Late Shift At Bid TV

I walk into the Sit-Up production offices at 3pm and immediately the sense of dread kicks in. The faces on the crew tonight – directors, producers, presenters, floor managers, sound and camera operators – are all familiar but none are welcoming. After three years as a freelance camera operator here, I have failed to make any kind of significant connection with any of them. The meeting is already underway, and I sit apart from the others, too apathetic to show any interest in the information being imparted, nodding at a few of the people who look my way. The gesture is not returned.

The head cameraman, for reasons I cannot fathom, has a soft spot for me, and so the phone calls continue and I drive the two miles into Acton and do my mini tours of duty.

Peter Simon is holding forth at the meeting, gently complaining about the colour of the jewellery displays. “I know I say this almost every day,” he is saying, “But, well, it never seems to change. If we’re selling gold or silver coloured rings and bracelets, it just doesn’t make any sense to me to have yellow or white backgrounds. I mean, it doesn’t show up. We need brightly coloured backgrounds, like red or blue. That way, the jewellery shows up. I mean, am I wrong? Sometimes I feel like no one listens in this place. The problem with the yellow and white backgrounds is that the gold and silver doesn’t show up…”

He continues but I tune him out and read a book, putting my feet up on someone’s desk, not caring whose. Twenty minutes later on the way out, Simon stops on his way to make-up and hits me on the shoulder. “’Ey,” he says, taking an interest in something I wish he wouldn’t. “Not long now, surely?”

“Well, still a good seven months away unfortunately.”

“Why does it take so long?” he asks rhetorically. “’Ere,” he says, tapping my shoulder again, “Someone should write a bloody book about this place.”

“Well, if I could find a way of setting it in the future with Cyborgs and laser guns, maybe my publishers would let me.”

Peter Simon nods uncertainly, not getting me. “Well,” he says, “Good luck ‘ey?” And he bounds off, beaming.

In the Bid TV studio, I walk up to one of the two camera operators being relieved. “Alright?” I say.

“Alright,” he says back, and gives me his headset. There is nothing else to say. I put my hands on the camera and perform a long, slow tilt down a necklace. Almost immediately a vague sense of panic sets in. I have ten hours of work to come, seven hours of which will be spent on camera. I’ll never be able to think of seven hours of shots, I think. I will go mad, I imagine. Time stretches and stops here, I know.

But I manage two shots, then a third, and a forth and that is how time is marked; shot by shot, product by product, hour by hour. The music begins to nag at my senses after ten minutes, the endless repetition of a mindless, inoffensive ditty that is barely noticed by the viewer but that on one side of the studio, the one with the ‘speaker, is almost unbearably loud.

I’ve been lucky with the director. He is one of the one’s who doesn’t care, who doesn’t take it seriously, who understands that it’s just shopping telly. The other cam op is OK too, someone who I can say stupid stuff to when I’m going crazy and who’ll play along. He’s on Camera 2 at the moment, the one where you get a bit of respite, and he saunters over to me while he has a moment, nodding hello.

“I don’t think I can do this,” I tell him. “I might go home. I’m going to walk out and go home and just not spend money anymore.”

He smiles. He can empathise. Morale is low here. Three months is the point where new recruits are ground down and earn their thousand-yard-stare. Michael has been here for over a year. He is entering the stage known as acceptance. “I thought you were going to be some big-shot author,” he says and I grimace. “Shouldn’t you be rolling in it?”

“Only a small number of authors manage to earn a living from fiction alone,” I tell him. “One has to regard it as a very time consuming hobby.”

“So no one bought your book then?”

“It’s not out ‘till October. How can you not know this? Are you not going to buy it?”

“I’m not much of a reader,” he says, and walks back to his camera.

After only half an hour an ache creeps into my calves and feet. This is a bad sign.

After an hour we swap and I get onto camera 2. I walk up to the assistant presenter (formerly known as model). She is a cute blond called Laura but she arouses nothing in me. When I first started here, the models got me through the day; a cavalcade of gorgeous ditsy girls with tits spilling out of their outfits, casually adjusted every time the camera was about to swing their way. Even in the darkest depths of a twelve-hour mid-shift, all it took was a quick glance to spark off dirty fantasies involving one or more of them; chance meetings in the dark studio after-hours leading to quick, frantic sex on the patch of carpet Andy Hodgson uses to demonstrate the suction power of vacuum cleaners, or a weekend away on a promo shoot where, over a few drinks, sad stories of useless boyfriends are told and then tears are mopped up and forgotten with, well, quick, frantic sex. For a long time though (and even before their uniform was changed from tight revealing shirts to more conservative, tasteful tops), the crushing weight of working here overwhelmed any vague hopes of sexual possibility. Now they are as much a symbol of tedious grind as the wall-mounted signs displaying suggestions/orders such as ‘Smile! Happiness! Engage! Sell!’.

“How’s your blog coming?” Laura asks me.

“It’s OK,” I say, surprised and pleased she cares.

“I keep meaning to check it out,” she says. “Write down the address again for me.”

“That would be a waste of paper and ink,” I say, and she doesn’t bother to deny it, or perhaps understand it.

“Your book must be coming out soon.”

I swallow a scream. “Not ‘till October.”

She claps her hands together. “Exciting! Have you read Jordan, sorry Katie Price’s new one?”

“No, it’s on my wish list though.”

“She’s like, my idol. She’s so amazing.”

I nod, because there is really nothing else I can think of to do.

On my first break, predictably, I’m at the pub writing the outline of my second novel, sitting outside to avoid the dance music even though it is dark and windy and I have to weigh the pages down with my pint. This is the high point of my day.

The second part of my shift, for which I switch to Price-Drop TV, is utterly inconsequential, although marred by a director who, for Christ’s sake, cares, and who asks for special moves and peers through the window from the gallery to make sure we aren’t talking to each other, presumably because his own life is so empty and devoid of joy that he can’t stand the thought of anyone being anything but entirely unhappy.

After my second break spent at the pub, the beginning of the final part of the shift in Bid goes relatively quickly, and the possibility that this day might actually draw to an end seems within the realm of feasibility. But, naturally, when it comes to midnight, the final depression sets in and the shittiest products of all are dragged out for painfully slow flogging. No matter how many times Peter Simon stops the music to inform us gravely that the price has gone far below anything they could have expected, people just aren’t buying. What depresses me more than anything is that for all his humour and generosity, Simon cares about what he is doing. He asks the producers about targets and revenue and wants to do better. I want that spirit, that desire to make the company paying me to do better. But I will never have it because if the company makes an extra ten thousand pounds, what’s in it for me? Why should I want be part of a team that makes its employers richer while my wage stays the same?

Finally, at 1am, we can turn the cameras off and go home. My legs are screaming in pain, and this is why I don’t walk to work, because the walk home would be unbearable. I try to slip into bed without waking Cheryl but she rolls towards me and immediately remembers where I’ve been. She puts her hand on my chest. “Never mind,” she says as I lie stiffly on my back and stare at the ceiling, trying to convince my body that the suffering is over for another day. “Soon you’ll be famous and rich and this will all be a distant recollection for your autobiography.”

She has hope, which is enviable, but I stare at that ceiling and I think about the near-certainty of working in shopping telly for the rest of my life and it terrifies me.