Final Act Read online

  Sam Jackson decided that he had been excluded from the discussion for quite long enough. He pointed his cigar at Hook’s chest and said accusingly, ‘Are you telling me that women don’t drop their drawers in real life?’

  Bert was thrown by this non sequitur and no doubt looked baffled for a moment. He tried to smile as he said, ‘We meet all aspects of human life in the police service, Mr Jackson. Ladies underwear is one of the less disturbing ones.’

  Hook got his first small laugh from the audience on this, but Jackson went on as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘Because I’m telling you they do. Most of what men do is motivated by what women have inside their drawers, and criminals are no exception!’

  This brought another roar of appreciation and the presenter decided to heed his producer’s urgent instruction to cut his losses. ‘Well, this has been a most stimulating discussion and I thank you all for taking part. We shall look forward even more to the latest Inspector Loxton investigation, now that we are assured that it has a solid grasp of the realities of criminal life and the campaign our policemen conduct against it. Thank you DS Hook for your valuable insights into real crime. Thank you Sam Jackson for your usual trenchant viewpoint on the essentials of television fiction, and thank you Martin Buttivant for your view from the centre of this and for the pleasure you have given us over the years as an actor.’

  Bert Hook spent a little time with them in the hospitality suite before returning to the duller world of police procedure. Unlike Jackson and Buttivant, he had refused to indulge in booze before the programme. He now accepted the generous gin and tonic thrust upon him as his reward and listened to Sam Jackson enlarging enthusiastically upon the luscious physical attributes of Sandra Rokeby, who was to make a guest appearance in the Herefordshire Horrors episode. ‘Does she have a big part?’ Bert asked innocently. He smiled weakly through the Rabelaisian explosion this brought from Jackson, who then asked him if he would like to appear as an extra in this locally based episode.

  Bert declined the offer as politely as he could, trying not to envisage John Lambert’s horror and derision at such a diversion. He slipped away from this histrionic world as swiftly as he could, feeling its pretensions and its deceptions totally alien to his normal way of life. His wife Eleanor would want to know all about it when he arrived home, but for himself he was glad to be rid of the false glamour and back in the real world.

  Crime and punishment were the basis of his existence. They were solid realities of life in twenty-first-century England, however a nineteenth-century Russian novelist might have treated them. He was glad to be rid of these posturing thespians.

  DS Hook had no idea on that bright spring afternoon how swiftly and brutally he would be thrust back into professional contact with them.

  Sandra Rokeby had never claimed to be a top-quality actress. There had been occasions, indeed, when she almost denigrated her talents, indicating that it was her other, less aesthetic and more physical attributes which had endeared her to the public.

  She had passed over thirty years from outrageous page three girl, with her twin claims to fame displayed liberally and at every opportunity, to popular but limited actress. Practice does not always make perfect, but it usually leads to improvement. She had been in more or less continuous employment now for twenty-five years and had appeared with some of the most respected of the nation’s thespians. Despite her dumb blonde and curvaceous status, Sandra was certainly not stupid. She would never become one of the nation’s acting dames, but she had acquired a certain competence. She had also shown a readiness to send up herself and her image, and that endeared her to a country which believes that no one, not even an actress, should take herself too seriously.

  Sandra was now regarded with sentimental affection by the English public. Her brazen use of her body in adolescence had become with time a loveable vulgarity, rather than something to deplore and shut away from the children. There was every possibility that if she maintained her public exposure – which she proposed in every sense to do – for another generation or so, she could become in old age that mysterious but much-admired British phenomenon, a national treasure.

  She had spent most of her life in cities, but she now breezed into this predominantly rural area with a characteristic exchange with the local press. The young reporter who handled show business for the Gloucester Citizen was putty in her hands, the first of several double entendres with which this experienced, jovial woman set about enriching his copy. She interviewed him – that was emphatically the order of things – in her hotel room in Cheltenham. She was here unaccompanied, to play an important role in a successful drama; Sandra assured him unsmilingly that she took her acting very seriously.

  Having but the haziest sense of theatrical history, the reporter consulted his notes nervously and then was unwise enough to ask Miss Rokeby if she regretted the decline of the repertory theatres which had formerly provided such a useful grounding in acting essentials for the more mature members of the profession. She withered him with a glance from her wide and vivid blue eyes and asked him quite how old he thought she was. As he stumbled into an apology, she assured him that the reps had gone before she was even a babe in arms.

  ‘I was thrown in at the deep end, ducky! You pointed what you had at the camera and trusted that they would make the most of it.’

  ‘And you never had any complaints!’ Her interlocutor attempted a humorous recovery.

  ‘No, rather the reverse, in fact. I was invariably asked for more. Cleavage covers a multitude of acting deficiencies, when it is properly deployed. I turned my twin weapons upon any opposition. If that didn’t work, I turned my back upon them in a very short skirt.’ She demonstrated the tactic to him now and was gratified to seem him gulp in the manner which had become familiar to her over the years. Men were suckers for female flesh: it upset their judgements in ways which were very useful indeed. You just had to choose your clothes and your moves carefully as your flesh aged a little.

