Elimination Night

2

A Horrible Farewell



I CHECKED THE TIME on my cell phone: Barely seven minutes to go now before the press conference—or “The Reveal” as Len insisted on calling it—was due to start.

The run-through.

Must do the run-through…

I began speed walking down a yellowing hallway, wondering vaguely if the exercise might spare me yet another depressing visit to the Starlight Gym on Hollywood Boulevard—which typically involved an hour of heavy breathing on an elliptical machine while staring at the absolute perfection of some cow town beauty queen’s Lycra-encased buttocks. I could definitely have used something to burn the dumpster-sized box of sticky buns that I had emptied into my digestive system earlier, when I thought Len wasn’t there. (No such luck. “Look, everyone, here comes Miss Cinnabon!” he’d boomed over the PA system during rehearsal.)

The corridor dead-ended.

Where the hell were the dressing rooms?

I wished for a moment we were on the more familiar territory of Greenlit Studios. It would be months before we reached that stage of the competition, however. For now, Project Icon was still touring from city to city, prescreening potential contestants. This week, conveniently, we were in LA—but we needed a venue with a big enough parking lot for the “cattle call” of mostly delusional masochists who wanted to line up all day for the opportunity to be insulted on TV. That’s why Len had rented The Roundhouse, a big old concrete arena down by the oil fields. The place had originally been designed to resemble a Roman coliseum, only they’d slathered the entire thing in cheap sixties stucco, so now it just looked like a giant overflowing porridge bowl.

“Six minutes!”

Shit.

Another corridor.

I broke into an undignified half-jog, half-run. At last, after turning a corner, there they were… two doors, side-by-side, a golden star on each. Pushing my hair back from my eyes, I tried to breathe deeply from my abdomen. “You’re a majestic mountain,” I told myself. Then I knocked twice loudly, in an attempt to project confidence, before flicking through the sheaf of papers on my clipboard, one last time. Len’s notes were underlined in the right-hand margin:

11AM: HOUSE LIGHTS DOWN

On time, please!

11.05AM: VIDEO PACKAGE

Slow motion clips of previous Project Icon winners/contestants, set to Carl Orff’s “O Fortuna.”

Bill—this isn’t Carnegie f*cking Hall.

Anything weepy and out of copyright will do.

11.07AM: INTRODUCTION

WAYNE SHORELINE (HOST)

Welcome, welcome everyone. This… [long pause] is season thirteen… [even longer pause] of PROJECT ICON! And I am your host, Wayne Shoreline, at your humble service. So, by now the whole world knows our incredible story: How the business genius Sir Harold Killoch discovered an obscure TV talent contest in Belgium—featuring a revolutionary system of telephone voting—and brought it here to the Rabbit network in America, where it shot to the top of the prime-time ratings and became a worldwide sensation. [Audience goes wild. Close-up of Sir Harold smiling front of house.]

Bill—talk to the smile-coach again.

Need Sir H. to look more Cuddly Grandpa,

less Dark Lord of Evil.

And who could forget our original, iconic lineup of judges? America’s favorite uncle, JD Coolz [applause]; the beautiful and dare I say sometimes a little unpredictable Pamela Crabtree Wayne—double-check with legal for approved crack-head euphemisms. and of course “Mr. Horrible” himself, our erect-nippled Scottish friend Nigel Crowther…

[Audience boos]

Bill—let this run a bit.… Erect-nippled—really?

Over the years our show has gone through lots of changes—most dramatically when Nigel sadly left the judging panel last year to pursue other opportunities at the Rabbit network. We wish him all the very best, of course, and we’re sure he’ll have many, many more successes. Wayne—NO F*ckING SARCASM. But one thing has remained a constant: Our NUMBER ONE ratings. So! [Tense music.] Back to the news that everyone has been waiting for. There has been talk. There have been rumors. We’ve all heard mention of many, many names. But now, finally, here in this room, we can reveal WHO will be sitting in the judges’ chairs over the coming months, helping us find.… [another pause] the next winner… [pause again, spoolup title theme] of PROJECT ICON!

Wayne—new delivery ideas?

