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January 26, 2008
Galina Goes Shopping
I told Thomas Whitehead that the plot for my next play involved euthanasia. He said he was sure I could work in lots of local colour writing about young people in countries such as India.
Ay Di Me.
Still, at least he didn't do something that is anathema to a comic - try to out-funny me.
Early doors with Madame Galina Anne Stone from Rapido TV rang me to ask if I would take part in a set-up audition for a ballet company. I said I wouldn’t. And please would she do her research more thoroughly? Ballet companies have schools feeding them talent. Otherwise dancers apply for contracts or the company director will go find. There are no open auditions.
However, I said, Madame Galina would do a set-up audition for something like...something like... something like...a ha! For selllng stuff on the Shopping Channel!
So, off I was soon going with camera and sound Dan and Huss to have breakfast in a greasy spoon off the Kentish Town Road en route to a business park in Peterborough.
Anne had said that the experience would be “rock and roll” and might “glean for me a side to Galina I’d never thought existed.” Dan said that it would be unlikely I’d manage to stay in the Shopping Channel studios for longer than two minutes.
“Dan dares you to have balls of steel, Galina”, he said. “That’s what Sacha Baron-Cohen used to tell himself when he was first out and about doing Ali G.”
In the waiting room at Peterborough station, Dan and Huss masked me while I dressed in Galina’s offstage outfit.
“And...rolling!”
Cut away shot of me in fur coat, fur hat, fake cobra skin stiletto knee high boots imperiously handing my ticket to over-game barrier wallah Fred.
“Really, really, really try and just do what you’d do normally, mate, could you, just that?” said Dan quite a bit later while Huss rubbed take nine.
During the first take Fred had said: “Welcome to Peterborough” straight to camera, he dropped the ticket I gave him to ruin take two “Bollocks…sorry, sorry”, and from take three onward had gone for Best Actor in a Jesus Lord Why Did We Involve The Twat In The First Place? Role.
By the fence alongside the industrial estate, running late now, Dan set up for a shot of me getting out of the taxi onto a muddy bank.
“So cool the way the fur moves”, he said, looking into the viewfinder.
I tried to watch this fur movement and rear-ended myself. Bless Dan and Huss, neither of them laughed.
“You okay?” Dan asked. “Can we go quickly again, please?”
I was careful this time.
“And another go”, Dan called, “you’re not doing the weird angley thing with your feet.”
Eye for detail. Heels shoved forward I did ballerinic alighting from taxi and we rolled on into the studio.
I gave the receptionist photographs of me in various Madame Galina costumes.
“Please to cover up those”, I said, pointing behind her to framed shots of the studio bosses.
I rearranged the glass table and chairs in the seating area and had just picked up the rug when she asked what I was doing.
”I am Madame Galina”, I said. “But don’t worry, I’m not going to charge you for the improvements.”
Dan stopped me. Mark Thatcher, Shopping Channel Chief Executive, was among us.
“Why have you come dressed as a failed Formula One driver?” I asked, holding my hand for him to kiss.
He lowered my hand to the right height for shaking. And, now, see he had a choice here. He could either bounce me out of there or go along with the joke. What he shouldn’t have done was try and get one up on me.
“First, let’s give you a screen test”, he said.
“Only from my best side”, I simpered.
From behind the Shopping Channel crew, Dan looked up from his camera and mouthed at me, “Keep playing up.”
Mark gave me a pen.
“Sell this to me. And make me feel that by buying it I am rendered exclusive in some way.”
I asked if there was a standard script.
“Make it personal to yourself”, he said. “And…ready…we’re selling!”
In full Galina mode I went for it.
“With this elegant, stylish writing accessory…”
Mark gave me an approving nod for managing to use all those six syllables instead of the one: “pen”.
“…whose width is, opaquely to see, optimumly manufactured for manoeuvrability.”
Another nod. But from behind the crew Dan was giving me palms up “what the?...”
“It’s a scriptment implement”, I went on, “for the Queen Of The Swans. Not just any old swan or cygnet. And not for Olga Klimtova. She is more of a Bic bird.”
“None of that last lot”, Mark interrupted, “is going to mean anything to my viewer.”
As God is my witness I knew from Dan’s corpse that he read my thought “just the one?”
“Who’s Olga? And what was all that stuff about swans?”
“You said I had to make it personal to my life. I play the Queen of the Swans regularly onstage.”
”Whatever”, said Mark. “I’m not letting you go in front of a camera dressed like that, in any case. Put something else on and I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
When he came back I was wearing much heavier make-up, my purple baby-grow and a sequined alice band.
