The day we learned that Aimee was to come, one day soon, into our Camden offices on Hawley Lane, everybody was affected by the news, no one was completely immune. A little whoop went around the conference room, and even the most hardened YTV hacks lifted their coffee to their lips, looked over at the fetid canal and smiled to remember an earlier version of themselves, dancing to Aimee’s early, dirty, downtown disco—as kids in their living rooms—or breaking up with a college sweetheart to one of her soupy nineties ballads. There was respect in that place for a real pop star, no matter our personal musical preferences, and for Aimee there was a special regard: her fate and the channel’s were linked from the start. She was a video artist right down to the bone. You could hear Michael Jackson’s songs without bringing to mind the images that accompanied them (which is probably only to say that his music had a real life) but Aimee’s music was contained by and seemed sometimes to only truly exist within the world of her videos, and whenever you heard those songs—in a shop, in a taxi, even if it was just the beats reverberating through some passing kid’s headphones—you were sent back primarily to a visual memory, to the movement of her hand or legs or ribcage or groin, the color of her hair at the time, her clothes, those wintry eyes. For this reason Aimee—and all her imitators—were, for better or worse, the foundation of our business model. We knew American YTV had been built, in part, around her legend, like a shrine to a pixie god, and the fact that she should even deign now to enter our own, British, far lowlier place of worship was considered a great coup, it put everybody on our version of high alert. My section head, Zoe, convened a separate meeting just for our team, because in a sense Aimee was coming to us, in Talent and Artist Relations, to record an acceptance speech for an award she wouldn’t be able to pick up in person in Zurich the following month. And there would surely be many indents to shoot for various emerging markets (“I’m Aimee, and you’re watching YTV Japan!”) and perhaps, if she could be convinced, an interview for YTV News, maybe even a live performance, recorded in the basement, for the Dance Time Charts. My job was to gather all such requests as they came in—from our European offices in Spain and France and Germany and in the Nordic countries, from Australia, from wherever else—and present them in a single document to be faxed to Aimee’s people in New York, before her arrival, still four weeks away. And then, as the meeting wound down, something wonderful happened: Zoe slid off the desk she sat on, in her leather trousers and tube top—under which you could see a glimpse of a rock-hard brown stomach with a gem-like piercing at the belly button—shook out her lion’s mane of half-Caribbean curls, turned to me in an offhand manner as if it were nothing at all, and said: “You’ll need to collect her downstairs on the day and bring her to Studio B12, stay with her, get her whatever she needs.”
I walked out of that conference room like Audrey Hepburn floating upstairs in My Fair Lady, on a cloud of swelling music, ready to dance the length of our open-plan office, spin and spin and spin out of the door and all the way home. I was twenty-two years old. And yet not especially surprised: it felt as if everything I’d seen and experienced over the past year had been moving in this direction. There was a crazed buoyancy to YTV in those dying days of the nineties, an atmosphere of wild success built on wobbly foundations, somehow symbolized by the building we occupied: three floors and the basement of the old “WAKE UP BRITAIN” TV studios in Camden (we still had a huge rising sun, egg-yolk yellow and now completely irrelevant, built into our fa?ade). VH1 was wedged on top of us. Our external tubular heating system, painted in garish primary colors, looked like a poor man’s Pompidou. Inside was sleek and modern, dimly lit and darkly furnished, lair of a James Bond nemesis. The place had once been a second-hand-car salesroom—before either music TV or breakfast TV—and the interior darkness seemed calculated to disguise the jerry-rigged nature of the construction. The air vents were so poorly finished rats crawled up from Regent’s Canal and nested in there, leaving their feces. In the summer—when the ventilation was switched on—whole floors of people came down with summer flu. When you turned on the fancy light dimmers, more often than not the knob would come off in your hand.
It was a company that set great store on appearances. Twenty-something receptionists became assistant producers, just because they seemed “fun” and “up for it.” My thirty-one-year-old boss had gone from production intern to Head of Talent in only four and a half years. During my own eight-month stint I was promoted twice. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed—if digital hadn’t killed the video stars. At the time I felt lucky: I had no particular career plans, yet my career advanced anyway. Drinking played a role. At Hawley Lane drinking was mandatory: going out for drinks, holding one’s drink, drinking others under the table, never declining a drink, even if on antibiotics, even if ill. Keen, at that point in my life, to avoid evenings alone with my father, I went to all office drinks and office parties, and I could hold my alcohol, I’d been perfecting that very British skill since the age of thirteen. The big difference at YTV was that we drank for free. Money sloshed around the company. “Freebie” and “open bar”: two of our most repeated office nouns. Compared to the jobs I’d had before—even compared to college—it felt like being in an extended period of playtime, in which we were forever expecting the arrival of adults, who never appeared.
One of my earliest tasks was to collate the guest lists for our departmental parties, of which there was about one a month. They tended to be in expensive venues in the center of town, and there were always loads of freebies: T-shirts, trainers, MiniDisc players, stacks of CDs. Officially sponsored by one vodka company or another, unofficially by Colombian drug cartels. In and out of the bathroom stalls we trooped. Next morning walks-of-shame, nosebleeds, holding your high heels in your hands. I also filed the company’s mini-cab receipts. People booked mini-cabs back from one-night stands or to airports to go on holiday. They booked them in the wee hours at weekends to and from all-night off-licenses or house parties. I once booked a cab to my Uncle Lambert’s. An executive became office-wide famous for booking a cab to Manchester, having woken up late and missed the train. After I left I heard there was a clampdown, but that year the annual bill for transport was over a hundred thousand pounds. I once asked Zoe to explain the logic behind it all and was told that VHS tape—which employees were often carrying upon their person—could be “corrupted” if taken on the tube. But most of our people didn’t even know this was their official alibi, free travel was something they took for granted, as a sort of right that came with being “in the media,” and which they felt to be the least they deserved. Certainly when compared to what old college friends—who had chosen, instead, banking or lawyering—were finding each Christmas in their bonus envelopes.