Blue Collar (25 page)

27 At the keyhole

CT had given us a call a couple of months earlier to let us know that the show had been scheduled and the good news didn’t
stop there. For reasons I found difficult to follow and a bit tedious trying to, our programme had been switched from BBC3
to BBC1, which meant that a few people might even get to see it now, including Robbie, who’s telly still didn’t even get Channel
Five.

Personally speaking, I was quite surprised we had to wait until it actually came on the telly as I thought CT and his bosses
might’ve invited us into their offices for a sneaky preview, though I guess they decided against that on the grounds that
they didn’t want cement dust walked all through the BBC.

And here it is, here’s what their big write-up said about our show:

Still, I was one of the brickies, and an English one at that, so what did I care?

One of the lads suggested we all got together to watch it when it came on and this suggestion was enthusiastically received
for about thirty seconds until Jason pointed out that as hardly any of us lived near each other, nine out of ten of us would
have to drive and therefore be unable to drink, spelling a death knell to that particular idea.

In the end, me, Jason and Robbie agreed to get together to watch it up at the Lamb when it came on, so that’s where we found
ourselves at seven o’clock the following Wednesday evening, with the pints lined up on the bar behind us, watching the end
of the regional news with increasing palpitations.

Hardly anyone else was in the pub this early, and those that were – old Stan, Paul, Peggy, Tony the landlord, of course, and
a few others – knew the occasion and marked it with a cheer when the programme started.

I’m sure I don’t even need to tell you that my thoughts flickered to Charley in those first few seconds.

I wondered if she’d be watching. And I wondered what she would think when she saw me. Or indeed, if she’d see me, seeing as
I’d kicked up such a strop six months earlier that CT had more or less promised to stop pointing the camera my way. This was
something I kind of regretted now, but what could I do about it? Moan my guts out about not being on the telly when I’d already
moaned my guts out about not wanting to be on the telly? And perhaps while I was at it I could tell Jason he was my best friend,
Robbie he was my second-best friend, old Stan he was my third-best friend, and then sit on the steps crying my eyes out until
everyone had agreed to make me their best friend. If I wanted to be childish about this sort of thing.

These thoughts were thankfully banished with a roar when Robbie came on screen throwing sand and water into a mixer only to
suffer an almighty great splashback for his troubles. Dirty Den introduced us to Robbie and told us how old he was, how long
he’d been a hoddy and a bit about his daily duties and I fought the urge to turn to him and ask him for his autograph.

Robbie’s slapstick moment was followed by a procession of familiar faces from all corners of the site, including a shot of
Jason nodding at the camera nonchalantly as he walked past, his tools slung over his shoulder and his face chiselled into
that haunted thousand-yard stare that only the most battle-hardened of brickies wore on their way back from the front line.

‘Twat,’ Robbie observed for both of us, and Jason looked dour and admitted there was a lot more Vietnam-vetting from him to
come.

‘I thought it looked cool,’ he muttered, the colour drained from his face.

Gordon distracted us further, taking the camera on a quick tour of an oversite the lads were working on before snatching up
his trowel and slashing into the muck and bricks with such a vigour that it pretty much guaranteed that particular section
of wall would’ve had to have been rebuilt the moment the cameras were off him.

As for me, I was nowhere to be seen, and I was just starting to think that I’d snubbed my fifteen minutes of fame as well
as the love of my life when the camera pointed to the horizon and zoomed in on me working on one of the countless chimneys
I’d built over the last twelve months. I recognised the house straight away and remembered roughly when I’d been up there,
but I wasn’t allowed to dwell on these thoughts for too long as Jason was talking about me directly to the camera.

I turned to Jason in disbelief and he was suddenly even more ashen faced than before.

‘What was all that about?’ I demanded.

‘I don’t know. I can’t remember. I may have said a couple of things about you, but I didn’t think they’d put them in the programme,’
Jason simultaneously confessed next to me and laughed like a drain about on-screen.

‘When did you ever say that?’ I challenged him.

‘On the telly. Just then. When you were working on that chimney,’ he told me, before adding: ‘Sandra’s going to kill me.

Can I stay at yours tonight?’

‘No you fucking can’t.’

Dirty Den then cut in to take us across the site and for five minutes we followed Dan the chippy around a joist lift while
he looked for a pencil that was actually perched behind his ear.

Then we went off and watched the plumbers putting rads into a half-finished home, then the site agent knocked on the door
and came in for a cameo, before once again we headed off to a different location to watch a couple of spreads flinging plaster
up and down the walls like a pair of H-Block lifers with a tune on their lips. All in all, it was a bit like being at work,
only I actually got to hear what the wankers said about me behind my back.