“Is this better?” I asked.
“Of course it bloody isn’t. What is this? What makes you think you can get onto my shopping channel looking and behaving like this?”
I said nothing.
“What point of reference is my demographic of viewer going to have re you?”
Dan and Huss giggled.
“We just thought we’d go with a new angle”, I said, “something they won’t have seen before.”
“So you think” and he was getting a bit loud now, “that you are bigger than the product you’re selling? Can I tell you just how fatal that is?”
After a few seconds waiting I said:
“Okay, tell me.”
Mark spluttered and got blotchy.
“Do you think you’re bigger than my product?”
I held the pen up to camera.
“Yes, Mark”, I said smiling, “I am bigger than your little pen.”
“That’s it! You’re just made the one unforgivable Shopping Channel mistake. You have just admitted to thinking yourself bigger than the product.”
His crew began to shift about with embrassment. From behind them, Dan mouthed, “Balls of steel."
I pretended to cry.
“He is shouting at me”, I said between sobs. “Not even Nureyev ever shouted at me.”
Mark stared. The crew were shell-shocked. Dan mimed “go with it."
I wailed and flounced.
“Is this for real?” Mark asked. One of his crew shrugged. Dan gave me the thumbs up.
I tottered, looked aghast at Mark and toppled into a dead faint.
There was silence.
Until I giggled.
“That’s it”, Mark stormed. “You’re out of here. I’m getting security.”
He left.
“What a complete and utter shit face”, I said to camera. The crew stopped filming. Dan and Huss hurried across the room to me.
“F**ing genius”, Dan hissed. “Go and put your tutu on.”
“No way”, I said. “He’s getting security. I’m out of here.”
“Put your tutu on! Balls of steel. Dan dares you."
I put my tutu on. I could hear people approaching the screen- test room. Dan went into the corridor and said calmly but not messing, “Any of you touch him and it’s assault, okay?”
He came back.
“Right. We make this look like it’s your decision to leave. Go win the award for most outraged hissy-fit."
Huss had my bag over one shoulder camera on the other, Dan was shadowing me like a boxing second, the security guards were smiling nicely and I was giving it my best Rajah’s Daughter strut. Through reception - “I’ll have my photos back, thank you. Pearl before swine as they were” - the car park, the gates and onto the supply road. It was rush hour. Drivers honked me.
I asked the biggest security guard if it would be okay to go back and fake a sequence where he manhandled me through the gates.
“For a big roughic”, I said afterward, “you give surprisingly soft finger-prizing.”
Dan announced it was time to eat humble pie so we could get the footage out, and started back up the drive.
While Huss masked me with my fur coat, I changed back into civvies.
“Thanks, Huss. My modesty and all that.”
“Actually”, “Huss said, “I’m more concerned about them taking their eyes off the road. Headline. Drag Ballerina Causes Peterborough Pile Up.”
After twenty minutes or so Dan was back, talking into his mobile.
“…and he’s saying no way is he signing the release form. He got his lawyers down and made them watch the footage, and ended up even more pissed off because they cracked up. Yeah, I was watching it with them. We have to get it back. It’s genius. Specially the faint. We’re really onto something here.”
After he hung up, he said:
“Anne wants me to try and get the stuff back off him, and you two can head back to London.”
The next day Anne called me. She was subdued. And for a TV researcher, whose raison d’être is to convince you that being in his or her programme for no fee will lead to bliss, this is something.
“Mark wants to sue you for defamation of character for what you said to camera.”
“A fictional character can’t defame someone, Anne. Otherwise my mother would have had me inside by now. Have you got the footage back?”
“There’s no hope of that, actually.”
“But what did Dan and Huss say about it?”
”They’re keeping quite a low profile around the office today.”
What was this?
”We’d really like you to write a sincere letter of apology to Mark at the Shopping Channel.”
“No. He started it.”
“Iestyn, I’m really afraid you put us in a very tricky position, re a stations war.”
“Rapido versus the Shopping Channel. Hardly matched like King Kong and Godzilla is it?”
“Could we draft a letter for you to sign?”
“No.”
“Could we write him a letter and mention you in it?”
“As long as the mention of me isn’t libellous.”
She sighed. I could imagine her putting her mouth close to the phone to get the full effect.
“With you…”
She paused. I could hear her rifling through papers.
“With you “character comics with white clown influence and classical dance skills” everything’s a joke, isn’t it?”
Anne recently married the head of menswear for Jaeger. She asked me to dance at the wedding. The fee I asked for was no joke, let me tell you…
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