CHAPTER TWO
The Descent Into Darkness
4TH OF JULY 2018
At the time of delivering the project I was exhausted. As debts mounted and my stress levels ratcheted up to extreme levels a small cyst on my chest had ballooned into a full on infection. This was the best chance I’d ever had of making it so I had given the project everything. All that was pure had poured out my heart into a 30,000 word pitch document as I thought I was finally getting my break. And the person who had developed it with us had left without telling us and I was now being ghosted by a tv channel. It felt like they’d paid a whore to fuck and then had a wank in the toilet and left. The seeping growth was the physical manifestation of the negative vibe that was pulsating through every fibre of my being as hope and expectation turned to despair and realisation. I had chronic insomnia and had been to three different dentists that week as my face was throbbing and much to my frustration despite several X-rays none of them could find the wisdom teeth I thought were growing and obviously causing me this pain.I’d spent months working out intricate plots and complex character arcs. My mind was primed and with nowhere to direct that energy I turned my storytelling powers inwards. I magnified aches into debilitating health conditions and pains into terminal illness. I was now working on a much darker project 24/7 in my head about a neurotic, desperate writer who would die a failure.
NEITHER A BORROWER OR NOR A LENDER BE
FROM RUSSIA WITH INDIFFERENCE
I wandered around in fugue state only snapping out of it a couple of weeks later when I genuinely thought I'd fallen through a wormhole. I’d finished a DJing gig and when I checked my laptop it said 1am. But when I got to the pub I go to for a drink after work it was shut. I was confused so I looked at my phone and it said 2:38am. I was pretty drunk but surely it hadn’t taken me ninety eight minutes to pack away my gear. There was no explanation for it. I just sat on the pavement for twenty minutes staring into space with no idea who or where I was anymore. The next day my mum texted me to say “don’t forget the clocks go forward.” That explained why the pub was closed but it didn’t explain why I felt like I’d been kicked in the head by an elephant.
It had been three weeks since we’d heard anything. As I pondered hitting the streets to find a Fagin type figure who might take me into his gang I got an email from my producer in which he said “we were in the hands of the commissioning committee.” Which sounded a lot like “you are sentenced to death by firing squad” when I repeated it in my head. We are in the hands of the commissioning committee … you are sentenced to death by firing squad. I had no idea what this meant so I just said how excited I was. This sort of response had seemed to work throughout the project. If in doubt just say how excited you are. The opposite was true. I was completely terrified. The way my producer explained the commissioning Committee it sounded like a big meeting where a bunch of demented baboons at the watering hole of fate ripped to shreds young creatives dreams before sacrificing a virgin to the head of the channel as a sign of devotion and aspiration to find the next Goglebox. I wish he hadn’t told me.
TV development pays less than minimum wage so at the beginning of the process I’d taken a zero hours job as a bar man in a sodden cave under the Thames. Like a mold spore I floated from my damp flat to my damp place of work and back again only stopping to eat, sleep and write a sit-com. But towards the end of the writing process I had to make a choice. I could work in a bar and write a sit-com and not sleep or I could write a sit-com sleep and not work in a bar. As much as I enjoyed the life of a mold spore, sit-com writer felt marginally better so I went for that.
It was a calculated risk as I thought I could go back to my job when I’d met the deadline. But amongst all the fuss of the last few months I hadn’t realised I’d been fired. For once it wasn’t my fault. Apparently I had insulted the Qur’an in an Uber home with one of the managers. I’d shared a cab home with her and a colleague. My manager Amy was a posh girl who’s rich family had fallen on hard times so was having to manage a bar until she could meet a rich guy, restore her family's honour and never work again. A private education buys you a lot of arrogance and self belief but that can only get you so far when running a moldy cave under a river staffed by miscreants who haven’t taken a job in a bar to listen to authority or do any work.
