BY JAMES BEMBRIDGE

The things people will do for a lick of screen time, I think, looking at a woman disgracing herself before a producer. Shall she be on that show again? The one that won her a retweet by Jordan Peterson. She might, he says, more with his hands than voice.

I’m at a party to celebrate the opening of my friend Alex’s production studio, attended by names with bylines and faces usually made up with pixels.

My attention is meant to be with making the canapes but something else has captured it. A reflection I caught of my face in one of the studio cameras.

It’s strange, I hadn’t noticed before how well my reflection looks in it. How comfortably my face sits in its lens. How, a dark thought then enters, how unworthy the other faces here are of the camera lens.

‘Are we ready for the canapes?’ Alex asks.

‘Yes, almost. I’m just giving them the finishing touches.’

My hands are made busy with the canapes, but my thoughts are consumed by the camera lens. I don’t watch television unless I’m on it which is criminally rare these days. In fact, it has long been my suspicion that producers only invite me on if someone’s died last minute. But for what need do I have of television or producers when I have, with that camera lens, my own private world?

The celebrities swarm to the canapes, veneers bared, tearing salmon from blinis as lions do flesh from impalas. I gladly leave them to their frenzy. Left among it, they won’t have a thought to spare about the camera lens.

But before I can return to it, Dan Wootton’s face comes into view. A face not unknown to camera lenses. A face, it occurs to me when seeing it close, made for them. The Hollywood smile, the perfect hair, the well-formed eyes and that God sodding height of his. Next to him I look for all the world like a hobbit seeking the council of a wizard. May God rot him for his height. May a swarm of bees sting and smite his –

‘Mr Bembridge! What a fabulous party.’

‘Dan, you’re looking very handsome tonight.’ As if by instinct, my hand strokes his and the grasp of jealousy that had only moments before held me releases. Such is the power that TV faces wield. We talk of his new show that is to launch later this year and of how new media shall replace the old. And the more critical the talk of legacy media becomes between us, the less bad I feel for not being a feature of it.

He is of course right. Is broadcast news not to us what the town crier was to our grandparents? Do its hosts not look as out of place as silent starlets in a time of talkies? ‘Silent starlets in a time of talkies.’ Yes, that’s not a bad line, I think. In fact, I think it one of my best, and a smile rises on my face as if to confirm so, only to fall again at Dan’s asking to see the studio equipment, and by extension – the camera lens. Wootton means to take it from me. Of that I am now certain. And did I not spy Lois Perry casting glances towards it? Far too many glances to put down to mere curiosity. No, she has designs on the camera lens too, and must be watched – with the most vigilant eye.

‘Dan, darling, why not relax yourself before I give you the studio tour? Let me get you a drink – oh, and you really must try the canapes.’

He joins the others at the canape table and all feels safe again. In fact, I feel so safe that I begin doing something I wouldn’t have dared were the celebrities not at the farther end of the room. But why shouldn’t I do it when they make a career from doing the same? I begin… I begin talking to the camera lens. ‘These producers,’ I snarl, gesturing my head towards theirs. ‘I’m sure they don’t invite me on unless someone has died last minute.’ I take the camera lens’s silence as confirmation of my suspicion. And then talk, such talk like I have never given comes from me to it. It’s only when I finish that I realise the party has quietened, and that its guests are strewn across the floor – the mark of a good party, I reason.

The only sound to be heard is some choked voice of a woman complaining of the canapes tasting bitter. But I bear her no attention. Of course, I have none to spare from the camera lens.

‘Yes,’ I remark to my reflection, ‘the things people will do for a lick of screen time.’

James Bembridge is Deputy Editor of Country Squire Magazine