SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher by Alexei Sayle

of evil to harm her … brave pig. There were so many
of them, actors, actresses, like you would watch in The Bill and apart
from the regular cast there were loads of actors in it and in the next episode
there was a whole different bunch of actors and you never saw the first bunch
again on the telly ever, and those were the successful ones who got on the
telly even the once.
    The CD
Rom had a timecode running along the bottom of it, giving minutes, seconds and
tenths of a second. The bits that needed voice-over would be played to her and
a green light would tell her when to start talking, the timecode was also
printed on her script and that told her when she needed to stop speaking by.
Beanie spoke to her over her headphones. ‘I need a sound level, tell me what
you had for breakfast.’
    ‘A nice
piece of grilled lettuce dressed with lemon juice and there’s this new live
bacteria drink tha—’
    ‘Yeah
that’s fine. I’ll run the picture and give you a light.’
    The
small TV on the desk in front of her came to life. A big clock appeared on it
then the images began, bright blue sea mixing to coral reefs, tropical fish
darting in and out, then small tropical islands covered in palm trees. The
green light flashed and she began to read. ‘The South China Seas, famous for
azure blue lagoons, palm-fringed beaches and …’
    She
paused as the script told her to and waited for the light to come on again. As
it did the image cut to shaky footage of small boats rammed with armed men
smashing through the surf.
    ‘… pirates!
Rapacious, bloodthirsty, rampaging pirates!’
    The
pictures stopped and Tom spoke to her over the headphones.
    ‘That
was great, Zoe, fablious. Let’s try it once more for luck. Have a bit more fun
with it.’ So they did.
    Then
the pictures fast forwarded a bit up to the next section they wanted her to
voice over.
    ‘Nearly
a century after Joseph Conrad wrote of the colourful robbers he called “vagabonds
of the sea”, the pirates of the South China Seas are highly organised,
technically advanced criminals and now they are expanding into Europe.’ She
thought this sounded like one of those documentaries she’d done but why had
they said it was a CD Rom? On screen the speed boats were bucking in the wake
of a huge merchant ship. Grappling hooks were thrown and the men in the boats,
rifles slung across their backs, climbed like racoons up the ropes and onto the
unseen deck of the ship. She read on.
    ‘We are
those pirates, the pirates of the South China Seas and we are looking to make
alliances in your area. If we are your friend we are loyal and true, if you are
our enemy we are implacable.’
    On the
deck of the freighter the gunmen had the crew lined up in front of them. The
pirates began firing with their rifles and the sailors staggered about for a
bit and then fell down in a heap.
    Zoe
suddenly had a horrifying thought. Her agent, who she usually told what she was
doing every second of the day, didn’t know she was here, in fact she’d lied and
said she was going to an auction of unwanted greyhounds. It would be up there
on the board in the office in big felt-tip letters: ‘9/6 Zoe auct, unwnt
grhnds.’ The CD Rom people had phoned her direct and offered her a buy-out flat
fee of five hundred pounds which had seemed like a lot of money for something
that wasn’t going to be broadcast. So Zoe’s agent didn’t know about this job,
she was cutting her out of her fee, in fact the CD Rom people had expressly
told her not to mention it to her agent. What suddenly struck Zoe was, was she
getting paid enough for this? What if it wasn’t sufficient? What if she was
getting shafted? She thought she might try phoning her agent and asking, all
casual like, what the right fee for a thing like this might be. Would her agent
be annoyed with her? She’d phoned her yesterday when Zoe’d thought she was
pregnant to ask if she thought Zoe should get an abortion now or wait till
after the East