Arabic music was playing when we got in the Uber “Is this your call to prayer?” Amy asked the driver “No, i’m just listening to the Qur'an” he replied. I started to talk to my colleague in the back because as far as I was aware London was not yet under the rule of the caliphate. Amy asked the driver if he had a problem with this, I guess she had forgotten to clock out at work, he said no. But that didn’t matter because she, a white atheist, did. She leaned over the front seat and begged me to “stop talking and respect the Qur'an”. Fine it was her Uber rating. We cruised through a silent London the dulcet Arabic melodies the only sound as dawn began to break.
At work the next day She took me to one side and told me she was very angry with me. She left a pause for my apology but it did not come as I had to explain to her that it was her who had insulted the Qur'an by telling a man what to do.
NEITHER A BORROWER OR NOR A LENDER BE
So now I was unemployed, massively in debt and no doubt being labelled an islamophobe behind my back. Over the years I’ve learnt to live with debt because unpayable debt is just a number on a spreadsheet on a bank managers laptop whereas the cost of solvency to an unqualified waster like me is to be forced to work in a system that doesn’t care and is a never ending cycle of menial thankless tasks to make someone else wealthy, destroy the planet and gradually wring out the meaningfulness of your existence until your only motivation is to maximize profits and your rewards for doing so are like little treats for a dog who’s been a good boy; holidays you’ll never remember, a house full of furniture you never sit on and multiple subscriptions to entertainment platforms with nothing to watch on.
If you’d said to me 15 years ago that my credit score would be so low that I wouldn’t be able to secure a loan to buy a plastic bag to carry a can of beans home I might have tried to work my way up the corporate ladder. It’s easy to say that now when every creative endeavour has either ended in financial disaster or social alienation. You need a pretty robust sense of self worth to continue to believe in yourself when your bank is still ringing you fifteen years into your career when you make a purchase over £20 to say there has been suspicious activity on your account. By the time you’ve realised the destination you have arrived in is not the warm embrace of a profitable career and loving family but the cold death stare of a pile of unopened brown envelopes that stack up in a one bedroom flat next to a motorway that no matter how many pictures you hang on the wall will never feel like home it’s too late. You didn’t achieve your first few futures, so why will you achieve your next one. So you set achievable goals like not wanting to punch yourself in the face when you get dressed in the morning, being able to look at yourself in the mirror without the word pathetic reverberating in your skull and mustering up enough self esteem to get an erection so you can wank yourself to sleep. Achieving goals no matter how small are surprisingly rewarding when all your dreams are tossed in a burning bin that God warms his hands on.
Whilst I waited for the commissioning committee to light the flame under their cauldron and start their commissioning orgy I remembered the therapist I was rehabilitating had given me that business advisors card. Maybe he could help me with my finances. In order to get to the office I had to walk past Jeremy Corbyn’s house which I recognised from the news. It very much had the feel of someone pretending to live there to win an election. Complete with a front garden that was a communists tribute to the great Chinese famine of 1959. But with more death. From the state of the business advisors office I wasn’t holding out much hope. A grotty little hole basking in cancerous LED light, the smell of MRSA wafting through the air. Piss stained sofas peppered the waiting room fresh enough that I feared the sofa would squelch if I sat on one.
My financial advisor Kevin was not what I was expecting. He was the type of guy who from the moment he sat down at his desk was counting down the minutes till he was in front of the TV eating dinner. All the other advisors were under his spell. He had them wrapped around his finger all commanded from a desk at the back of the office away from prying eyes. His clients were just a long line of distractions stopping him from getting to the pub. His desk may have been out of the way in the corner but everything about him was out in the open.
Kevin got me. He said he was “a lot harsher” with the youngsters but I’d be getting an “easy ride” as I looked like a “hard worker.” He reckoned I'd be back on my feet in no time. Kevin could not wait to give me money. He was appalled at how one of the great comedy geniuses of their generation had been treated. He agreed that I had been wronged and was owed a living. I even sensed he was a little bit embarrassed for me. If I wanted I could walk out of his office with £900. I asked him what the catch was. He said “there wasn’t one.” So I didn’t turn it down. This guy seemed to know what he was doing so I asked him what he thought I should do about my mounting bank and credit card debts. He said “rack it up further and don’t pay it.” I didn’t ask him if that was official government advice. It was controversial I'll give him that... but he was the one with a desk so I wasn’t going to not listen to him. I’ve got a desk but it’s an upturned drawer with a wooden palette on top with a table cloth thrown over it. I stood up and my phone beeped. £900 was in my account. Hopefully I could eek that out over the next ten years as I retreated to my bed to get morbidly obese and never cut my toenails again as I endlessly scrolled though social media hate watching my contemporaries flourish. When I left he shouted across the office “come in next month and I’ll give you a free bus pass.”