  The young man had enjoyed too sheltered an upbringing to be a successful showbiz correspondent. His brain ceased to function as the aforementioned cleavage was lavishly and movingly displayed. Miss Rokeby leaned extravagantly forward, then back again, inspecting her thinly deniered thighs as her skirt rose with the movement. He looked desperately around the luxurious bedroom, jettisoned his prepared and useless list of preliminary questions, and said, ‘You’re here alone, Miss Rokeby.’

  ‘So far I am, dear. You never know what life will throw up, do you?’ She gazed with a smile at the double bed behind him. ‘I’ve always been an optimist, and on the whole life has been good to me.’

  ‘Is it a big part you have in Herefordshire Horrors?’

  Sandra beamed at him affectionately, emphasising how attractive she found his innocent naivety. ‘You’ll have to wait and see, won’t you? It wouldn’t be fair to reveal things in advance. But perhaps I’m not cut out for small parts.’ She leaned forward again, threatening for a moment to reveal not just cleavage but the full glory of the assets which had made her name.

  ‘I believe some great actor said that there are no small parts, only small actors.’

  ‘Did he, indeed? Well, that’s reassuring for me, since I’ve never had small parts and I don’t intend to be a small actress.’ She laughed a little, encouraged him to join her, and concluded the interview on that thoughtful note.

  Four days later, Sandra Rokeby was preparing to be briskly professional. All the publicity hypes were over and shooting had begun. This was the first day on location and she was here to do a job and to emphasize to everyone else involved in the enterprise that they should be equally single-minded. She had a youngish man in tow; she had a reputation to keep up, after all. But he would disappear very shortly now; she would be thoroughly professional when the time came for that.

  Shooting on location was a complicated business. You had to admire the industry and thoroughness of the people who set things up, the people who got scarcely a mention in the
credits which flashed quickly across the screen whilst viewers turned their attention to other things at the end of the television transmission. A canteen had been set up to feed everyone, from technical staff like cameramen and make-up girls through the extras and the bit-players with a couple of lines to the stars of the show, the actors who were household names to the many fans of the Inspector Loxton series. Everyone had to be fed and watered, everyone had to be kept as happy as possible in the often trying circumstances of location shooting.

  You never knew what the weather would be like, for a start. The director might insist on waiting many hours until conditions were suitable for an outdoor scene, or he might reschedule the order of scenes at short notice to take account of prevailing conditions, whether wet or dry, whether warm or exceedingly cold. Actors had to be hardy and adaptable souls when shooting on location rather than in the studio.

  There were, as everyone knew and most people simply accepted, considerable, sometimes volcanic, temperaments involved. These were indulged more than usual in popular television series, because it was almost impossible to replace an actor in one of the principal roles without strong objections from the public and serious blows to the make-believe which lies at the heart of all drama. We are telling a story, writer and director and actors admit, but the more real we can make the story seem, the more it will convince and the more our audience will enjoy it. The naïve among the public, a surprisingly large section of the audience, identify the actors with their roles as if they were not actors at all. Any unscheduled departure of actors from senior roles damages that willing self-deception which audiences undertake.

  Studio shooting is relatively easy. It is when you are on location that the major problems of the artistic temperament usually occur. So producers do everything they can to keep these considerable and highly important egos happy. Most of the major players in the Loxton series were well-behaved, by the standards of television drama. They were, in the jargon of the profession, ‘good troupers’. In truth, most of them had been glad of the work when the series started and were even more glad of it now, when Inspector Loxton was a greater success than anyone had envisaged.

  Martin Buttivant, who played Loxton, had been a reliable but small-time player when the original series had been commissioned six years ago. As he would still confess when pressed in interviews, he ‘knew which side his bread was buttered on’. He was grateful to writer, director and producer for making him into a star. Even Sir Bradley Morton, the greatest name in this present episode, was glad of the work at his age, though he would never admit that, even to himself. Even Sandra Rokeby, imported at considerable expense and with maximum publicity for this Herefordshire-based episode, was glad of the exposure, as she assured any cameras trained upon her with a wink and an amiable leer.

  Nevertheless, everything was done to keep the major players happy when shooting on location. They needed privacy to prepare for the ordeals of shooting – they needed the equivalents of their own dressing rooms which they would have been allotted in any of the nation’s great theatres. They were provided with small but luxuriously equipped caravans for their rest, recreation, and preparations for the ordeals of performance. They must be happy if they were to be effective before the location cameras.

  The allocation of caravans was keenly studied by the members of the cast. Some of the lesser players had to share, but to be given a caravan at all was a clear and desirable mark of status. It established an order of precedence and set you above the lesser players who had to do their crosswords in the communal restroom and eat with the others in the canteen where excellent food was prepared and constantly available on a self-service basis. The catering was put out to tender and the food was almost invariably good, because producers had realized a long time ago that theatrical armies like military ones march upon their stomachs.

