Splash!

by Stephen Glover

Genres: Humor & Satire

Synopsis

'I thoroughly enjoyed Splash! It's a delicious confection of excellent plotting, an inventively bonkers cast of characters, subtle insights into the world of newspapers and a satisfying ending which invokes the great Evelyn Waugh's masterpiece, Scoop. A fine comedy of manners by a writer who knows the media inside out' BEL MOONEY Sam Blunt is a drunken, broken-down tabloid reporter, working for a once-mighty newspaper struggling to come to terms with the digital age. With the assistance of Benedict, an earnest though clever wet-behind-the-ears young intern on the paper, Sam grapples to uncover the story of the century which reveals the political corruption and cynicism at the heart of a rotten Establishment. As they try to nail the story amid a series of capers, Sam and Benedict are frustrated by the self-serving proprietor of the Daily Bugle, various self-appointed do-gooders who want to rein in the Press, and Trevor Yapp, the malign and untrustworthy editor of Bugle Online. Splash! is a satire of the Press and politics in a modern London peopled by a Chinese billionaire would-be press proprietor, a worldly bishop, neglected immigrants, a corrupt and plaintive Prime Minister, and journalists who are often most interested in doing one another down. Yet however self-serving newspapers may sometimes be, Sam and Benedict are ultimately on the side of the angels as they battle to write their triumphant story.

Release date: June 15, 2017

Publisher: Constable

Print pages: 272

Sample

All over London they are making their preparations. In the flat above Number Eleven Downing Street, the Prime Minister’s wife is talking on the telephone to the Prime Minister’s diary secretary who is just about to talk to the Prime Minister’s driver. Across the city, the manager of Mount’s Hotel is checking on his tablet for the third time that three thousand oysters have been ordered, and that the vintage champagne is being refrigerated at precisely the desired temperature. In a hairdresser off the New King’s Road known to the cognoscenti who do not want to splash their money around, Lady Evelyn Wherewill is having her hair coloured. Sitting at his desk in the crumbling remnant of what was once a generously appointed episcopal palace, the Right Reverend Bob Butcher, Bishop of Middlesex, is wondering whether he should mention the newly vacant see of Canterbury if he encounters the Prime Minister at the party. The stout figure of Madame Po Chun is embedded in the soft black leather of her limousine as she is driven noiselessly from the Fig Leaf restaurant in Mayfair to the Kensington mansion she shares with Mr Po.

In the editor’s office of the Daily Bugle, whose centenary is about to be celebrated, Eric Doodle is listening to senior members of his staff describe the next day’s edition. His mind has begun to wander while the foreign editor makes a doomed case for ‘splashing’ with a devastating earthquake in Tibet. The Bugle does not greatly concern itself with foreign stories with no British connection, and it is most unlikely that any Britons have strayed into the mountainous regions of that unhappy country where the Almighty has elected to wreak such havoc. The dead are probably all monks. Or peasants. Doodle pats his side pocket again to feel the reassuring bulk of the speech he will deliver this evening. His proprietor, Sir Edwin Entwistle, has told him he must not exceed four and a half minutes, and he has practised his oration endlessly in front of the sometimes irritable Mrs Doodle, who has timed it to the last second. His speech has been printed out in 20-point type so that he will be able to read it easily even if there is little light. The editor of the Daily Bugle has persuaded himself that the award of the knighthood which Daphne Doodle and he have craved for so long will hang upon his short performance at Mount’s.

All over London people are making their preparations – and none more assiduously than Lady Entwistle, or Caroline as we must learn to call her, wife of the proprietor of what was once the highest-selling newspaper in the world. Caroline regards her naked body in the long mirror with approval, noting the firm outlines and pleasing contours which in her estimation are not often to be found in a forty-year-old. She smiles at herself, admiring her bleached teeth. But then the smallest look of crossness passes over her lovely face as she observes in her mirror the bulging form of her husband standing behind her, clad only in underpants of unseemly briefness, over whose elastic waistband cascade folds of white flesh. Not for the first time Caroline reflects that if she can justly claim that four decades have treated her kindly, the same cannot be said of the six decades during which Edwin Entwistle has sojourned on this earth. Nonetheless, she manages a thin smile of solidarity, which her husband takes as an expression of endearment, stepping forward to clutch her right buttock with agricultural vigour.

A grimace is rapidly converted into a smile. This is not the evening for a row with Edwin. As fervently as the Doodles long for an honour, so Caroline yearns for a life peerage to be bestowed upon her so far merely knighted husband so that she can be the consort of a peer of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. She needs him to be on top form and make the speech of his life.

