An extract from Blackpool: a parable

Chapter one: Prague Days

There is great fun to be had by turning a toad onto its back and poking it around with a pointy stick. In much the same way a foolish oaf humiliated by lighter, cheerier characters can be the source of enormous pleasure. This is wicked wisdom.

Patak - our toad - steps out of his bedroom into the broad wash of light falling in through the drawing room window. This is his apartment on the teeming Lenski Ave, Prague; an apartment about as large as his personality, big enough with just a hint of the superfluous.

He opens up the window and dares to lean out. It is snowing. Flanking the window on the facade of the block is a huge caryatid angel. Patak peers into the foot-high eyes of the guardian. He looks across over the smoking chimney pots and spinning weather vanes beside the calm gaze of the angel and feels like a king surveying his lands. The tableau fades to grey.

Now here is Patak sleeping the sleep of the just. His bed is worth a word or two because it is not really a bed. It is a mattress on top of a door on top of a gutted chest of drawers. He did not know where the door came from as he had bought the set (mattress, door and shelves) from a newspaper ad (selling all furniture due to sudden departure for Latin America), but he sometimes thought of that door (in his irritating, childlike way) as the door to the other side of his life.

Patak sleeps on.

Another scene is coming now. Patak on the red tram travelling through Prague. Patak liked Prague. There were parts of it he loved and knew intimately, dark quarters he liked to know the existence of but thought were best left alone, streets that bored him, places (squares or avenues) where he liked to linger. Here on the tram, for example, is the slight swerve of the Avenue Klaster as it crosses over the crossroads of Avenue Tepu and begins skirting the Karlov Gardens on the left, leaving behind the dome of the observatory which, when you peer out of the back window of your tram, becomes a head clambering to get a look in at the window. When the tram suddenly accelerates to take the slight curve and ease through the lights, an amalgam of memories and sensations jostle in PatakÕs head, which together take on the form of that easy swinging sensation in his stomach coming from the buoyant acceleration of the bus at that moment.

In the tram Patak plots the points of his Prague compass: South is his work zone; West is the University and cafŽs looking onto the Karlov Gardens; East is the hotel where his mother had stayed years ago when she had come to visit him. North, where the bus is bound, is home, the conquered territory, the bars he knows, the restaurants, his apartment, his table and chair, his bed, his caryatid angel.

At this stage we become aware that there is a box in the corner of the frame portraying another scene. Here are our lighter, cheerier figures. Still in hibernation, they have not yet been called upon to turn Patak over onto his back. Electricity has not yet fizzed them into animation. For the moment they are sleeping in their box, so we shall have to stay with cumbersome Patak.

That was just to let you know.

Now cut back to Patak pleasantly cavorting in the hills and dales of his life.

Girlfriends. He had been acquired and shed by girlfriends at regular intervals. Dominique, who had first defined for him his irritating, childlike manner so that it was now lodged in his own mind and he waited for the moment when other girlfriends would start to get their inklings of it. Doris, the breastless redhead. Tanja the catholic who clicked into furious sexual action when the light went out, so that he sometimes wanted to surprise her by clicking the light on again to check it was really the same person. Audry, the freckled skater, who had left him for a so-called artist whose a.r.t. consisted (it seemed to Patak) of making up puns for scraps of material cut into the shape of rag persons. e.g: Polly Esther. Vanina whom he had left (she was too short for him; when they stood kissing on the open street - he cringed just thinking of it - he had to stoop. Ugly! Ugly! ) They were all up there now, like a set of paper dolls, lodged in the dress circle of his mind, out of harmÕs way.

Job-wise the list went like this: stationery clerk; documentalistÕs assistant; junior picture editor on a daily newspaper; Chief Picture editor on an insurance weekly. Those were the main ones. As picture editor on the insurance paper, he dealt in snaps of granitic-jawed insurance executives, ships under construction and cats. Cats were his principal type of photograph. All kinds. Natural cats, many of them life threatening and cats that came about due to negligence on the part of the insured. Hurricanes, tornadoes, tidal waves, forest fires and droughts; motorway pile-ups and terrorist bombings, aeroplane crashes and broken legs. All kinds of catastrophes. Cats were his bread and butter. He wrestled with tornadoes and tidal waves every day and was pleased to get back home to his ordinary apartment on the Lenski Avenue in one piece.

One thing that Patak had never acquired was a good idea, the kind of idea that makes your heart strings twang. But one day, a summerÕs day in the Mala Strana, the western quarter of Prague over the river where the poor were parked and life was cheap, Patak suddenly came up trumps. It was an idea for a game show for the T.V. He had just been looking at an electronic poster for the latest gameshow entitled Rooks and Pawns which was due to start that very evening and he started to imagine how such a gameshow might be. But what he imagined had nothing to do with your average run-of-the-mill gameshow and was, moreover, nothing like the actual Rooks and Pawns when he viewed it at 7.30 that evening. No, his imaginary gameshow was quite different.

