Chapter 2
Ludo
Nothing keeps your ego in check quite like staring at yourself in a TV-studio mirror under harsh fluorescent lighting at eight o’clock in the morning, nursing a hangover that thumps like two honey badgers shagging inside your skull, while some incredibly patient make-up artist tries to breathe life into your corpse with a bucket of Max Factor.
I was being interviewed on telly in half an hour but had to knock off a quick radio interview with the BBC’s Today programme first—so my phone was clamped to my ear as I sat on hold, waiting for Lucy Veeraswamy to start asking me questions.
My father always said journalism wasn’t a nine-to-five job, and I always rather planned to take him at his word.
Unfortunately, on this particular morning, “not a nine-to-five job” didn’t mean rolling into the newsroom at half ten after a long, casual wank and my third macchiato of the day.
It meant getting up at six, pouring myself into a taxi driven by a man whose halitosis had soaked into the upholstery, and making my way to South Bank to do a bit of national breakfast television.
I was in demand today, after my first big splash in the Sentinel.
Everyone wanted a piece of me. My story was set to roll on for days, and there was a good chance the minister at the centre of the scandal would have to resign.
Two months into my career and I was about to claim my first political scalp.
I should have been on cloud nine. Instead, I was staring at my reflection, trying to summon up the life force needed to sound professional for Lucy Veeraswamy.
She started her introduction, and the phone clicked in.
I’d come off hold. As Lucy fired off her first question, I stared at the bags under my eyes.
They were so heavy they’d be over the carry-on limit for even the most permissive of airlines—no matter what you promised the boy on the check-in counter you’d do for him on his break.
I was feeling very, very sorry for myself.
Five minutes later, the interview was winding up, and I still looked like death.
“We should say we have reached out to Energy Secretary Bob Wynn-Jones’s office for comment, but we haven’t received a reply as yet,” Veeraswamy said.
That was the BBC’s obligatory three seconds of balance—designed to offset the on-air execution that had just occurred and ensure the government kept funding them for another year.
“Ludo Boche, from the Sentinel, thank you for joining us.”
The audio clicked in my ear, indicating we’d come off air.
“Congratulations, Ludo!” Lucy said. “I bet your mum and dad are chuffed to bits.”
Here it comes, I thought.
“I worked with your mum at BBC Hampshire, back in the day.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Give them both my love, will you? Tell Beverley we must catch up soon. And give Hugo a nudge for me, will you? I sent him an email about a month ago. Not sure if it got through the keepers or not.”
There it was.
“Must dash,” Lucy said. She was gone before I could say goodbye.
A bookmaker could keep me hostage for a year and I still wouldn’t understand how to place a wager, but I was willing to bet Veeraswamy’s email was not an invitation to lunch.
You show me a journalist who doesn’t already have a newspaper column in the Sentinel, and I’ll show you a journalist who wants a newspaper column in the Sentinel.
Lucy Veeraswamy did not, as yet, have a column in the Sentinel.
I was just about to put my phone in my pocket when it buzzed.
It was a message from my mother, the aforementioned Beverley Barker-Boche.
Mummy no longer worked at BBC Hampshire but was now the somewhat institutionalised executive producer of the BBC’s equally institutionalised flagship investigative programme, Compass Point.
Mummy: You sounded asleep, darling. Did you do the vocal exercises I suggested?
Asleep? I wasn’t jolly well asleep. I might still have been drunk, but I was very much awake.
I had the taxi receipt to prove it. I thought I’d performed remarkably well, considering I’d only had about three hours’ kip.
After a night at the theatre, I had accidentally ended up at Maxime’s, the Soho club, with my little brother until well after two, and I hadn’t yet had a drop of caffeine for the day. My phone buzzed again.
Mummy: You’ll need to be a bit livelier on TV or they won’t invite you back! Maybe drink some coffee? Good luck darling. Very proud of you. x
Given six million people up and down the country still spent their Monday nights sitting in front of Compass Point, tut-tutting about the state of Britain into their cups of tea, I had to acknowledge Mummy probably knew what she was talking about when it came to appearing on the telly.
I would do well to listen to her advice.
