Chapter Two
Edward Temmis knew for certain that his boss did not want him to go into the room on the other side of that door. He raised his gaze from the polished brass handle to the two patches of sweat under the arms of the older man in front of him, spreading in the fabric of his shirt like colonial nations on a Victorian map. Pearls of moisture speckled his temples.
They both looked down at the brass knob again. Like a gunslinger, Edward reached for the cold metal first.
‘Hey!’ barked Douglas Aspinall.
Ever since his arrival in the southwest of England to run the troubled radio station on which Edward had his evening show, Aspinall had come over as the hair-trigger type. ‘A heart attack waiting for a final ice cream’, one of the DJs had unkindly called him. There were stories (surely untrue) that he had once jumped out of his car during a road-rage incident in London holding a fireman’s axe. True, he was capable of a certain teeth-clamped charm. Once in a while he would smile, as if he was chewing the end off a cigar.
The London-based chief executive of the entire radio group had apparently known Douglas Aspinall at Leeds University. He had been prevailed on to come out of early retirement and bethe acting boss at Sidmouth, the smallest of the sixteen stations. Edward had often wondered: who took that amount of low-level panic into retirement? If you were boarding a plane and saw Aspinall in the pilot’s seat, on edge as he always was, you would turn around and head straight back to the airport bar.
The events before Douglas Aspinall’s arrival were never spoken of by the staff in anything other than hushed tones. His predecessor Agnes Chan had presided over a series of disasters – or, as the official line went, ‘decided on a career break to spend time with her growing family.’ The list of shocks the station had suffered was so long and so lurid – including an industrial-scale fraud and two violent murders – that three-quarters of the staff from the period were gone. A small mercy was that some of the worst publicity had been avoided. Time had given the story the quality of legend. Among the few at the station who had experienced the events directly, there was rarely any direct reference to them. Most used just a two-word phrase: ‘The Case’.
Now, as both men tussled for control of the door handle, for a second the controller became a Wild West character too – the squinting left eye and, across the top of his domed head, a crest of grey hairs, standing on end, dancing as if in protest at the body they were attached to. A foot taller, a big man, Edward looked down at him. Douglas might have been a collection of ill-fitting limbs bought in a jumble sale and badly slotted into place.
Both of them held the doorknob now. They looked down at the nest of fingers, alarmed at the physical contact. They froze.
‘Don’t go in there until you’ve listened to what I have to say.’
Edward whispered. ‘Why not, though?’
‘What’s happened to your voice?’
‘I think I might be losing it. I felt an infection coming on this morning.’
‘Jesus, Edward. An infection? Aren’t you on air later?’ Aspinall shrugged. ‘We’ll cross that bridge when …’ He drew aquick breath, interrupting himself. ‘Okay, listen up. This is meet-and-greet. Our audiences love meeting the … stars.’ (Had he paused for a microsecond before the last word, worrying about exaggeration?) ‘But unfortunately, we’ve been blown out by the others.’
Edward wanted to laugh but knew he must not. He was the oldest five-days-a-week presenter, but was still nearly twenty years junior to his average listener, whom he always pictured as a sixty-six-year-young grandmother. As her own exit loomed, Agnes Chan had savagely binned the last cohort of DJs who were over sixty. The Farmers, as they were nicknamed, had been vile and sometimes even racist towards her. Her putsch against the last three became known as The Night of the Long Combines – but, once she had quit herself, the rump of the station had to soak up the resulting audience fury.
Douglas Aspinall’s response on arrival had not been what was expected. Instead of shoring up the schedule with new pensioner-presenters, he had rapidly brought in fresh faces in their twenties, including the station’s first black and Asian DJs – respectively Miriam Tamla and a man called DJ Satan Fiendy, which had been misprinted as ‘Stan Friendly’ in theEast Devon Gazette. It made the audience even crosser. The figures sank for months.
Adding to Aspinall’s stress, the new generation were tricky to handle, as evidenced when a delegation went to see him to register a protest over RTR-92’s new slogan. The young DJs said putting the words ‘SLOW ENOUGH FOR DEVON’ on the side of buses made the station look dull and would kill their social media. Aspinall responded by jumping out of his office chair and shouting, ‘Dull? There was a murder here, for God’s sake! How exciting do you want it to be?’ Two of them reported him for bullying.
Then, out of nowhere, a small audience uptick occurred. Aspinall held celebration drinks for the new presenters butforgot to invite Edward. The evening was ruined before it started anyway. TheGazettepublished a column by Vic Turnbull, one of the ousted presenters, who called the slight rise in listeners ‘dead cat bounce’. Turnbull, aged sixty-seven, had been removed from his morning show by Agnes and now appeared every week in the paper with a writing style as thick and salted as old gruel. ‘Even a dead pet will move upward a teeny bit,’ he wrote, ‘if you drop it from high enough.’ Edward received a passing mention, which rang alarm bells. ‘I guarantee Edward Temmis, now the radio station’s geriatric, won’t even get to fifty before they do what they did to me – cart him to the abattoir and make him into questionable pasties.’
Turnbull’s ugly turn of phrase highlighted a truth. As the most senior presenter, Edward had become the tribune of the very section of the audience that felt excluded and angry. The really furious ones were a lot older than him, but that was not the point. They had rioted – well, politely protested – when, at one point, Agnes Chan tried to depose Edward himself. They celebrated when she reversed her decision and reinstated him. ‘We are getting our station back,’ said an online post in a listeners’ forum. He printed it and proudly used a magnet to stick it to his fridge door.
His new show was the same as the old one, just with a different producer and a fresh name:The Temmis Session.A local comedian had done a whole routine about it. ‘They have chosen the one name you cannot say while drunk or on medication.’ The small bounce in listening figures did not hide the pensioner anger. On the same listener forum Edward saw a post he resisted the temptation to print out:
RTR SCHEDULE
6pm–9pm: LOUD RACKET,
9pm–midnight: INTELLGENCE AT LAST.
***MDGA***
He discovered that MDGA stood for ‘Make Devon Great Again’. He knew the oldies would stand up for him, but also that Aspinall resented their influence over his schedule.
‘Talk to me, Edward, please, before you even think of turning that handle.’
‘I was told to get down here by your office! An urgent call. “Go to the village hall in Harpford at four thirty because Douglas needs reinforcements”. It was Chrissie,’ added Edward, a reference to the controller’s secretary that he immediately regretted.
‘Well, of course it was Chrissie, and I will have words with her later. We can’t put you out there on your own.’
‘But the young ones haven’t turned up!’
‘No. Gen Z didn’t make it. Better things to do than fulfil a work commitment,’ he said bitterly. ‘But of course I’m not allowed to say that, because it would be bullying.’