  It is not easy to keep up morale on a grey day with scudding rain. The director eyes the skies and hopes desperately for the conditions he needs for a three-minute outdoor scene. Despondency can spread quickly through the motley group of personalities assembled solely for this peculiar purpose of perpetrating fiction convincingly in an English countryside which refuses to cooperate. Sir Ralph Richardson, that realist among actors, thought that, ‘The art of acting consists of keeping people from coughing.’ The harassed deputy producer of Herefordshire Horrors, watching the clouds drop lower and the rain fall more steadily, thought that on this day it would be an achievement to keep his actors from coughing.

  The principal players had their own caravans and might be expected to be reasonably content: they were after all experienced in the trials of days like this. Ernie Clark toured the site dutifully to make sure that all was well. Sam Jackson’s name might be stamped all over this, might be on everyone’s radar when it came to awards, but it was his deputies who put themselves about and strove to solve a multitude of problems on such difficult days like this. Those were the rules of the game and everyone understood them. Jackson raised money and gave the show business fraternity in press and television the quotes they desired. He was a ‘character’, the British public had long ago decided. People wouldn’t forget about the Loxton series whilst he was around. But it was his deputies who picked up the pieces and kept things going on harsh days like this.

  Ernie Clark appreciated that and did his best in trying circumstances. Actors frustrated by the elements are not the most understanding of mortals. The extras were collected in the canteen and as contented as could be expected. ‘Resigned’ would have been a more accurate epithet. They were huddled together in groups, drinking record numbers of coffees and becoming intensely repetitive about the British weather. They were mostly experienced, which made them philosophical about days like this. The cream buns from the local bakery had gone down well; Ernie made a mental note to double the order for the following day.

  Martin Buttivant had his latest mistress in the caravan with him. Ernie Clark knocked carefully and waited dutifully until bidden to enter. The pair were only talking: Martin would have regarded it as unprofessional to engage in congress when he might at any moment be called upon to act. Buttivant was pleasingly realistic about his acting abilities, recognising himself as competent but by no means brilliant. He knew he was lucky to have secured the Loxton role and even more lucky that the series had become an international success, though of course he would never voice those thoughts publicly. Modesty was all very well on occasions, but it should never be carried to extremes.

  He introduced Juliet Cooke as ‘an old acting friend who had dropped in to renew acquaintance’; Ernie Clark was happy enough to go along with the fiction. ‘Doesn’t look as though we’re going to film much today,’ Martin said, stooping a little to glance through the caravan window at the incessant rain.

  ‘John suggested we might alter the sequence and do that scene near the end in the thunderstorm. There’s only you and David in it and it involves you getting very wet.’ John Watts, the long-standing director of the series, was conscious that he had been allotted only fifteen days for location shooting and that every day was expensive. He needed to make something of even days like this one.

  ‘I’ll get my regulation police plainclothes mackintosh out and turn up the collar,’ Buttivant promised philosophically.

  ‘We’ll tuck you up in bed with a hot toddy afterwards,’ said Juliet Cook solicitously.

  She was plainly finding it difficult to keep her hands off her lover and Ernie Clark was happy to leave them to it. At least his leading actor was prepared to make the best of a trying day. And Buttivant seemed content; the big thing on location was to keep the larger egos content.

  Ernie took a deep breath before knocking at the caravan door of Sir Bradley Morton. A sonorous voice bade him to enter, seeming to come from somewhere beyond the elements themselves, which were not only grey and wet but threatening at this moment to becoming blustery. A little water trickled down Clark’s neck as the deep baritone of the oracle boomed from within.
r />   Sir Bradley surveyed him under the eyebrows which had impressed on stage and screen for half a century. ‘Come in, dear boy! Sit yourself down and tell me the latest gossip from this rural haven.’ He poured a measure of whisky for his visitor, then refilled his own considerably larger glass, adding a generous measure of water to Ernie’s drink and a token drop to his own. ‘Difficult day for you, this. People getting impatient and making trouble, I expect. We old hands know better than to do that. We’re professionals, you see. We’ve endured many days like this, in our time upon the boards.’

  There would be no work from the theatrical knight today, Clark noted. Morton must have almost a bottle of whisky inside him by now. He wouldn’t be troublesome, but it was no use asking him to work. Even in some minor scene he would be reeling about, slurring his speech, and delighting the extras, who loved nothing better than a little scandal to take back to the normal living which existed outside this madness of make-believe. Not like Sir Bradley, that: he was usually quite responsible on set. Ernie wondered if he was under some sort of strain. He downed his drink dutifully and took his leave with a sickly smile.

  Sandra Rokeby was drinking more modestly in her caravan. She had a young man he had not seen before with her, but there was no sign of what she had called ‘hanky-panky’ earlier in the week. ‘This is Jason,’ she said. ‘He fancies a theatrical career. I’m giving him a little experience. He’s here to pick up whatever he can.’ She fluttered her eyes in a way which was by now almost automatic. Ernie gave her a weak smile of acknowledgement, wondering if she ever spoke without a double entendre. He was in truth a little in awe of Sandra. The fact that she sent herself up so consistently didn’t mean that she wouldn’t erupt with the full fury of a theatrical institution, without warning or provocation. That was the trouble with this profession: people both disguised their true feelings and indulged them, without any forewarning of which was to happen on a particular day or at a particular hour. Still, Sam and he knew things about La Rokeby which would probably keep her in line.