Dead famous by Ben Elton Page A

that telly is dumbed down? That we need more, I don’t know, history programmes and classic drama-type stuff?’
    ‘Well, certainly there is a place for history-type stuff and all that classic drama malarkey, but at the end of the day politicians, teachers and social workers need to be listening to young people, because I don’t think, right, that history and stuff is really very relevant to what young people are interested in today.’
    ‘Big up to that,’ said the hip latenight guy.
    ‘We like that!’
    ‘Because at the end of the day,’ Billy continued, ‘what politicians and teachers and stuff need to do is connect with what kids are really into, like the Internet. We think that the Internet and the web are terribly important, and of course these wicked experiments in reality TV like House Arrest.’ By the time the show was ending and the final band was being introduced, Coleridge had fallen asleep. He woke up to the vision of a sweating American skinhead wearing only board shorts and 90 per cent tattoo coverage shouting ‘I’m just a shitty piece of human garbage,’ at the screen. He decided it was time to go to bed. Geraldine had had a lucky escape with her show, that was clear. By rights, it seems, it should have been a flop. David, on the other hand, had not been so lucky. He was the fall guy, the national joke, and Geraldine had made him so. If David had known this, Coleridge reflected, he might have been tempted to take some kind of revenge on Peeping Tom, but of course he could not have known, could he?

DAY THIRTY-THREE. 10.15 a.m.
    T he picture of Woggle on the map on the incident room wall was almost completely obscured by the numerous tapes that terminated on it. Trisha had just completed the pattern by running a ribbon to him from Dervla, with the words ‘pubic hair row’ written on it. Dervla had seemed so determined to be quiet and serene, so like the muse in an advert for Irish beer. But you couldn’t maintain that if you followed Woggle into the bathroom.

DAY EIGHT. 9.30 a.m.
    I t’s day eight in the house,’ said Andy the narrator, ‘and Dervla has fust had a shower.’ ‘Woggle!’ She shouted, emerging from the shower room, clutching a bar of soap.
    ‘Yes, sweet lady.’
    ‘Can you please remove your pubic hairs from the soap after you have finished showering?’ It was their own fault, of course. Woggle would have been quite happy not to shower at all, but the group had made a personal appeal to him to wash thoroughly at least once a day.
    ‘That way in a month or two you might be clean,’Jazz had observed. Now they were paying the price for their finickiness. Woggle’s matted pubic mullet had never seen such regular action, and the unaccustomed pressure was causing it to moult liberally. Dervla waved the hairy bar of soap in his face. She had thought hard before confronting Woggle. Quite apart from the fact that she did not like scenes, she also knew from her secret informant that Woggle was a very popular person outside the house. Would having a row with him alienate her from the public? She wondered. On the other hand, perhaps it would do the public good to get some idea of what she and the other housemates were having to deal with. In the end, Dervla could not help herself: she just had to say something. Woggle tended to do his cursory ablutions in the middle of the night, and, being first up, it was always Dervla who encountered his residue.
    ‘Each morning I have to gouge a small toupee off the soap, and the next morning there it is again, looking like a member of the Grateful Dead!’
    ‘Confront your fear of the natural world, 0 she-woman. My knob hair can do you no harm. Unlike cars of which you have admitted you own one.’ In one single bound Woggle had got from his lack of social grace to her responsibility for the destruction of the entire planet. He was always doing that.
    ‘It’s got nothing to do with fucking cars!’ Dervla was shocked to hear herself