All over London people are making their preparations: the Bugle’s star columnist, Adam Pride, who is regarding himself in his mirror; Mount’s hordes of waiters, who include more than a smattering of illegal immigrants – a group against which the newspaper has often fruitlessly inveighed; politicians of every persuasion; the Russian oligarch Boris Vrodsky, accompanied by a blonde lady who bears little resemblance to Mrs Vrodsky; proprietors and rival editors; Sir Archibald Merrick, City magnifico and a vice-chairman of the governing party; ambassadors and diplomats, though few of them have ever read the Bugle, preferring instead the low-circulation, politically enlightened and more upmarket Chronicle; Emmanuele Botti, highly strung owner of London’s latest voguish restaurant, the Fig Leaf; Ambrose Treadle, the bafflingly successful City PR king; a brace of fashionable novelists; a sprinkling of film stars and starlets, all of whom have appeared at one time or another not as they might wish in the pages of the Bugle, including the veteran actor Tray Nevada, whose drug-fuelled orgies on his yacht have been somewhat misrepresented by the newspaper to his great annoyance; and those who will convey them all to Mount’s, as well as those who will photograph them as they arrive. The Bugle may not be what it was – it is scarcely making any money, and there have even been rumours that Sir Edwin is thinking of selling the paper – but it still strikes enough fear and loathing into its victims to be treated with respect.

All over the vast unfolding city people are making their preparations – except for Sam Blunt, the Bugle’s chief reporter, whose journalistic feats have included naming the original owner of a headless and legless torso found in the Thames (admittedly, with a fair degree of assistance from Detective Chief Inspector Nobby Walters of Scotland Yard) and breaking the story of Lady Evelyn Wherewill’s unfortunate adultery with Terence Glasswell, MP.

Uniquely among the hundreds of guests that evening, Sam is not making any preparations whatsoever. In an insalubrious suburb far removed from the fashionable climes occupied by our other players, he is stirring amid the ruckled sheets of a bed that is not his own. He is hardly aware of the identity of the woman whose not insubstantial body is pinning him down. If he was told her name on meeting her a few hours previously, Sam has forgotten it.

Re-entering the eager world, he senses that an important obligation lies before him, and yet cannot remember what it is. His head throbs and he is aware of a dull ache in his groin. He struggles to release an arm so that he can peer at his watch. It is nearly six o’clock. He takes a little time to consider whether it is morning or evening. Outside it is light, but that provides no evidence one way or another since it is early summer. He tries to recall the events that have brought him there, and, recollecting a drunken lunch with the woman on top of him, decides that in all probability it must be evening. In which case, what can the important engagement be?

Then the face of a senior colleague shimmers into his mind. It is not that of Eric Doodle the editor, with whom Sam has little to do, but of Trevor Yapp, the pugnacious, indeed pathologically disturbed, deputy editor. He can see Yapp’s snarling face, and hear his sneering voice. ‘I’m buggered if I know why that old idiot Entwistle invited you along with all those fucking columnists. You’ll only roll up pissed.’

Sam sits up with a start – or rather he tries to, but can scarcely move. The Bugle’s centenary party at Mount’s! He is not a man to take social engagements seriously, but his absence from such a momentous celebration might be noticed, at least by Yapp if not by Doodle, and be used against him. His position at the paper isn’t as secure as it used to be. There’s talk of Yapp taking over as editor, in which case anything could happen.

Our hero is not unchivalrous. Pressing though the matter is, he does not want to tumble the strange woman out of bed. Besides, there might be prolonged recriminations. The sound of regular snoring suggests she is still asleep. Experienced escapologist as he is, Sam succeeds in wriggling free without waking her. Once out of bed he grabs his clothes without another glance in her direction, and swiftly and silently puts them on.

It was one of those early June evenings when the world felt as though it had been newly created. The leaves on the trees had that full, pristine greenness of early summer. As he strolled across St James’s Park, Benedict Brewster was glad to be young and alive. Glad that he had just visited his father in his club. Glad that he had drunk two glasses of delicious wine. And delighted that the following day he would be joining the Daily Bugle as a junior trainee reporter.

On leaving his father at Stride’s he had meant to take the tube to his small flat in Hackney, but the gentle beauty of the evening cried out to his youthful heart, and begged not to be abandoned. Buoyed by the loveliness of all that surrounded him, as well as the wine, Benedict only needed a purpose. The idea of visiting the Bugle’s offices in Pimlico suddenly seized his romantic soul.

