Page 84 of Love Letters on Hazel Lane

Even before Leona joined Pop! Productions and started scoffing at every syllable she uttered, Jo had never had much luck pitching her ideas at the team meeting. But this idea… surely this was a good one?

A TV show based on Scrabble.

Scrabble had been around now since the 1930s, Jo knew. Almost a hundred years old, although it wasn’t called Scrabble back then.

And WordPals was a popular app. There was no doubt about it. People loved the game, so why wouldn’t they love a TV version?

For the past few weeks, Jo had thought about nothing but Hebbleswick Scrabble Festival. Well, nothing but Razz and the festival. Now the Scrabble game show idea filled her head on the train every day as she journeyed to and from Manchester. She thought about it in the bath, as she heated up each evening’s ready meal, and at work, as she ploughed through her usual tasks of booking hotels and taxis and typing up schedules. Those tasks seemed so mundane now; she was far more excited about the idea of coming up with a concept that might one day become a programme.

At least seven times a day, she almost texted Razz. Almost.

I’m trying to come up with a programme idea to impress my boss. Wondering about a Scrabble game show.

Would you watch a Scrabble game show on TV? I want to pitch it at our next team meeting at work.

Trying to devise a new TV game show based on Scrabble. Would you have time to play-test a few ideas with me please?

But she never pressed send on any of these messages. She imagined – assumed – he’d be too busy with his new romance. He wouldn’t want to be bothered with her. If she sent it and then he didn’t reply, or said it sounded great, but he hadn’t time to play-test it with her, well, she’d feel rejected all over again.

Perhaps she would ask him on Friday at Scrabble club. She could rope in the other members then and run her ideas past them too.

Even though she didn’t work on the creative side of TV production, she’d worked in the industry for long enough to know that simply televising a game of Scrabble wouldn’t work. Everyone had been enthralled watching the final of the festival tournament on the big screen in the school hall, but this wasn’t a sustainable format on television. Game shows had rounds, with different activities in each round. She needed to think of different letter- or word-based activities.

Viewers liked elimination rounds. There might be four or six players in the first round, but at least one of those would be knocked out so only some went through to the second round. By the final round, there should only be two people left. Facing each other one-on-one, going head-to-head over the Scrabble board, to see who would emerge victorious.

Jo could picture the set: predominantly grey – the same shade as the Scrabble board itself – with accents of red, pink and blue to reflect the coloured squares on the board. The contestants would stand behind lecterns and an illuminated display board would spell out each of their names in letter tiles.

And what would the rounds consist of? Playing against the clock was always popular. It added drama.

The first round could be an anagram round. Each player could be given a set of seven letters and they’d have to find the anagram of those letters. Or was that too similar to Countdown?

How about giving each player the same set of letters and their own board? They’d have a minute to make each word. And, she thought triumphantly, it could link with an app – a bit like the WordPals app – so people could play along at home. David was always banging on about engaging the audience. Viewers could even tweet their answers during the show using a hashtag. David would love that; ‘interactivity’ was one of his buzzwords. That was sure to win her brownie points.

Since Scrabble was a word game, there could be a round where the players had to guess the correct meaning of some unusual words. Perhaps unusual words that would score highly in Scrabble. Like zax, she thought, smiling as she remembered Razz playing that in the tournament.

The ideas were flowing thick and fast now, jostling for space in her brain. She couldn’t write them down quickly enough.

A true or false round; is this word allowed in Scrabble or not? They could present the players with a mixture of foreign words, now assimilated into English, and proper nouns‘ Was 'google’ allowed in Scrabble these days? It had made it into the dictionary.

Perhaps a round where the aim was to make the most words in one go. Points would be awarded for both the number of words and the length of each one.

By Friday afternoon, Jo had several scribbled pages of ideas in her Filofax. When all her colleagues had left – David was meeting a woman off Tinder, it was date night for Caroline and her husband, and Leona and the others were going out on the town – she read them through, chose the best ones and typed them up into a Word document.

She yawned. If she didn’t leave soon, she wouldn’t make the Scrabble club on time.

She saved the document and was about to turn off her computer when it occurred to her that Razz might bring Zoey along to the club that evening.

Damn. If he was with Zoey, well, she’d have to get used to that, but she wasn’t quite ready to see the two of them together just yet. Perhaps she’d give it a miss tonight. She should probably keep working on her pitch anyway, make sure it was word perfect.

It was five past eight when she finally decided to call it a night. She made sure to save her document – she wasn’t going to make that mistake again – and clicked print to create a hard copy to take home. She planned to memorise it and rehearse it over the weekend, so as to present it in the best possible way at the team meeting on Monday morning.

The door to the office opened, and the cleaner arrived. He never usually acknowledged her as he strutted round the office in his headphones, vacuuming under the desks. But this evening, he wasn’t wearing the headphones.

‘Evening,’ she said.

To her surprise, he actually replied. ‘What an evening! Last job – well, the place was such a mess. Then two buses didn’t show up…’

He glanced up at the enormous canvas of Mona above Jo’s desk. ‘Don’t you find her creepy? It’s like she’s watching your every move.’