If I were prime minister for a day (which is looking like an increasingly realistic prospect for all of us), one of my first acts would be to ban events being held on Monday nights. The first day of the week is always a jarring change of pace from the lazy joys of the weekend. I prefer my Monday evening to be a restful transition point into the rest of the week, like gradually dunking a Digestive into a mug of tea in order to get the right ratio of crunch to sogginess. You don’t want to hurl the whole biscuit in there at once.
Alas, the British Book Awards held its ceremony on a Monday and, for the first time ever, decided to nominate me for a prize. My latest novel, One Of Us, was up for audiobook of the year, which is akin to giving a marrow grower a participation certificate at the village fête. The prize was really for my excellent narrators rather than for me, but they are all glamorous actors and none of them was available. So off I schlepped to the carpeted glories of the Grosvenor House Hotel to eat what might have been a sweet potato smeared with hummus.
It was a slightly surreal evening, which kicked off with the children’s authors Michael Rosen and MC Grammar performing a hip-hop number combining the words of We’re Going on a Bear Hunt with the thumping bars of House of Pain’s ‘Jump Around’. It ended with the Freedom to Publish award being shared by Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s courageous exposé of her time at Facebook, and Nobody’s Girl, the memoir of the late Virginia Giuffre Roberts, co-authored with Amy Wallace. These were two noble and worthy winners. The cover of Careless People had to be blurred out because of the outrageously severe gagging order Meta has taken out against Wynn-Williams. As she herself put it when paying tribute to Giuffre Roberts: ‘When you try that hard to silence a woman who is telling the truth, you announce to the whole world that the truth must be very dangerous indeed.’
I woke the next day feeling ever so slightly jaded and went to record an episode of Joe Marler’s podcast. Marler is a former rugby player whose appearance on Celebrity Traitors showcased his uncanny ability to read people. His podcast makes a virtue of this, the premise being that Marler is now an (entirely unqualified) psychiatrist capable of identifying his guests’ obsessions and flaws. He quickly zeroed in on my love for reality TV and wondered where my fascination with observing others might come from. I suggested it stemmed from a childhood in Northern Ireland, where my father moved as an NHS surgeon in 1982. I was four: a child whose English accent marked her out as different. It was during the Troubles, and at some level I understood that many of the important things the adults seemed to be fighting over weren’t talked about in any meaningful way. The topics were deemed too dangerous to discuss. This was back when Gerry Adams had his voice literally silenced on the TV news, his words being spoken by an actor. That early feeling of outsidership, combined with an understanding of the power of words, of stories both told and untold, made me fascinated by human nature. In other words: a nosey git. Observation is a useful skill for a novelist. So I’m grateful for my childhood.
Talking of sharply observed fiction, the new season of Rivals, adapted from the late Dame Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles, has just dropped on Disney+. I was lucky enough to go to the premiere, held in London’s BFI IMAX, where the giant screen was only marginally wider than my 1980s-inspired shoulder pads, and Tony Hadley performed ‘Gold’ as a warm-up act. Just like Dame Jilly’s novels, the show is a joyous romp with a quietly radical undertone that centres the female gaze. The opening episode features a particularly memorable sex scene in a shower (I am reliably informed that no fingers were harmed in the making of it), but my favourite bit was when Aidan Turner’s character Declan O’Hara finds himself naked in a hotel corridor after being locked out of his room. He is spotted by two older ladies, one of whom is played by the legendary Pam St Clement (Pat Butcher in EastEnders). ‘Is that Terry Wogan?’ she comments as Turner snatches a packet of Crunchy Nut cornflakes from a room service trolley to disguise his manhood. I’m already looking forward to the season four plotlines involving the ghost of Michael Parkinson and a strategically placed Findus Crispy Pancake.
One Of Us by Elizabeth Day is out in paperback now.
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