Within a quarter of an hour he was gazing at the nondescript 1950s building that had housed the newspaper since its move from Fleet Street some two decades previously. Benedict knew perfectly well that it was not a beautiful building but he could not have observed the Taj Mahal with greater rapture. At last he would have a job and no longer be dependent on his generous parents. At last he would have a role, though he was not at all clear what it would be.

Two factors had led to his employment at the Bugle on a very low salary. Thirty years ago, when it was selling three times as many copies, the paper had only three graduates on the payroll. Now it had a policy of recruiting the mostly highly educated, or at any rate those with the best examination results, and with his Oxford First in Anthropology Benedict had put himself firmly in that category. But this alone would not have been enough to get him a job since there were hundreds of other candidates with just as good academic qualifications who had shown much greater interest in journalism at school and university. What had swung it for Benedict was a chance meeting his father had had with the editor, Mr Doodle, at a shoot in Yorkshire. Doodle, who was new to the sport, had recognised in Sir Cumming Brewster a gentleman of the old school, and one moreover who owned a fair portion of Lincolnshire, where he was said to entertain large shooting parties. Sir Cumming had openly confided his worries about his younger son, who, for all his academic talents, showed scant ambition. The imaginative editor immediately suggested what amounted to little more than a glorified internship on the Bugle, for which Sir Cumming professed his thanks.

It was true the baronet had never read Sir Edwin Entwistle’s famous newspaper, and might not have much liked it if he had. Nor did he have a very high opinion of journalists as a breed insofar as he had ever thought about them. But needs must. Younger sons are younger sons, and the Brewster coffers were not as replete as they once had been. Sir Cumming would have been happy if Benedict had followed family tradition and joined the army, but Lady Brewster feared for the life of her beloved son in one of the several conflicts in which Britain was engaged around the world, and the boy himself showed little appetite for taking up arms. So when chance presented him with Doodle, Sir Cumming gratefully bagged him.

If the father was ignorant of the ways of journalism, so too was the son, though he harboured unformed hopes of being some sort of a writer, which he thought might be mysteriously fostered on Sir Edwin’s organ. Benedict was unfamiliar with the Bugle, though his eyes may have occasionally skimmed the sports pages. He was not, in fact, a regular reader of any newspaper. At university he had occasionally glanced at the Chronicle as well as the ‘page-three girls’ in the downmarket Daily Dazzle.

Benedict knew nothing about the Bugle or its former glories. He was unaware that it had been founded by a Mr, later Viscount, Pepper, and he had no idea that this gentleman’s feckless and inept grandson had lost ownership of the newspaper ten years previously to the northern carpet magnate Sir Edwin Entwistle. He had absolutely no notion that this very evening its centenary was being celebrated by such people as the Prime Minister, Lady Evelyn Wherewill, Ambrose Treadle, Madame Po and the Bishop of Middlesex in the art deco ballroom of Mount’s Hotel.

As Benedict was inspecting the bland façade of the newspaper’s offices, trying to imagine his future there, he saw a tall, hook-nosed man shoot out of the main door, cut across the path of a young woman with a pushchair, and clamber into the back of a waiting taxi. Of all the many things Benedict did not know, perhaps the most important was the identity of Trevor Yapp, deputy editor of the Daily Bugle.

As an eighteen-year-old in the late 1890s, Arthur Pepper got his first job writing social snippets for a magazine with shabby offices in the Strand. Arthur was poor – so poor that he would walk all the way from his mother’s humble home in Paddington, and back again when he had finished work in the evening. In this way he got to know the city, and in particular the great houses of Mayfair into whose ungiving windows he would peer with unabashed covetousness. One day, he said to himself, he would own such a house. It was a dream he dared not share with his darling mother.

After six months on the magazine Arthur got a rise, and six months later another one. He could now have afforded to take an omnibus but he preferred still to walk the few miles each way, setting aside the money he might have spent on transport for the magazine he intended one day to launch. He lived frugally, seldom drinking alcohol, and never went to a restaurant or a pub.