In his gameshow of the mind the studio audience stood to gain by the defeat of the contestant. Think on. If the contestant got the question wrong or failed the task the studio audience shared out the winnings amongst each other. If the contestant succeeded in his task, the studio audience went away empty-handed. Not a complex idea but the germ of a great one, thought Patak. Adversorial instead of supporter games; interactive instead of passive. You saw it in the sportÕs stadiums where hatred played as large a role as support. What had to happen now was for it to be brought into the T.V. studio. Add a studio audience selected from the lower echelons, by which one meant west of the river Mala Strana way, and hey presto, a brand new genre, original merchandise.

Every evening after work Patak elaborated a new nuance into the mechanics of his game show until after a few weeks he had built it up into a whole sub-culture and was already imagining its cult following and his own fame management.

The idea struck Patak as he was making his way down towards the Karluv Bridge that would take him from the Mala Strana back to the familiar Old Town, where he lived. He had crossed the river into the Mala Strana to pick up some beans from his favourite bean supplier, and as he wended his way down the dusty mid-afternoon street, a raggedy young man crossed in front of him.

-Good Afternoon, sir, cried the fellow.

Patak nodded by way of a greeting.

-Where are you headed so fast? asked the scallywag.

-IÕm crossing back over into the old town, answered Patak, keeping up his pace. This was after all the Mala Strana, not exactly the safest place in Prague.

The young fellow took up a marching step beside him imitating the tread of a grenadier.

-May I accompany you? he asked after a moment.

-It seems to me you already are, said Patak. Perhaps, he thought, if he simply ignored the man, he would leave him alone. But as they approached the bridge, the young man was still with him.

-I take it you do not live in the Mala Strana, said the young man after a moment.

-No, answered Patak, eyeing his companion for the first time. How do you reach such a conclusion?

-Simple. The way you dress, the way you hold your head, your accent of course, and even the way you walk.

Patak stopped. The bridge was in sight now and there was no threat.

-Well, youÕre right, he said. I have an apartment to the North of the Old Town. But I must say IÕm impressed by your qualities of observation. And you, I suppose you live in the Mala Strana?

He was not sure if he was trying to be rude or not, but he knew his voice betrayed him. He sounded curious.

The young fellow smiled.

-Guess, he said.

-I would say that you were, said Patak.

-And why might you think such a thing? asked the young blackguard.

-Oh, I donÕt know, those things you mentioned the other way round, I suppose. But also, why should you take such an interest in the other side of the river if you werenÕt. And, moreover, here we are in the Mala Strana, it makes sense that you live here.

The young man smiled again.

-Well, I am actually in the process of moving from the Mala to the other side, so I suppose you could say that for the moment, I am a mixture of both.

Patak looked into his face for an instant. He was not as young as he had first imagined. Perhaps the fellow was no more than a year or two his junior. His keen eyes were a vivid china blue and his cheeks were rosy. He had a friendly look to him and, with no more than his quaint Mala Strana locutions as evidence of character, Patak believed he could trust him.

They marched on abreast for a minute until Patak caught sight of the bridge up ahead. A light was on in the constableÕs cabin, so Patak looked in his breast pocket for his identity card.

-Yes, well, IÕll be bidding you good-day, said the fellow and had quickly about turned to make his way back into the Mala Strana. In a moment he had hurdled over a fence and was gone.

Patak walked home brooding. He knew he ought to feel relieved. The man was clearly a pest and probably wanted by the authorities to judge by the way he had hurdled that parapet. Yes, clearly a nuisance of some sort or other, but for some reason Patak felt a sense of loss. He hadnÕt even found out what the young man wanted.

PatakÕs present girlfriend was called Julia. He had met her in the street when the bottom fell out of her paper bag of plums and he had stooped with her to help her pick them up. What had happened then was not that moment on T.V. commercials when she gets a whiff of his after-shave or he gets a nose of her perfume and hence unspeakingly consents to love him (or he her, depending on the product). No, it had not happened like that. They just picked up the plums and that was that. But, as fate would have it, they were bound for the same underground station and so were compelled to walk together and stand on the same platform, which made it difficult for them not to exchange looks, leading to smiles, and words, and so on and so forth, the bobsleigh round of phone numbers, calls, coffees, dates, uncertainties, resolutions, arguments and -eventually- boredom. Now they had completed the course and were ready to call it a day. Now and again they would beat it out in an oblique and tortuous argument. Open dissent and fury were reserved for practical events of particular and restricted incidence: if ever she left the tap dripping, not turning the faucet tightly enough; if ever he flicked his hair back in that irritating and childlike way of his.