I turned to the make-up artist, who was buried in her phone—probably googling whatever technique it is morticians use on particularly peaky cadaver.
“Linda, can I get a coffee from somewhere?”
“Of course, pet.”
She grabbed her walkie-talkie off the dresser and said something cryptic, or possibly northern, into it.
A minute later, one of those cheap airline-style coffee pots arrived.
As Linda slapped TV make-up on my face like a builder rendering a garden wall, I wolfed down cup after cup of thin, watery caffeine.
It tasted like the kind of thing Thames Water might release undiluted into the sea.
The morning was dragging on. I went to check my watch, but my wrist was bare.
My little brother’s favourite drunken game is to change the alarm tone in my phone, without me noticing, to some beastly racket.
Accordingly, I’d awakened to Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” at blistering volume.
In a flailing bid to turn it off, I’d knocked over the glass of water on the bedstand, completely buggering my Apple Watch.
I also drenched the signed copy of Wolf Hall I was definitely (probably) going to read some day.
OK, confession: If I’m being absolutely honest, I really only kept it there to make me look cultured in front of any potential boyfriends.
If I’m being honestly honest, there had never been a boy with enough boyfriend potential to see it in the first place.
But, in principle, if there ever was such a boy, I wanted him to know I was the kind of serious person who read tomes of the literary weight of Wolf Hall.
As opposed to the kind of person who would spend twenty minutes pumping a make-up artist for gossip about Harry Styles.
Which is exactly what I was doing when the door to the make-up room swung open and a fierce-looking fellow with an authoritative clipboard and matching audio headset poked his head through.
“Ludo Boche?” he asked.
I turned from the mirror to face him directly.
He was about eight feet tall and lanky, with a sweep of hair that, if you stuck it under a paint shop colour tester, would see you walking away with a tin of white emulsion.
He was wearing a figure-hugging blue romper suit and a red bandana, which made him look a bit like an extra from Made in Dagenham.
I was immediately obsessed with this aesthetic.
“I’m she!” I said, trying to channel a little golden-age-of-Hollywood glamour but falling short and looking like the kind of high camp muppet who might turn up to a house party in velvet trousers and start singing showtunes. (Which, frankly, is exactly the kind of muppet I am.)
“Gassed,” Made in Dagenham said, one eyebrow raised. It was an unreadable expression. “I’m Petey. I’m the AP. If you’re ready, I’ll take you through to the green room. We’ve had to move you up. You’re on the couch in five.”
Linda studied my face one last time and declared that I was, indeed, ready. I thanked her profusely, assuring her that, were it within my gift—and I thought it was possible it might be—she could look forward to a damehood for services to hung-over homosexuals in the New Year Honours List.
“Let’s go,” Petey said. As I got up from the chair, I felt terribly queasy.
All that coffee, on top of no food, on top of a cracking hangover, just wasn’t sitting quite right.
Petey held his clipboard aloft in what felt like a vaguely threatening manner and ushered me out the door.
As I followed him down the hall to the studio, the coffee started repeating on me, all acid, bile, and regret.
In the green room, Petey passed me a lapel mic cable, which I threaded under my jersey, and plugged it into a battery pack.
He then tried several times to slide the battery pack into my back pocket without success.
“Sorry, these chinos are a bit tight,” I said. “I have ballet butt.”
“Hench, innit?” Petey said. He gave up and clipped the battery pack onto the pocket instead.
“Gimme your phone, keys, and watch,” he said, holding out his hand.
“Is this a stick-up?”
“You have to leave anything that might make a noise or interfere with the microphones here before you go on set.”
Thanks to Jonty, I no longer had a watch, but I gave Petey the rest of my worldly chattels. He disappeared into his headset, listening intently. Someone called, “And we’re out.”
“You’re on,” he said. I was ushered to the famous yellow Wake Up Britain sofa where Sally Quartermaine and Krishnan Varma-Rajan greeted me like long lost friends.
Krishnan leant over and touched me on the knee, which would have felt intimate if, firstly, it wasn’t for all the cameras and crew and, secondly, it wasn’t for the fact I felt like I was about to vomit all over the famous Wake Up Britain coffee table.
“Can I have a quick word with you in the break?” Krishnan said.
“Of course.”