Paphos People

THE STORY SO FAR

It was the monthly meeting of the team of writers to decide the next month’s storyline of the Soap Opera Eastdale Street. They had to keep the audience figures up whether with a comedy theme, an emotional tragedy, or best of all a death or even better, a major disaster with multiple deaths!
Head of the team was James, a very experienced storyteller who was the main source of ideas. Caroline provided the feminine aspect, then there was Mickey the comedy side of things who came up with the whacky situations that the characters got themselves into. There was Allen an ex police officer who made sure that everything was lawful, Frank a serving vicar, Leroy representing the ethnic minorities, Chris the gay rights representative and finally Johnny who made sure that the scripts were correct grammatically and that the format was presented in the style required. It was his job to turn the whole thing into a script which made some kind of sense.

The main theme of the show was a typical city street and everyday events and happenings. The reality was the opposite, the bizarre twists and turns made E Street the most dangerous place in the world to live. From theft, extortion, violence, murder extra marital affairs they had it all.

In the PC world of television everything had to delicately balanced so that prejudice against one particular type of person was avoided. The perfect character was a black lesbian working class type a church goer with a bubbly personality. That was Clarice who as the post person filled the bill on all fronts.

The storylines twisted and turned, marriages split up, and couples got together moving into the house next door to their ex but everybody accepted the new relationship and life carried on. Viewing figures went through the roof when Pam, an older woman took a fancy to a teenage ‘bad boy’ Clint and left her husband with three kids to go and live the high life with her toy boy. It all ended when Clint rode his E scooter under an Electric bus ending up at death’s door in hospital, at best probably paralysed for life.
Pam returned to her family only to find that her husband had taken up with her eldest son’s ex girlfriend! The eldest son had taken to drugs, while the two girls were running the streets at night totally unsupervised. Pam was in tears and had the closing scene standing on a bridge over the river!
That was one of James’ ideas which won approval on most fronts except Leroy who finally settled for the ex girlfriend being afro Caribbean.

One day the office door burst open and the sponsor came in with earth shattering news.
“It’s like this guys, we don’t feel that the theme of the storylines reflects our product, Audiences that go for sex, drugs, violence and booze aren’t our clientele, I mean could you see Pamella using our product?. No. Mercedes Benz people live life in a different sphere to your people.”

They were going to end the soap and wanted a spectacular ending. Maybe a plane crash, or spectacular meteor strike or even a gang warfare situation from another borough but all these things had been done before.
As usual James came up with a bizarre storyline, A world wide pandemic would wipe out the entire area, with lock down situations, curfews, a ban on travelling worldwide while scientists struggled to find a vaccine, All over the globe countries would be collapsing under the costs of the whole thing and hundreds of thousands of people would be dying.
Objections came from all the representatives on the team, how was Mickey going to get a laugh out of a situation like that, Frank said that God would never let anything like that happen, In the end, Johnny stood up and said that he was not prepared to try and script such a ridiculous idea,
So after a lot of discussion they just pulled the plug, packed their belongings, got into their Mercs, and drove into the distance.

That’s Showbusiness Folks you couldn't write it!