much I almost checked to see if I’d left my vibrator in. I took a deep breath and stepped into the reception area. No one sat behind the counter, but Indira’s office door was open.

“It goes without saying, you’re off the show.”

Indira raised an arm and waved me in—beckoning me to sit in the chair opposite her.

“This has sod all to do with morality. We’re filming in a five-hundred-year-old manor house. The job means running up and down stairs all day. You’re in a moon boot. How are we going to get you up to the top floor? Fire you out of a fucking trebuchet and hope for the best?”

Indira looked directly at me for the first time, mouthing “sorry.” I dismissed the need for an apology with a sweep of my hand.

“You need six weeks to recover, minimum, and it’s a four-week shoot.

” Indira pulled a packet of cigarettes out of the drawer, put one in her mouth, and lit it.

She shook her head. “Well, you should have thought about that before you did something so incredibly stupid. I’m sorry, my decision is final. ”

Indira ended the call, took a long drag of her ciggy, craned around to open the window, and blew the smoke out into the cool air.

Her eyes flicked back to me, inspecting me, sizing me up.

She was every bit as terrifying as her reputation.

Before starting her own production company, Indira Murray had done ten years on Make Me a Pop Star—the behemoth of all reality shows—starting as a runner on season one and working her way up to executive producer.

You had to be made of pure steel to thrive in an environment so toxic.

“Word of advice. If anyone ever offers you five grand and an all-expenses-paid week at a Swiss ski resort in exchange for filming their risky, frisky al fresco OnlyFans content, please, I beg of you, remember that lube will make a chairlift really fucking slippery.”

I burst out laughing. Indira sucked on her cigarette.

“Remind me who you are?”

“P… Peter,” I spluttered. “Peter Topham. We met at the BAFTA—”

“The kid from Wake Up Britain. I remember now.”

Kid?

“I’m twenty-seven.” I needed her to take me seriously.

At least she remembered me. I’d met Indira a few weeks earlier at an after-party for the ritzy industry awards night.

Fuelled up on free champagne and egged on by my best mate, Jumaane, I’d plucked up enough courage to introduce myself and ask for a meeting.

Fighting for my opportunities, and all that.

“Do you like working on breakfast television?”

She sounded like my parents. I had no idea what answer Indira wanted to hear, so I opted for the truth.

“The hours are hell, but it’s fun.”

She was eyeballing me like she was planning a dissection, so I kept talking, desperate to win her over.

“I’ve done five years. Started as a runner. Did two years as an assistant producer. Now I’m a field producer. But what I really want to do is produce big reality shows like yours. I heard you might be looking for fresh ideas?”

“Every production company in the country is looking for fresh ideas,” she said, blowing a grey stream of smoke through the open window.

“Exactly, and I—”

She cut me off. “Since Channel Three cancelled Make Me a Pop Star, it’s opened a shit ton of prime time slots in the Christmas run-up.

We need to fill them with something suitably addictive or the great British public won’t know what to do with themselves on Saturday nights and there’s a risk they’ll open their phones, disappear down a rabbit hole of ultranationalist conspiracies, and end up voting for total fucking fascists at the next election.

And that’s not a country I want my nephew growing up in.

So, yeah, I’m on the lookout for fresh ideas.

” She knocked the ash from her cigarette into a mug. “What have you got for me?”

This was it. This was my moment. I opened my laptop and turned it to face her.

“OK, so the first one is called Inner Circle.”

“Terrible.”

“Er—”

She took another drag. “But go on.”

“The idea is, couples match with each other on dating profiles, but when they go on their first date, instead of finding the person they matched with, they find the person’s parents, best friends, colleagues, and so on.

Instead of getting to know the person directly, they get to know them through their fam. ”

Indira huffed. “You’re single, aren’t you?”

“Um, yeah. Why?”

“You’ve never had a girlfriend or boyfriend or theyfriend, have you?”

I swallowed. “How’d you know?”

“No one who’d ever had in-laws would suggest this. What else you got?”

I took a deep breath, pulled myself together, and scrolled through my presentation to the next idea.

“This one’s called Sweet, Sweet Love. Imagine it’s a bit like Blind Date, with one person asking questions and three or four anonymous contestants on the other side of a wall answering them to win their heart.

Only as well as answering questions, they’re making desserts, and the one who made the dessert she or he likes best gets to go on a date with them.

So, it’s a cooking show and a dating show combined. ”

Indira shrugged. “Not enough tension. Next?”

I swallowed and flicked through to idea number three.

“Gays Off Grid is like a gay Survivor. We send a group of hapless gay guys who think they could survive without electricity, running water, and TikTok into a remote forest—”

“If you want to film an orgy, I’ll give you Eva’s number.” Indira blew a lungful of smoke out the window. “Listen. Peter, was it?”

