Free Chart Throb by Ben Elton

fucking decision again.’
    ‘Ha ha,’ Rodney laughed woodenly.
    ‘Even I’m suddenly looking doubtful,’ said Calvin, barging on. ‘Did I make the right choice? The girls certainly know the answer to that! They go to the Bite Back Box and shout into the camera that they will be stars, breasts heaving, mascara running, belly-button jewellery jiggling with emotion. “Just you wait, Calvin Simms!” they shout. “We’ll be huge and then you’ll be sorry.” We milk it for a week, debate it over and over again on ITV2, try and tease the papers into running a “Support Peroxide” campaign. Feature the whole thing heavily on the Christmas DVD . . . Then ,’ and Calvin grinned triumphantly at his own cleverness, ‘we bring them back next year. Now that’s a story that has what it takes.’

Peroxide
    Ten months after this conversation, Georgie’s parents were sitting in their small sitting room listening to the sound of the toilet flushing upstairs. They had not heard their daughter Georgia vomiting but that was only because she always played loud music when she went to the toilet to puke.
    It had started again the moment she got the phone call.
    ‘Yeah, hi, Mr Costello, it’s Emma from Chart Throb , remember me? How’s gorgeous Georgie, we so love Georgie. We are such big fans. Is she there?’
    Georgie was the younger of the two members of Peroxide, a pop duo which she and her friend ‘Chelle had formed while attending Saturday morning drama classes and which the previous year had triumphantly sailed through the first round of Chart Throb only to be sensationally dumped in the second. Georgie had been just seventeen at the time, too young, in her father’s opinion, to be appearing half-naked on television.
    ‘If it’s a singing competition why can’t you wear some clothes?’ he asked.
    ‘The show’s all about having what it takes, Dad,’ Georgia would reply, standing on the living-room carpet in little more than her underwear. ‘Calvin’s always saying it . . . do you have what it takes? Well, this is what it takes.’
    The skimpy costumes had been ‘Chelle’s idea. At nineteen, she was very much the senior partner in the act.
    Georgia’s parents were firmly of the opinion that their daughter’s eating disorders had begun with those costumes. ‘Chelle was a natural exhibitionist who would happily have worn her hotpants and bra top to the pub, but Georgia had what her school counsellor called ‘body issues’. She was a slim girl who, when she stood before the mirror, saw a fat girl staring back. Despite being generally acknowledged as very pretty, Georgia could never quite convince herself that her body was good enough to be displayed alongside the confident ‘Chelle’s and so she began to punish it for its inadequacy.
    After Peroxide’s sudden and brutal ejection from Chart Throb Georgia had become convinced that they had failed because she hadn’t been thin enough. The more people expressed surprise that she and ’Chelle had failed to advance to the Pop School stage of the competition, the more she believed that it was her fault.
    In the weeks following the ejection Georgia’s parents had watched in despair as their beautiful daughter had gone to war with her own body. At first they had hoped that as the notoriety faded she would regain some sense of balance in her life, but the extinguishing of the media spotlight served only to increase Georgia’s self-loathing. The comments in the street went from support to pity to contempt and finally to indifference, and it was this last that seemed to hurt Georgia most. For a moment she had imagined that she meant something and then she had discovered that she didn’t. It was all the fault of her traitorous body.
    It had taken six months of family pain, together with the money for private help that her parents could ill afford, to bring Georgia back from the brink, and now it was all beginning again.
    ‘Hi, Georgie!’ Emma chirruped.