FROM RUSSIA WITH INDIFFERENCE
I Skyped my Russian girlfriend based in Moscow to tell her the good news about the bus pass and the bad news about me. We had met in 2017 when she was in the UK on BBC training and had randomly turned up at the bar I was working at looking for something to do. It was the middle of the afternoon so the only option I could think of in the area was Karl Marx's grave. Why not go and see the tomb of the man whose ideology is responsible for your aunt being trampled to death in a breadline. I knew she liked me when on our first date a couple of days later I paid £40, all the money I had at the time, to get into a club which she left after ten minutes as she “was tired”
Because our chemistry was so electric the next time she came to the UK I invited her to stay at my flat which she duly accepted. On arrival she informed me I’d be sleeping on the floor in my own room. Ever the cucked loser with low self esteem I agreed to this. No matter how well we got on during the day each night I’d find myself on the floor in my bedroom almost grateful that this beautiful lady would allow me to hear her snore from the discomfort of the cold hard floor of my bedroom. On the final night she granted me permission to sleep in a sleeping bag in my bed with her. I crawled into my own bed sheathed in a sleeping bag like the worm that I was. Outside of the sleeping arrangements it had been the perfect week. I had no idea that we were in a relationship but when she returned six months later for a three week holiday she informed me that we were. I didn’t get rid of the sleeping bag just yet. I guess this is how courtship in Russia works, be intelligent, beautiful and treat a man like dirt.
She’d recently been exposed along with every other Russian employee who worked for the BBC as an enemy of the state on a list published by the Russian far right. I dialled her up on Skype. I had to level with her, apart from the bus pass it was not good news. I thought it best to be honest,”I was very weak, almost pathetic.” I dropped the mother load “I’m so poor I could be Russian, It’s unfair that I started going bald when I was 23 and it’s only getting worse, I’ve put on weight I look like a toad sitting on top of a pear when I take my clothes off, the postman gives me panic attacks as every letter I get is a bill or a prospectus from a Turkish hair transplant company.” her face was motionless. “The last year 90% of the people i’ve met shouted at me for no reason, the only person who texts me is my mum, I’ve never had a missed call from anyone in my life, the only other time the phone rings it’s a debt collector or an injury lawyer asking if I’d like to sue the pub where I fell down the stairs drunk following an argument with my then alcoholic girlfriend, I walk past homeless people and think about asking them to lend me some money, the only qualification i have is a CBT to drive a scooter which means I’m going to have to be a Deliveroo driver for the rest of my life and all my ideas have either financially crippled me or emotionally destroyed me.”
I went on to almost complete silence. She seemed to be agreeing with me.
I thought modern man was supposed to be vulnerable. She was progressive, by Russian standards, she wasn’t an alcoholic and only said something racist once in two years of our relationship. In the UK If you are not talking about how much you hate your penis or publicly declaring that catcalling a girl out the window of a van should be punishable by death then you are considered a misogynistic pig from the patriarchy who is probably a men's rights activist. The opposite is true in mother Russia. Like decent pop music wokeness is not something that has been exported there yet. Russia is run by Putin, the ultimate alpha male who probably thinks that sharing your feelings is an act so pathetic that it should be reserved for women and homos only. A man so masculine that there is more testosterone in a single pubic hair on his crotch than in all the gender neutral ball sacks of the Twitterati liberal elites put together. Relationships in Russia are not about talking about your feelings but finding a girl whose perfume is 90% alcohol so you can drink it when she’s asleep. I could see from her reaction that this was the first time she had heard a man show vulnerability and it was not something she was enjoying. At this point I realised she had gone. Maybe she hung up or maybe the FSB cut us off to stop modern masculinity crossing the eastern front. The call had not gone well. At least I didn’t cry, I thought. Though not crying wasn’t a choice. I can’t cry. An optician told me it was because I had very dehydrated eyes. I remember I asked her if you could “cry air.” and she very much gave me the look I’d just seen my girlfriend give me for the last ninety minutes.