Nonetheless, he could not help noticing an establishment called the Earl of Aberdeen in a little side street. Every evening, after passing a row of fine Georgian houses which thirty years later would be erased to make way for Mount’s Hotel, he walked past the pub as he cut up from Grosvenor Square to Oxford Street. He would hear the sound of laughter and happy voices, and longed to go inside. One Friday evening he succumbed. He drank only half a pint of beer and left quickly. But having done so once he did so again, and after a while it became a habit for him to pop into the Aberdeen every Friday evening, where he would sometimes linger for half an hour. He got to know the clientele of clerks and shop workers. They did not know it, and nor did he, but they were the people who would read his newspaper when he launched the Daily Bugle ten years later – the people to whom he gave a voice. As rich and grand as he became, he never forgot them.

Superficially, the Earl of Aberdeen has not changed much in the years that have beaten past since Arthur Pepper took his weekly drink there. It consists of a single rectangular room whose four walls are gigantic mirrors. Arthur’s first thought was that it resembled his conception of a brothel. One mirror was cracked during an air raid in 1940, and later replaced. You can still look into the mirror where the stiff-collared young Arthur would examine his face and follow the movements of a barmaid.

Having taken a taxi from the distant suburb, whose hefty cost he would put on his expenses, Sam decided to stop for a fortifying drink at the Aberdeen before braving the centenary celebrations at Mount’s. It was not a pub he had ever visited before, and he had no idea the creator of his newspaper had once sat there.

Sam gripped a gin and tonic. His eye swooped around the pub, and he noticed an attractive woman sitting by herself. In other circumstances he would have tried to chat her up but he told himself this was not the time. He was already very late. He inspected himself in the mirror, and saw a slender man in early middle age, well lived-in, with specks of grey flecking his once raven hair, but still passably handsome.

By the time Sam got to the ballroom at Mount’s, Eric Doodle was approaching the final paragraph of his speech. The Prime Minister had already said a few words, emphasising the importance of a free Press, in which of course he did not at all believe, and praising the Bugle for its tenacious pursuit of truth. His real feelings about the paper were rather less generous since, although generally supportive, it had been appallingly rude a couple of weeks previously when Trevor Yapp had been editing in Doodle’s absence. It had called him a ‘weak, vacillating shadow of a leader’.

Doodle’s speech was not going as well as he had intended. Jokes that had been amusing even to Daphne in their Wimbledon sitting room had not been spotted. Despite the 20-point type, he had contrived to lose his thread on a couple of occasions. For some reason Daphne’s watch did not measure time in precisely the same way as Sir Edwin Entwistle’s, and the newspaper tycoon was looking crossly at Doodle, convinced that his editor had already been speaking for five and a half minutes, and impatient to take the floor himself.

Sam surveyed the ballroom. There were many figures he recognised, and a few he didn’t. He saw Trevor Yapp, who was observing Doodle with contempt. The Bishop of Middlesex – a well-known media performer who liked to be known as ‘Bishop Bob’ – was whispering in the ear of a well-built Chinese woman, whose hair towered above him like a missile on its launch pad. Edward Sneed, editor of the high-minded Chronicle, looked as though he had smelt a ghastly odour he couldn’t shake off. There was the Bugle’s star columnist, Adam Pride, standing by the Prime Minister, with whom he had presumably been conversing before Doodle set forth. Sam reflected that a stranger from another era might have inferred from Pride’s easy confidence, and the expensive cut of his suit, that he was the Prime Minister, and the limp figure beside him a mere columnist. He noticed Lady Entwistle standing with Lady Evelyn Wherewill, whose dull imperiousness Sam thought attractive. As for the proprietor’s wife, she was a corker. She seemed unimaginably removed from him. As though aware she was being watched, Caroline turned her face in his direction. Sam felt himself reddening. He took a swig of champagne.

Doodle was coming to his climax.

‘And so, my lords, ladies and gentlemen, whatever happens in the world of communications – and who can doubt great changes are afoot? – we may be confident, with a proprietor such as Sir Edwin Entwistle at the helm, a worthy heir to our founder, the great Viscount Pepper himself, that the Daily Bugle will continue to prosper so that, a hundred years from now, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren may, like us, raise their glasses to the greatest newspaper in the world.’

‘Hear, hear,’ said Mr Po Chun.

‘Six and a half minutes,’ muttered Sir Edwin Entwistle bitterly.

‘To the Daily Bugle,’ reiterated Eric Doodle.

‘To the Daily Bugle,’ chorused a hundred other voices.

Even Sam found himself raising his glass, whose contents he drained in one go. He cast another glance in the direction of Caroline Entwistle, and caught her eye. To his surprise she smiled at him.

Anyone encountering Sir Edwin Entwistle in a pub, and listening to his views about the world, might reasonably concl. . .