All these pauses are getting

a bit old, no? Food for thought…

I wondered how many people would know that most of this intro was bullshit. In particular the bit about the “business genius Sir Harold Killoch” having anything to do with Icon’s success. I mean, yes, Sir Harold owned both the Rabbit network, and its parent company, The Big Corporation—so in that sense he was responsible for putting the show on the air. But as everyone who’d ever read ShowBiz knew, it was the mogul’s younger brother George who’d seen the original Belgian format—while on a beer-tasting vacation in Antwerp—and suggested that Rabbit license it from its creator, Sven Svendsen, a reclusive Swedish talent agent.

“Who the hell wants to listen to a bunch of piss-poor wannabes who can’t sing?” was Sir Harold’s response, according to his unofficial biography, Harold’s Killing. Nevertheless, he ordered Rabbit to buy the rights, and within a few weeks, a pilot had been commissioned. “Old Harry thinks it’s the dumbest TV pitch he’s ever heard,” as ShowBiz reported at the time. “But his baby brother George—like all Killoch family members—is a voting shareholder in Big Corp, and therefore needs to be indulged. We predict a swift cancellation.”

Rabbit aired the first episode at midnight on a Friday: “The hospice slot,” as I’ve since learned it is known (due to the fact that ninety percent of viewers at such an hour reside in assisted living communities). That in itself might have been enough to kill Project Icon, if not for the fact that Sir Harold asked Sven Svendsen—a.k.a. “Two Svens”—to help run the show.

Two Svens’ first move? Hiring his old friend Leonard Braithwaite as supervising producer.

I had no idea who Len was back then. No one in the US did. It was only later I found out he’d starred as a cruel-to-be-kind mentor in From Arse End to the West End, an acclaimed British TV documentary about the creation of a theater production using actors cast entirely from soup kitchens. That’s how Len persuaded Two Svens to hire exactly the same kind of villain for the Rabbit version of Project Icon. He couldn’t cast himself, though—the network wouldn’t let him—so he found a doppelgänger, Nigel Crowther, and spent months coaching him on “sneer technique” and “insult metaphors.”

Oh, America had no idea what was coming.

Pretty much everyone remembers the first time they saw Crowther on TV. Me? I was at my friend Maggie’s house, pretending to study for a math exam. I’d actually wanted to watch a NOVA documentary about long-whiskered Peruvian owls (that’s how hard I partied as a thirteen-year-old), but Maggie insisted on loading up Icon from her early-model TiVo. And thanks to Crowther, I couldn’t stop watching: Here was this aging, pudding-bellied, apparently heterosexual Scotsman with a toilet-brush hairdo, who kept his shirt unbuttoned to several inches below the navel, and appeared to have doused himself repeatedly in some kind of fluorescent orange tanning solution. More extraordinary, however, was his willingness to insult contestants to their faces, even if they were deranged or sobbing with fear—or both, which was more often than not the case.

“When you reach for the high notes, David, you look like a brain damaged orangutan with a genital itch who’s trying to lick poo off its nose,” he informed one visibly quaking teenager, who promptly fell to his knees weeping.

Within a few days, “Mr. Horrible” was a national sensation. The Concerned Parents of Young Christian Patriots tried to sue to remove him from the airwaves. Several members of Congress petitioned. Even the president of the United States himself made a personal call to Sir Harold, which the mogul put on hold, then sent through to voicemail, before leaking the voicemail—out of habit—to the editor of one of his more prominent news websites.

“PREZ BLASTS MR. HORRIBLE FOR POO-LICKING RETARD JIBE,” read the headline.

Everyone wanted to know: Who the hell was this guy?

It didn’t take long for ShowBiz to dig up an answer: Before Icon, Crowther had been a talent scout in Glasgow, best known for discovering a pop duo named the Dreami Boyz, whose gimmick was to appear on stage wearing only pajama bottoms. They’d been a spectacular hit with both the grandma and gay demographics—hence the two million sales of their abominable first album, Sweet Dreamz & Warm Cuddlez, which received the first ever negative-starred review from NME.

Perhaps inevitably, Two Svens—three hundred pounds, ice-skating enthusiast, face like an exploded dumpling—couldn’t stand Crowther. He swung a punch at him a couple of times, in fact. Even Len fell out with his protégé within a few days. But it didn’t matter. By the end of Project Icon’s first season, “Mr. Horrible” had become one of the most famous men on earth. And by the second season, more votes were being cast by the show’s viewers every week than it takes to win the keys to the White House. As a result, Crowther was able to negotiate a contract that made him the best-paid performer in TV history.

