The Fall

4

Within 48 hours of flying out of New York, Sam Baker found himself standing in a field somewhere in a northern part of England. The sun shone brilliantly.

He’d heard of Yorkshire pudding. Eaten it plenty, usually with roast beef, occasionally with syrup and smothered with cream aerosolled fresh from a can. (Who says that by the age of 26 bachelors haven’t already developed perverse eating habits?) Only he’d never realised there was an actual place called Yorkshire. This, then, his on-site PA had told him, was the biggest county in England. A population of four million, encompassing an area that comprised more acres than there were words in the Bible. He stood in the middle of green rolling pastures that went on rolling all the way down to a big, wide river.

In the middle of those pastures lay an old Roman amphitheatre – scooped from the living rock, no doubt, by the sweat of well-whipped slaves. And he, Sam Baker, had been assigned the job of televising, live, a midsummer rock concert and beaming it back to the States via satellite.

He’d done this a lot from sports stadiums. Well, televising sports events, anyway. The only problem was that, unlike the stadiums that were carefully designed and built with camera emplacements, commentators’ studios, microphones already embedded in pitches and the whole caboodle cabled up to satellite dishes, here in this green Yorkshire field that abutted a wide shining river on which ducks swam and boats bobbed, what he got was what he saw: turf and rock and water – and not so much as a single power point.

He’d have seven days to bring in what he needed. Sure, a local TV company was providing the outside-broadcast hardware – generators, cameras, mixing consoles, trailers and the like – but he’d have all the fun of making sure everything went in the right place and that the crew knew what they were doing. All to ensure that he’d be sitting in the director’s chair in the OB control vehicle (ubiquitously referred to as ‘the scanner’ by TV folk) when the red light went on, calmly telling his assistant sitting at the console beside him, ‘Run credits, go to camera one, go to camera two. Run VT.’ And so on, and so on, for the three hours they were going to be on air.

He turned to his PA, who was diligently annotating a plan he’d sketched that morning. She was probably a little younger than him, with long auburn hair woven into a plait that looked as strong and as thick as a ship’s cable. When she turned her head quickly (which was often: she crackled with energy) the plait slashed from side to side like a whip. Her eyes were a dark, solid brown that made him think of fresh chestnuts. She went by the name of Zita and made a formidable PA. Her tiger-skin leggings and raunchy studded tongue only added to her aura of barely contained energy (and he didn’t doubt she could be a ferocious wildcat, too, if riled).

He worked hard to keep up the air of directorial authority. ‘I think we’ve got this licked,’ he called across to her. ‘The site’s only running a slight incline down to the river. Ground’s solid. Weather’s perfect.’

‘I wouldn’t count on it.’ She pushed the pencil into her thick hair, using it as a pen-holder. ‘The weather’s unpredictable here. It might be raining cats and dogs by tonight, then this ground will be a mudbath. The OB trailers will bog down.’

‘Best ring round the local farmers, then. Have them on standby with their tractors just in case we need pulling out of the poop.’

‘They’ll want paying. And probably in whiskey, not cash.’

‘Another quaint local custom?’

‘No. Tax evasion, pure and simple.’

‘Don’t worry.’ He flashed her a smile. ‘I made sure I came away from the States with a copy of the budget in my pocket. There’s a sizeable amount included for contingencies. Shall we take a look at the amphitheatre?’

They walked side by side, talking as they went.

‘The amphitheatre itself is protected by law as an archaeological site,’ she explained. ‘We can’t touch that, so no heavy equipment can be brought onto it: no scaffolding, not so much as a single tent peg.’

‘We’ll need to run cables across it,’ he said. ‘Either that or put the OB trailers and satellite dish behind the stage, but then that’s going to obscure the view of the river behind it.’

‘We could use radio links?’

‘No way. A thunderstorm 30 miles from here would leave viewers across the Atlantic with a screen full of snowflakes. We use cable.’

‘Cable,’ Zita echoed (doubtfully, he thought) as she jotted the word down on the equipment schedule.

‘How old is this, then?’ he asked.

‘The amphitheatre? Getting on for two thousand years.’

‘You don’t say? So this is where they fed the Christians to the lions?’

‘No, I think it was only in Rome itself where they did that. This was probably a theatre for plays and the like.’

‘So you live round here?’

‘No. But you wouldn’t recognise my accent. I’m from Wales.’

‘Which part of England’s that, then?’

‘Don’t let the Welsh hear you say that. It’s not part of England, it’s a country in its own right.’ Suddenly she stopped and smiled. ‘You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you? You’re playing the dumb Yank act.’

He smiled. ‘Guilty. I was just trying to break the ice. So call me Sam, not Mr Baker, do you hear? Or I’ll start wearing loud checked shorts and demand to be taken to McDonald’s at the top of my voice.’

She laughed, sounding genuinely friendly for the first time since he’d met her. ‘Okay, okay. Sam.’

‘Okay, Zita. Once we’ve finished up here what do you say to me buying the two of us some lunch?’

‘Fine, you’re on.’

‘What’s good to eat around here?’

‘Fish and chips.’

‘Posh?’

‘Extremely.’

