Free Inconceivable by Ben Elton

can’t seem to find it in me to write one myself, when Daphne said that the Channel Controller was on the line. Well of course I was thrilled, he could only be phoning personally to accept my dinner invitation! I was mentally leafing through Delia as I grabbed the phone and had already decided on the salmon mousse to start when it turned out that Nigel had called about something even more exciting! He was phoning from Barcelona, where he was (of course) attending an international television festival. Perhaps the single greatest perk of being at the Beeb is the international festival circuit. The BBC don’t pay you much, but they do let you lig. Even I get to go to a few. Lucy and I had a fantastic weekend in Cork last April, except that she thought she was ovulating so I wasn’t allowed to drink. Controllers, being an altogether superior breed, of course, virtually spend their lives at festivals. You can always find them in some exotic location bemoaning the fact that Baywatch is the most popular Programme in the world and that cartoons are the sickness at the heart of children’s broadcasting.
    Anyway, this was why Nigel was calling from Barcelona.
    But oh, such news! It turned out that the Prime Minister’s office had been on to the BBC about the PM appearing on Livin’ Large. Livin’ Large is our current Saturday morning kids’ pop and fun show and every week they have a sort of interview spot where the children get to ask questions of a celebrity. Now, unbeknownst to me (surprise, surprise) our PR people had had a brilliant idea. (I must digress here to remark that the fact that our PR people had had a brilliant idea was shocking news in itself and evidence of how much things have changed around the old place. BBC press and public relations used to consist of an office with a large enthusiastic woman in it whom everyone ignored.
    Now it’s a huge and entirely separate company called something like BBC Communications or Beeb COM, whose services I have to hire. It’s quite extraordinary. In order for me to ensure that BBC shows are plugged in BBC publications I have to pay BBC money to BBC Communications. It seems loopy to me, but George assures me that it’s cut away a lot of ‘dead wood’.) Anyway, BBC Communications’ idea had been to ask the Prime Minister if he would like to appear on Livin’ Large and take some questions from ‘the kids’, thereby cutting through all that cynical adult bullshit and plugging in to the pure unsullied enthusiasm of youth. Astonishingly, it seemed to me, the man was considering it.
    The problem for Nigel (the Controller) was that Downing Street (which is a vigorous, ‘can do’ sort of a place these days) wanted to meet today ! and no other later date would do because the PM’s diary is chockablock with summits and Cabinet crises right through till Christmas. Nigel had of course tried to get a flight back from Barcelona but there was a football match, or the French air-traffic controllers weren’t letting anybody out of Europe today or something. Anyway, the upshot of it was that I would have to go to the meeting!
    Well, I spent the rest of the morning phoning my mum and Lucy and everybody I knew and trying to get my tie ironed. Of course, one might have thought that in the heart of one of the largest television studio complexes in the world getting one’s tie ironed would have been easy. To get someone from wardrobe would, one might imagine, have been the work of a moment.
    Unfortunately ‘wardrobe’ no longer exists as such. It’s a separate company called Beeb Frox or else something equally awful, and one has to negotiate with it. This Daphne, my wonderful secretary, duly did, and came back with a quote of £45. It seemed a bit steep to iron a tie but apparently Beeb Frox claimed it would scarcely cover their paperwork. I told Daphne that seeing as this was the Prime Minister and all, she’d better get on with it, but it turned out not to be that simple. In