I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [62]
His big face went pale and he averted his eyes. ‘It’s a no,’ he said. Nearby diners who’d been secretly eavesdropping on our summit gasped and stared. I’m fairly sure one let a roast potato fall out of his mouth. ‘Whaaaat?’ they all thought.
I was more sanguine. Don’t get me wrong, it was a hammer blow. But I’d expected it and didn’t really have my heart set on working with Auntie anyway. The BBC is nothing if not risk averse and I was seen as a bit of a maverick. In fact, some of them called me Maverick behind my back I think.
No, I’d foreseen my career would be with other broadcasters anyway, so I really wasn’t arsed.
I felt a bit sorry for Hayers then. Shadowy powers had clearly forced his hand, and he was snivellingly torn between losing a major piece of talent and upsetting his idiotic paymasters.
‘Have you got any other ideas, though?’
I snorted. Did I really want to entrust my portfolio of projects to this shoddy outfit? I don’t think so. But he practically begged me (it was a bit unseemly actually, people were watching) so I went ahead and listed them. Norwich-based crime drama Swallow, Knowing ME Knowing You (a factual show looking at the disease), Inner City Sumo and Monkey Tennis.156 But as I reeled off format after format – each more daring than the last – I could see he was retreating into his cowardly, safety-first shell. All genuinely original ideas, all snubbed.
I did have another ace up my sleeve: Motorway Rambles – a travelogue of me walking the hard shoulders of British highways, with special permission from the British Transport Police – but it had been co-devised by Bill Oddie and he’d made me promise I wouldn’t pitch it if he wasn’t there. Fair enough.
The meeting was over. I had things to be doing that afternoon anyway, so I thanked Hayers, and stood up.
‘But … but … we’ve not even had the cheese course,’ he said.
I looked him square in the face and, without breaking his gaze, I struck the handle of the knife that was resting on the cheese board. The wooden edge acted as a pivot, the blade as a springboard, firing a cube of cheese up into the air. I caught it and wrapped it in a napkin, which I slotted into my pocket.
‘While I’m on the subject of cheese,’ I said, as the waiter hovered nearby, ‘it’s an open secret in the BBC that you smell like cheese.’
The waiter caught my eye. ‘Ha! I’ve been dying to say that,’ he thought.
Well, Hayers didn’t know what to say. I didn’t care. I’d had enough and the meeting merely confirmed my long-held desire to continue my career well away from the BBC.
I wasn’t going to let a coward like him pay for the meal, so I took out a hundred-pound note and slotted it down the waiter’s cleavage. And he did have a cleavage.
A noise snapped behind me, like the sound of a piece of flesh hitting a nearby piece of flesh. It was a handclap. It was followed by another from the far corner of the room. Then another. And another. And as I turned to face them, the diners broke into rich applause. It was as if they were saying: ‘So long, Alan. The bigwigs might not appreciate you, but by God, we do.’
Thanks, guys, I thought. It means a bunch. Then I very calmly, very slowly, very proudly walked through the lunchtime diners and away into the night. It felt good.
152 Press play on Track 29.
153 As I say, he’s a good guy. He’d become chummy with me after a falling out with Des Lynam several years before at a Grandstand bonding retreat. Des couldn’t help but correct what he saw as speech defects in fellow sports presenters – he’d picked up on my Norfolk nasality in the early 90s, for example. Unlike me, Steve had reacted badly to being told he had a tendency to pronounce ‘this afternoon’ as ‘the zarfternoon’ – but the fact is, he does and Des was bang right to point it out. Steve’s not spoken to him since – and I’m the beneficiary. I am, Steve admits, his fall-back friend