‘Do I need to reserve a table?’

‘I think we’ll be okay today.’

‘Hey, looks as if the cavalry’s arrived.’ A coach rumbled by on the road that led to the amphitheatre. It swung into the car park and pulled up by a line of half a dozen or so cars. At the far side of the car park was a timber-built visitors’ centre with racks of postcards, travel guides and imitation bronze busts of Roman emperors. Not far from that, an ice-cream van did a brisk trade refreshing thirsty tourists. Sam shielded his eyes from the brilliant sun. ‘From the look of those shorts and hats it looks as if this part of Yorkshire’s managing to pull in the mighty dollar. Come on, let’s get a proper look at the amphitheatre; after that we’ll fax these equipment schedules off to your boss.’

In the otherwise perfect blue sky hung a single dark cloud. The man in the ice-cream van leant out to look up at the cloud and said a single word: ‘Thunderhead.’

It took barely three minutes to walk to the car park, which was a little behind the amphitheatre. It also stood on slightly higher ground, allowing Sam to look down into the arena that antiquity had bequeathed them.

It sat on a slope running down to the river that was perhaps two hundred yards away. The amphitheatre itself was, as he’d seen earlier, cut from the bedrock to form that classic bowl shape, a good 50 yards in diameter and maybe 20 deep, with shallow concave sides. Sam noticed that, unlike most amphitheatres he’d seen before in photographs, the sides were smooth and the seating, like the steps down to the centre of the stage area, was constructed from timber rather than cut into the stone itself. He guessed the wooden seats were a modern addition. The original Roman seating must have long since rotted down to a mulch and been blown away by the cold winds of the Dark Ages.

The back of the amphitheatre had been cut away in the dim and distant past so that someone sitting in the bleachers could have seen the actors on stage (or Christians being shish-kebabed, Sam thought with relish) with the river as a backdrop.

‘Want one?’ Zita offered him a cigarette pulled part-way from its carton. He noticed her fingernails were painted red. The colour of danger, he thought with an inward smile.

‘No, thanks. The last time I smoked one of those I got struck by lightning.’

She laughed and put her hand to her mouth. A moment later the laugh died as she looked at him more closely. ‘My God. You’re not joking, are you?’

He shook his head. ‘Perfect aversion therapy. Never touched one since.’

‘Were you badly hurt?’ She looked at him, eyes wide, scanning his face as if expecting to see some Phantom of the Opera-type scars cleverly concealed beneath make-up.

He smiled. ‘No. But I wouldn’t want to repeat the experience.’ He saw her ease the cigarette pack back into her bag as if she’d unwittingly flashed a pack of condoms at a nun. ‘No, go ahead, smoke if you want to. It was a long time ago. I won’t run screaming. Anyway, it’s not as though I belong to an elite band, either. More than a thousand people are struck by lightning in America every year, and eight hundred of those will survive the experience. Now…’ He folded his arms and looked down into the amphitheatre. ‘I’m going to put camera one here, on the rim of the amphitheatre. Then we’ll get a clear view of the stage, dead centre. This will form the base shot that we can keep returning to, particularly between bands. Camera two will go down on the floor level, directly below us here. I noticed a church about five minutes’ walk back that-away. I want to mount a remote camera on top of the tower. That’ll give us some lovely bird’s-eye shots of the crowds arriving, and wide-angle shots of the amphitheatre and surrounding fields. Oh, and there’s some moorings down there at the water’s edge. See those boats to the left of us? They’re all right. They won’t be in shot. But we don’t want any moored directly behind the stage on the night. When Eric Clapton stands there, belting out the riff from “Layla”, Joe Public will only want to see that behind him is the river flowing serenely toward the hills in the distance.’ He smiled. ‘And if we can cue up a flock of geese flying majestically into the sunset that will be just fine.’

‘I don’t think even your budget will run to trained geese.’

He turned his attention back to the bottom of the bowl of the amphitheatre. ‘You see that block of stone at the back of the stage? That looks like some kind of altar?’

‘I see it.’

‘I guess there’s not a hope in heaven of moving that?’

‘You guess right. It’s carved from the bedrock.’

‘Oh, we’ll have to work round it, then. Or maybe we can make it some kind of feature of the show.’

‘I’ll get the art department to look at it.’

‘You know, in years gone by, Jimi Hendrix or Sid Vicious would have happily smashed their guitars against it. Then we’d have sold the stills to Rolling Stone magazine.’

‘Perish the thought. The Department of the Environment people would throw us in jail for despoiling an ancient monument. Uh, wait a minute.’

‘What is it?’

‘It looks as if the show’s about to get under way.’

‘What show?’

‘The local tourist board stage some kind of entertainment for visitors. Want to move on down to the river?’

Sam looked at the people filing down the timber steps, where they took their seats on the amphitheatre’s sloping sides. ‘No, we’ll grab a few minutes of it. We might be able to bring a crew in to film part of it so we call drop in a taped insert as part of the introduction.’

‘You think your viewers will be interested?’

‘Not particularly, but it gives them time to visit the john or finish microwaving the popcorn before the concert gets under way. There, grab a seat. Whatever it is, it’s just about to start.’