There had been highlights: sharing a phone receiver in a winter phonebooth; an outdoor performance of Ben-Hur with the amplified soundtrack booming into the sultry August night; kisses on a railway bridge in the autumn. But the deep underlying problem was that she just couldnÕt get it into her thick skull that his present life was a temporary and unimportant stage on the way to the real thing, which was going to take place when he got his game show idea accepted by the powers-that-be.

It wasnÕt as if Patak hadnÕt treated her to a serious exposition. One day as she came out of the bathroom after having applied one of her night creams, he confronted her. He was wearing his orange Y-fronts at the time.

-Freeze, he told her. Freeze. He pointed an imaginary gun at her.

He paused for a moment to let the tension settle, then he started up:

-Antagonism Gameshows: A New Concept in Viewer Participation. For a Gameshow of the Future...

This was an extract from his written proposal, where he spelt it all out in full. The exact function of the Gameshow host and his two assistants or as he called them the Director of Operations and the two Agonists. The participants were called Protagonists and the audience Meta-protagonists. The whole dramaturgy was spelt out in those terms with different parts of the set coloured in terms of their dramaturgical weight. The set was littered with a range of accessories: glass booths like ducking stools; sitting zones like stocks and pillories; roulette wheels like racks, so that the set looked like a torture chamber. Patak gave the set the name of the Game Chamber.

Anyway, between the hours of midnight and one in the morning Patak laid it all out for her. Julia just sat there on the eiderdown while it sank in, the night cream that is. From time to time she nodded, from time to time pursed a lip, from time to time raised an eyebrow. It wasnÕt much of a reaction.

WeÕll discuss it tomorrow, she said.

Patak was looking about for someone who might help him to bring this project to the surface. He spoke to Julia the next day. He told her he was thinking of giving up his job to devote his time to finding supporters for his project. He had some savings, he had never been a great spender. How much did he have stowed away now? Enough to keep him for two or three years if he tightened his belt. But Julia didnÕt like the idea. He knew immediately from how her mouth seemed to get thinner as he was speaking to her (she must have been holding her breath to let him finish and give the impression she was listening to him reasonably). No, it was nonsense. Why couldnÕt he just grow up? He should have got these illusions out of his system years ago. It was ludicrous for him to be still lugging this kind of nonsense around with him. After all, how old was he now? Thirty eight. Thirty eight. He was supposed to be a grown-up. Thirty-eight-year-olds were running the world. Did he realise that? Exactly. This was his chance to make it big, to get in on power. Julia laughed. Julia laughed so that he saw her numerous and efficiently planted silver fillings glisten like a trapful of treasure.

Here now is Patak pushing open the great wooden doors of the Central Prague Television Network Building on Republiky Square with the firm intention of obtaining an appointment with Jerzy Grotowski, head of the networkÕs light entertainment department. The girl behind the reception desk smiled engagingly but insisted there could be no meeting without an appointment and no appointment without a stamp from the Television Authorities Committee.

Patak knew about the Television Authorities Committee. His request for an appointment with them was still being considered five months down the line. They held what they referred to as a surgery for the general public once a week and applications to attend figured on a list the length of Wenceslas Square. What Patak really needed was not to be a member of the general public, that charmless block of the population that he yearned - yes, yearned with his entire pang-ridden soul - to abandon.

As Patak pleaded with the smiling receptionist - and, by the way, Patak was old enough to be her father - his eyes fixed on the poster for the new TV game show produced by the network stuck up behind the reception desk. Foolish Thoughts, game show mania produced by Jerzy Grotowski and the light entertainment crew. Patak had seen the first programme last week. It was junk. Contestants attempted to participate spontaneously in a staged five minute drama and attain the mystery prize at the end. Depending on how they managed to orientate the action the prize ended up more or less valuable. Last weeks prizes were a motorcycle, a goldfish in a bowl and a kilo of carrots. At the end of the show the woman who won the carrots applauded and laughed joyfully as though she had got the star prize, which went to show what a hoax the whole thing was. Did she want to win the carrots or did she want the motorcycle? The whole premise of the show was that she was mildly indifferent to what she won and that the only thing she really cared about was competing. Now, in sport that notion had gone out with the ark. These days sportsmen admitted that they were out to win. It was time gameshows were based on the same honesty, and then perhaps real drama might enter the arena. And as to where the foolish thoughts of the title came in, that was anybodyÕs guess. The marketing gurus would have thought the title up months before even seeing the show.

They would have costed it, locked it in and shipped it out, partnered it with press outlets, given it a profile, packaged it, advertised it and merchandised it, sold and contracted it, indexed it to the appropriate sections of the population, vaunted it, elevated it, condemned it and pathologised it, all before the sparrow-brained Ôideas-manÕ had even thought about what the show would actually be.

Zounds, thinks Patak as he shuffles out the network building, his lank strands of thinning hair flapping into his eyes as he encounters the wind of the great outdoors. He is a slight figure in the huge institutional doorway. Patak Ôout and aboutÕ, to coin a weathermanÕs expression. As far as the