And now?

Well, as the script said—there wasn’t any hiding it—Crowther had left. What the script didn’t say was that Two Svens had turned almost homicidal with rage upon learning this news, especially given that he’d offered Crowther a “Triple Oprah”—i.e., three times the salary of the Queen of Daytime TV during her final season on network TV—to stay on for another year. Crowther’s counteroffer? No salary. But one hundred percent ownership of everything.

Two Svens thought he was joking.

Another fact omitted from Wayne’s script: Crowther had now started to work on his own rival TV franchise, The Talent Machine, which the Rabbit network had paid for and promised to air. Thankfully, The Talent Machine wouldn’t be ready for another year. But when the show did finally make it onto Rabbit’s prime-time schedule, it seemed obvious that only one singing competition could survive.

As Chaz Chipford, the newly-assigned Project Icon correspondent for ShowBiz, summed it up:

Season thirteen is a live or die moment for Project Icon—a last chance for the Rabbit tentpole warblefest to prove that it’s still viable without superstar Crowther. Odds don’t look good, even with dancepants-wearing showrunner Leonard Braithwaite back in the supervising producer’s seat (robo-host Wayne Shoreline also inked a new contract last week). After all, The Talent Machine is revving up like an eighteen-wheeler for its debut next year, and Madison Avenue expects it to spatter Icon like a bug on its windshield. Sure, Icon and T-Machine won’t air at the same time, but Rabbit insiders say Crowther will likely soak up all the audience for warblefests in the fall, leaving Icon to pick over the scraps come January. Besides, as Sir Harold already knows: Icon’s format is as stale as a week-old Pink’s hot dog, and ratings have been tanking by TEN PERCENT a year for the last five seasons. Word is even going around The Lot of a top-secret plan at Big Corp to ax Icon THIS season if it loses its number-one position. Old Harry—who celebrates his eighty-second birthday next week at Skullhead, his private island in the South Pacific—wants to spare it (or perhaps himself) any future humiliation. What few hopes remain now rest on a cast of untested new judges, after Sir Harold ordered Braithwaite to “nuke the panel.” JD Coolz remains—he’s cheap—but dud celebrity chef Helen DeMendes has been ankled, as has sourpuss tunesmith Kat Patrigliano. Rumor has it, only two “stars” will be hired to fill the three empty seats. Trouble is, no matter who comes on board, there’ll still be a gaping, Crowther-shaped hole.

Those two stars were now supposed to be in their dressing rooms, waiting for me to give them the run-through of the press conference, where in five minutes we’d reveal their names. But I’d knocked six or seven times now, and no one had answered.

Where the hell were they?

“Ahem. Hello?” I said, rapping on the first door again, hurting my knuckles. “Anybody there?”

Silence.

Another try, this time on the second door.

“This is Bill,” I called out. “For the run-through. We’re starting in two minutes.”

Nothing.

Out of options, I turned the handle in front of me and pushed. The door swung open to reveal an untouched room. The red sofas I’d bought on the Project Icon credit card for five thousand dollars apiece showed no creases. Neither did the five hundred dollar red silk pillows. Likewise, the red candles were unlit, the red iPad on its red docking station next to the red roses was still playing The Best of Enya, and the seal on the room temperature Pellegrino (placed on the red table, next to the red vase) was unbroken. In spite of the eight days it had taken me to furnish this room to such precise specifications, no one appeared to have set foot in it.

Same deal: leather bean bags fluffed and perfect. Mongolian dream catcher untroubled by a breeze from the switched-off wind machine. Giant vat of drinking water (marked “Kangen” in black Sharpie) still full to the brim and gurgling quietly to itself. And under the Broadway-style vanity mirror, a foot-long roast beef sub, placed strategically next to a square-jawed Action Man figure, who for reasons not worth getting into right now was dressed in nothing but a frilly pink Barbie doll bra. Attached to the latter was a note from Len, which read, “Best we could manage, I’m afraid!”

Uh-oh—something’s up, I thought.

And this was a problem. Because we were out of time.