‘I’m sorry, mate, honestly, I know I said some things I shouldn’t have but you know how it is; we were just taking the mick.
Didn’t mean nothing by it,’ Jason apologised again, quickly waving Tony over to top up my pint, but I told him not to sweat
on it, it was fine. After all, no one had been a better mate to me over the last year than Jason, and part and parcel of being
mates with someone is the joy of ripping the piss out of them in times of need.

It really is ‘just what you do’.

With the best intentions in the world, no one can offer an unlimited supply of tea and sympathy without cracking a few gags
along the way for their troubles, otherwise we’d all go mad or grow tits. So no, I wasn’t angry or annoyed at the lads for
putting the boot in behind my back, as I’m sure I’ve probably done the same to others in my time.

It was just weird seeing something that I’d so clearly never been meant to see. It was the ultimate ‘listening at keyholes’
experience and a little unsettling, to be honest.

Before we knew it, half an hour was up and the on-screen lads were packing away their tools for the evening and making for
their motors behind a scroll of rolling credits. They even included a little scene of me waving goodnight to the roofers and
climbing down from my chimney as Dirty Den told us to tune in next week for more ‘high drama from the boys from the building
site’.

And then it was over. As quickly as it had come, it was gone.

‘That was wicked, wasn’t it?’ Robbie reckoned, as Tony, Paul and Peggy came over to slap us all on the back and agree. Only
old Stan sat his ground, perhaps a little intimidated to be in the company of three such enormous celebrities.

Almost immediately our phones started popping with beeps as everyone we knew sent us texts or tried to call us to say they’d
been watching and as much fun as it was for about an hour, eventually we had to turn them off just to get a little peace.

Ha, famous at last and already sick of it.

Still, we toasted ourselves long into the night, which was pretty stupid considering it was a work night, and inevitably pulled
a trio of gorgeous kebabs on the stagger home.

When I got in, I turned my mobile back on to see who else had left a message and it beeped away like R2D2 making a dirty phone
call. After thirty or so seconds, R2 blew himself out and I checked the enormous list of text and voicemail messages for a
specific name. But it wasn’t there.

I had enough messages on my phone for it to qualify as heavy reading but the one text I’d spent the last couple of months
kidding myself into believing I would receive never came.

Perhaps not everyone had been watching after all.

Tommy seemed to have taken his new-found celebrity status most to heart and spent the best part of the day asking us if his
face really looked as fat as it did on the telly.

‘The camera adds ten pounds, don’t you know?’ Big John told him.

‘Yeah, and those sausage-and-egg sandwiches you’ve been living off all year have probably contributed a couple of ounces
too, you fat fuck,’ Jason suggested.

As you’d expect, most of the day’s chit-chat was taken up with the obvious and we jabbered on about almost nothing else until
the conversation finally burned itself out the following morning. CT chose that particular afternoon to drop by to see how
the show had been received, briefly reigniting the whole tedious topic again, but that flying visit aside most of us were
done with the conversation until the following Wednesday.

Naturally, we all tuned in again, but this time around there wasn’t the same level of excitement or anticipation that had
heralded in the first episode. Don’t get me wrong, it was still exciting and there was still a buzz about the place that day,
but it didn’t quite feel like the life-changing, seismic event that the previous week’s episode had. We were still here. We
were still working. And we were still able to walk up to the corner shop for a Scotch egg without being mobbed by crazed and
adoring teeny fans.

Nothing had changed for us.

And Charley still hadn’t rung.

It was all very disappointing.

But things didn’t stay disappointing for very long.

It was like CT was growing in confidence the more shows he got under his belt. There had been just the merest mention of us
that first week and he’d got away with it, so come the second, there we were again, only this time in more detail. And then
the third. And then the fourth. And so on. All spread out for teatime viewers to pick over and digest.

Talk about reopening old wounds. It was more than a little jaw-dropping.

All our rows were there too, like a collection of porcelain squabbles; the wanky bars, the dinner parties, the posh food and
her dodgy time-keeping, the fact that Charley earned more in a year than I would in three (and that’s before subtracting all
the unpaid rainy days I’d lose) and our niggling little disagreements over newspapers, celebrities and the need to clip kids
around the ear on a regular basis. They all made unwelcome appearances. Even the classic old theory about posh birds and rough
bits of trade made it in there thanks to a moment of profound insight from Robbie, which pretty much ticked my entire card.

All there, and all snaking their way through the series like pockets of rising damp.

I tell you, when CT set out to do a job on someone, he really did a job. I had to give him that much if nothing else.

Naturally, whenever my name was mentioned by either Dirty Den or the lads, the camera would find me in the distance and zoom
in on me, either finishing off one of my chimneys, trudging around a footing or forlornly picking my nose in the van.