I nodded.

“How good are you at fuckwit wrangling?”

I didn’t know what she meant. Indira huffed impatiently.

“Handling big egos. Juggling ridiculous demands. Politely telling self-important twats you’re going to rip their heads off and turn their skulls into novelty Skittles decanters if they don’t sit the fuck down, but doing it in such a way that they come back years later and ask you to be godfather to their children. That kind of thing.”

I nodded like a plastic dog on the dashboard of a Vauxhall Astra.

“We’ve had a lot of big-name celebrities on Wake Up Britain’s famous yellow couch over the years.

” This was true. I’d seen it all. The Silicon Valley CEO who sprinkled ketamine on his doughnuts and went live to air in a K-hole, but nobody noticed because everyone thinks tech bros are weird anyway.

The ageing Hollywood legend who dragged me into the make-up room and made me pull all her neck skin back behind her head until she had a visible jawline, then made me duct tape it in place to hold it.

Or—and this was peak—the Tory health minister who flopped his cock out in the green room and asked me if, in my professional opinion, I thought he had the clap.

“And did he?”

Apparently, I’d said that aloud. “No idea, but I said yes on principle. Then told the geezer I was taking the whole story to the newspapers unless he doubled the funding for the Gay Men’s Sexual Health Clinic.”

Indira laughed—actually laughed. She sat back in her chair and, from the corner of her mouth, blew a heavy fog of smoke out the window.

“I like you,” she said. “You have initiative.”

She liked me!

“Listen, I have a show with a two-and-a-half-million budget that starts filming up in Leicestershire on Monday. I’m short an assistant producer.

I need someone who can juggle the egos of a dozen online influencers without collecting them all up in a sack and drowning them in the lake. The job is yours, if you want it.”

My pulse stuttered. This wasn’t what I came here for. My mind was racing, calculating what this opportunity meant and where it could lead.

“What’s the show?”

Indira shuffled through a pile of papers, pulling out a booklet in a plastic cover. It landed with a slap on the desk in front of me.

“The Love Manor. Shit name, but then it’s a shit concept. Can’t believe Channel Three went for it, to be honest with you.”

The cover showed a group of people in Regency costumes standing in front of a very grand manor house.

“It’s basically Love Island in fancy dress,” Indira said. “Pride and Prejudice with promiscuity.”

I snorted.

“I’ve got twenty-four spoilt-brat twenty-somethings signed on to do it.

They’re all absolutely fucking stunning and Instagram famous.

Thick as shit, obviously. They’re descending on an old manor house in the middle of buttfuck nowhere on Monday.

Twelve lads. Twelve lassies. The lads all think they’re Mr Darcy.

The lassies all think they’re Daddy’s fucking princess.

What they don’t know is we’re splitting them into upstairs and downstairs.

” Indira pointed at the booklet. “You can take that with you, it explains everything. But the gist is, we’re putting a heap of horny models into a castle together, making half of them pretend lords and ladies, half of them pretend maids and menservants, providing them with a bucket full of johnnies, and giving them a list of rules about who’s allowed to bang who.

Then we’re going to film them breaking the rules and put it all on the telly. ”

I flicked through the booklet. This could be either television’s lemon of the year or an absolute winner. But it was also a chance to work with Indira Murray—the best in the business. I’d be mad to turn it down.

“I mean, I would literally watch this,” I said.

Indira smiled. “Do you want the gig?”

It would mean either begging my boss for a month off with zero notice or quitting my job with zero notice.

Either way, I would be leaving my team high and dry, and I might have nothing to come back to after filming finished.

My heart was thudding so loudly it was rattling the window.

I tried to slow down my breathing. This was a major decision.

I put the booklet down. “What about my ideas?”

“Your ideas need work.” Indira leant forward and stubbed out her cigarette.

“But that’s precisely why you’re in the right place.

You do this job for me, keep working on your ideas, and in a month’s time, when filming is over, come back to me with the best idea you’ve got. We’ll see if we can do business.”

I was so excited I had to clench every clenchable body part I had.

This was an incredible opportunity. This was my dream.

My boss at Wake Up Britain would have to find someone else.

It was the risk employers took when they kept you rolling along on exploitative casual contracts, year after year, rather than providing job security.

Flexibility cut both ways, I decided. I really wanted to do this.

But I had to play it right. Indira clearly respected ballsy, so I went with ballsy.

“If you accept my idea, I want an original concept credit and I want to be an executive producer on the show. A real one. Not just a name on the screen.”

Indira tapped a finger against her cigarette packet, eyes never leaving mine.

“Can you be in Leicester by Sunday night?”

“I can.”

Indira stood and extended her hand.

“Then we have a deal, Peter.”