This was it. This was my moment. I opened my laptop and turned it to face her.
“OK, so the first one is calledInner Circle.”
“Terrible.”
“Er—”
She took another drag. “But go on.”
“The idea is, couples match with each other on dating profiles, but when they go on their first date, instead of finding the person they matched with, they find the person’s parents, best friends, colleagues, and so on. Instead of getting to know the person directly, they get to know them through their fam.”
Indira huffed. “You’re single, aren’t you?”
“Um, yeah. Why?”
“You’ve never had a girlfriend or boyfriend or theyfriend, have you?”
I swallowed. “How’d you know?”
“No one who’d ever had in-laws would suggest this. What else you got?”
I took a deep breath, pulled myself together, and scrolled through my presentation to the next idea.
“This one’s calledSweet, Sweet Love. Imagine it’s a bit likeBlind Date, with one person asking questions and three or four anonymous contestants on the other side of a wall answering them to win their heart. Only as well as answering questions, they’re making desserts, and the one who made the dessert she or he likes best gets to go on a date with them. So, it’s a cooking show and a dating show combined.”
Indira shrugged. “Not enough tension. Next?”
I swallowed and flicked through to idea number three.
“Gays Off Gridis like a gaySurvivor. We send a group of hapless gay guys who think they could survive without electricity, running water, and TikTok into a remote forest?—”
“If you want to film an orgy, I’ll give you Eva’s number.” Indira blew a lungful of smoke out the window. “Listen. Peter, was it?”
I nodded.
“How good are you at fuckwit wrangling?”
I didn’t know what she meant. Indira huffed impatiently.
“Handling big egos. Juggling ridiculous demands. Politely telling self-important twats you’re going to rip their heads off and turn their skulls into novelty Skittles decanters if they don’t sit the fuck down, but doing it in such a way that they come back years later and ask you to be godfather to their children. That kind of thing.”
I nodded like a plastic dog on the dashboard of a Vauxhall Astra. “We’ve had a lot of big-name celebrities onWake Up Britain’s famous yellow couch over the years.” This was true. I’d seen it all. The Silicon Valley CEO who sprinkled ketamine on his doughnuts and went live to air in a K-hole, but nobody noticed because everyone thinks tech bros are weird anyway. The ageing Hollywood legend who dragged me into the make-uproom and made me pull all her neck skin back behind her head until she had a visible jawline, then made me duct tape it in place to hold it. Or—and this was peak—the Tory health minister who flopped his cock out in the green room and asked me if, in my professional opinion, I thought he had the clap.
“And did he?”
Apparently, I’d said that aloud. “No idea, but I said yes on principle. Then told the geezer I was taking the whole story to the newspapers unless he doubled the funding for the Gay Men’s Sexual Health Clinic.”
Indira laughed—actuallylaughed. She sat back in her chair and, from the corner of her mouth, blew a heavy fog of smoke out the window.
“I like you,” she said. “You have initiative.”
She liked me!
“Listen, I have a show with a two-and-a-half-million budget that starts filming up in Leicestershire on Monday. I’m short an assistant producer. I need someone who can juggle the egos of a dozen online influencers without collecting them all up in a sack and drowning them in the lake. The job is yours, if you want it.”
My pulse stuttered. This wasn’t what I came here for. My mind was racing, calculating what this opportunity meant and where it could lead.
“What’s the show?”