INTO THE VOID
It had been nine weeks since we had last heard anything from the channel. On his deathbed the most successful studio head of his day MGM’s Sam Mayer said “if he’d commissioned the same projects he’d rejected and rejected the same projects he’d commissioned he’d have the same amount of hits” So using that theory if you smeared dog food on every TV project and got a one eyed dog to rub his dick on the ones “he liked” you’d have the same amount of hits but with less nepotism. I’d be up for that system but it would probably be considered animal cruelty to make a dog rub his dick on most of the stuff that gets sent in. At least a dog would be pleased to see you when you turned up to one of these joyless meetings about plot and tone.
Three months after we had first handed in the project we got an email saying no with some notes on why. To call them notes is to damn them with faint praise, I’ve seen more insight in a hallmark card. “we can see you’ve done a lot of work” (No shit, it’s 30,000 words long) “you’ve worked on this for a long time” (oh really well I started it two and a half years ago) “Was the font Helvetica?” … I mean I wasn’t expecting a red carpet but I thought they would have least read it. I’d only given the show two years of my life under the false pretence that it would go through the commissioning process. Granted I wasn’t fluid in the language of commissioning but I was pretty sure I’d been made assurances by the channel and my producer that the project would at the very least be considered. As a result I’d made it a priority and completely neglected my life so now I had the worst of both worlds no TV show and no life. I’d spent two years working on it for them at great emotional and financial cost and our contact had left without even telling us or reading the finished work. All I had to show for my herculean efforts was an email full of hollow platitudes as I was left to rot on the side of the road like a dead pig lying in the sun on a summer's day.
I had worked hard to the best of my ability and I was proud of the work but once again I had been punished not rewarded for my efforts. I had put so much into this and made countless sacrifices. I wondered if my family would ever be proud of me. I’d been dragged through the gears of an indifferent bureaucratic machine that was controlled by the whims of a faceless corporation. What hurt the most was not the rejection but that I had been so naive to think the system was meritocratic and that my talent mattered.I was completely broke and had no future... well annoyingly there is always a future but this particular future was less about writing sit-coms and more about writing letters to creditors asking them not to send the bailiffs round. My jaw throbbed, my cyst oozed and whether my eyes were open or closed all I could see was darkness.
If that wasn’t depressing enough my girlfriend sent me a text saying it was over. Completely my fault. With the TV project I’d put all my eggs in one basket and now they were smashed on the pavement and like every Russian stereotype they do not go out with an English guy to eat an omelette off the pavement, they want it on a gold plate.
If that wasn’t depressing enough my girlfriend sent me a text saying it was over. Completely my fault. With the TV project I’d put all my eggs in one basket and now they were smashed on the pavement and like every Russian stereotype they do not go out with an English guy to eat an omelette off the pavement, they want it on a gold plate.
I went out for a walk to clear my mind. I felt like I couldn’t breathe properly. I tried to brush it to one side then my chest tightened and I felt a shooting pain down my left arm. I was certain I was about to have a heart attack. I rushed to A&E and threw myself at the receptionist shouting “I’m having a heart attack because my TV show didn’t get commissioned!” (top tip if you don’t want to wait in A&E, tell them you are having a heart attack) They hooked me up to some monitors and gave me the bad news I was perfectly healthy. I was going to have to live through this shit. It was a nightmare.
I was alone, penniless and the last two and half years of work was rotting in an inbox of a heartless commissioner. Now every bridge was burnt. It was time to throw myself in the river and drown. But before I could do that things were about to get a whole lot worse.
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