He liked to be called Cartwheel Crazy for personal as well as obvious reasons: a budding clown who combined fast clockwise somersaults with a cheeky chappy wit, subtle as well as slapstick. He often wore a garish wartime yellow suit that had frayed at the cuffs and turn-ups, hanging on his slender frame with a bagginess that his father had passed down to him without the body to fit it.
Being, as he thought, quite a character, Cartwheel Crazy had an ambition to enter the Big Brother House and become one of those jugglers of antics and outbursts who depended on the huge audience being unable to differentiate between truth and fiction. Not that he went as far as that in his thoughts. Or in so many words. He simply wanted to big himself up and he thought he had the capacity for gimmick and for furthering his chances in the roulette of modern life. He knew, at least, he had the ghost of a chance.
"If you’re crazy, why not make craziness an asset rather than a drawback?" he asked himself, in the hearing of his Mum who merely continued reading her celebrity magazine as she humoured her son with an unknowing smile. Yet, his chosen nickname as a whole was a bit of a mouthful: crazy in itself. You couldn’t imagine strangers and potential viewers to ‘Big Brother’ and fellow contestants on the programme using ‘Cartwheel Crazy’ as a name in their day-to-day speech either to his face or behind his back. They would need to shorten it somehow. Carty? Weelzy? Carzy? None of the shortenings seemed right. Indeed, most of his friends and associates in his home town had managed to articulate the whole nickname for many years in their conversation, so why not strangers? Not strangers, for long. Being on ‘Big Brother’ would soon bring many friends or enemies from the midst of strangers. They would have to lump his name.
So, Cartwheel Crazy he remained.
He misunderstood the eligibility process, believing, as part of his craziness, that he needed votes of confidence, proposers and seconders, from his friends and neighbours, so as to get on to the programme. He failed to realise that he needed to attend one of the many nationwide auditions along with the thousands of other budding contestants. He sent out several letters requesting support from the people he knew personally, including neighbours, local shopkeepers, his relations, old schoolfriends and some of those likely lads he knew down the pub. The man in an brown overall at the corner shop – who had never watched ‘Big Brother’ and knew very little about it – suggested Cartwheel Crazy put an advert in his shop window, so Cartwheel Crazy wrote out a card and pinned it up along with the adverts for secondhand prams, flats to let and services to be rendered.
BIG BROTHER HOPEFUL OFFERS SERVICES FOR SUPPORT. PLEASE CONTACT CARTWHEEL CRAZY and there followed his address which, for security reasons, is not shown here.
However, he soon realised – after accosting other proposed supporters – that this was not really the way to do it. He needed an act, a sense of the subtle differences between pride and humility, fame and infamy, reality and unreality and, above all, comedy and tragedy. Not only their differences, but also the ways in which they blended each with each.
And then he needed to take that ‘act’, hone it, perfect it, take it before others, hone it again, perfect it again, then parade it at the optimum in a carefully targeted moment in a line of serendipities affecting the individual destinies and sensibilities of each member of the selection panel as well as of himself. He had only one throw of the dice. Only one ghost of a chance.
Meanwhile, as the day of the all-blaring, all-shouting 'Big Brother' audition circus in Cartwheel Crazy’s town approached, he received an unexpected visitor at home. His Mum was out with her two cronies, Mrs Mummerset and Mrs Milledges. The three Mums he called them. And, in view of his aloneness in the house, Cartwheel Crazy was a bit unsure whether to invite the stranger in or not. But as this was a nice-looking young man whose voice sounded like the commentator who did the voice-over for 'Big Brother' round-up programmes each evening, Cartwheel Crazy decided to let him in. The man must have read his card in the corner shop window.
“Two eh em ... the housemates are all awake...” The man spoke as if he were about to make a long speech, while inspecting the surfaces in the kitchen where Cartwheel Crazy had led him to make a cup of tea, for one thing, and to allow possible avenues of escape, for another, should this man be a stranger dangerous to know, such as his Mum had always warned him that many strangers were.
“I’m sorry, I should have taken the card out of the window. It was a bit of a misunderstanding on my part.”
The man coughed to clear his throat and continued: “Cartwheel Crazy is in the kitchen entertaining a stranger...”
Suddenly, there was a loud voice, belonging neither to Cartwheel Crazy nor to the visitor, one that resonated lugubriously: “This is Big Brother. Will Cartwheel Crazy come to the waking-room.”
“Will he go, or will he stay,” said the slowly fading man with the voice-over, “Only <i>you</i> can decide.”
The man’s fading had pre-empted the decision, as the voice became just the hissing of the tea-kettle. And there was a slowly revolving vertical somersaulting of yellow air, that blurred with the matching shutter-speed of fast-strobing migraines.
If there is such a state as half dreaming and half not dreaming, Cartwheel Crazy thought he was in one. A bit like having his sleeping body being watched over by other sleepers who could not see him because their eyes were shut whilst they dreamed of seeing something quite different but really thinking that they saw what they assumed to be him sleeping. A bit like watching Big Brother live in the morning while the housemates merely twitched in grey outline in a deep slumber or dozing whilst maintaining the pretence of being in an old nineteen-fifties Andy Warhol film where he had someone sleeping for nine hours under the view of his camera. The frightening prospect of a permanent ghost that hardly moved.
Cartwheel Crazy woke with a scream. He was in bed and the hissing was rain on the blacked-out window of his bedroom. Or the blacked-out screen of a derelict cinema in wartime London. He called for his Mum. But she was snoring in her bedroom – her latest scandal magazine having slipped off her bed as she entered her own blocked-off world with the light still on.
“Three eh em – and Cartwheel Crazy is the only housemate awake. He comes to the diary-room.”
“Hello, Big Brother.”
“Hello, Cartwheel Crazy. How are you?”
“I’m dreaming that I’m on Big Brother. Can you wake me up, please, Big Brother?”
“But you <i>are</i> on Big Brother.”
“Hello, Big Brother.”
And the craziness went round and round, gnawing its way through a yellow suit with frayed cuffs and turn-ups. A washing-cycle. A ring-cycle. A dream or ghost of a wooden wheel. Hell is not other people, after all. It’s you on your own, riding solitary shotgun on the back of an old black and white film that is spooling from wheel to wheel, an aging film that has flickering feelers creeping in from the sides of the screen turning into the fingers of those who think they are watching ghosts but are, in fact, the ghosts watching themselves: the ghosts of fame and infamy, truth and fiction, pride and humility, tragedy and comedy, and all the other things that balance life and death.
Ghosts, too, of past and future.
The shopkeeper took the card out of the window. Its display time had expired. Tomorrow was Christmas Day, 1984.
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The above is a footnote to WEIRDTONGUE 32
DFL's comments on Big Brother: http://newdfl.bloghorn.com/136
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