"Kim Newman - The Serial Murders" - читать интересную книгу автора (Newman Kim)"But Mam," whined Brenda, who strangely had a Birmingham accent, "I'm with child!"
Mavis' face set in the gargoyle snarl which always meant someone would suffer serious emotional or physical damage in the next episode. The theme tune cut in, an unacknowledged collaboration between the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band and the Pink Floyd. Credits slid across still photographs of slag-heaps, urchins, and strikers from the 1930s. The Barstows had come a long way since then, though you'd not know it from listening to Mavis the Matriarch. Richard was once held captive for three weeks by a scorpion cult who were practiced in Black Acupuncture, the science of inflicting non-lethal but excruciating pain by applying venom-tipped needles to the nerve endings. On another occasion, he had found it necessary to crawl through three miles of clogged-up Victorian sewer filth in order to throw off a determined shapeshifter who was on his scent. Not to mention a childhood spell in a German labour camp, traumatic enough to blank out any memory of whoever he had been before Captain Geoffrey Jeperson found him in the ruins of Europe and adopted him. But nothing in his experience was quite as agonising as a fortnight in the basement screening room of Amalgamated Rediffusion Television's West London offices, watching episode after episode of The Northern Barstows. He would never hear that infernally memorable theme tune again without wincing. Lady Damaris Gideon, MP, was on the ART Board of Directors and owed a favour to the Diogenes Club. In 1928, Edwin WinthropтАФRichard's predecessor and sometime mentorтАФsupervised a gruesome pest-control exercise at Gideon Towers, ridding caverns underneath the estate of a branch of the family who had practiced obscene rites in the sixteenth century and degenerated into nastily toothy mole-folk. Thirty-five years on, no longer the ing├йnue who'd required rescuing from her many-times-removed cousins' appalling larder, Lady Dee wore long sleeves to cover bite-marks and tinted contacts to conceal the pink, distinctive Gideon Eye. A tough-minded survivor of far more terrifying battles in business and politics, she was well up on the trouble in Northshire and was only too happy to dump the problem in someone else's lap. "O'Dell-Squiers have their own fiefdom with that wretched programme," she had said, "and the Board would not be unhappy to see them taken down a peg, just so long as the unwashed keep watching the adverts." Barstows on behalf of ART, who syndicated it through the Independent Television network. The production company was owned by June O'Dell, the actress who played Mavis Barstow, and her ex-husband, Marcus Squiers, the writer who had "created" the show. Lady Dee was the only person Richard had run into on this case who wasn't a Northern Barstows fan. In fact, the MP refused even to cast a cold, contemptuous Gideon Eye at anything broadcast by the company which paid her a fat salary plus dividends simply for gracing an annual meeting with her presence and a letterhead with her esteemed name. In what sounded like an uppercrust Mavis Barstow rant, she told him she loathed the wireless ("especially those ghastly transistors"), despised television on principle ("it's for being interviewed on, not watching"), was iffy about talking pictures, and none too sure if music halls should be allowed. The most useful thing to come out of the meeting was that Lady Dee had put Richard in touch with Professor Barbara Corri, "this batty spinster from one of those plateglass pretend-universities." The professor was infamous for pestering ART with questions about The Northern Barstows. The programme was her field of study, and she taught a course around it at the University of Brighton. "In my salad days at Shrewsbury," said Lady Dee, coming over Mavis again, "it was Greek and Latin, with a bare minimum of Shakespeare to satisfy the 'moderns.' None of this rot you read in the Sundays about degrees in plays full of swearing or pop records by the Bootles. But she knows her onions, this Barbara Corri. If you absolutely have to find out about this dreadful thing, she's your best bet. ART could scrape up a consultancy fee if needs be. We've an interest in settling this curse. Sir Joseph Keats was on the Board too. Is still, if he ever turns up alive." Among Professor Corri's works was a paper in Television Monograph entitled " 'Women of A Certain Age': The Stereotyping of the Independent, Powerful Woman in British Television Serial Drama: Crossroads, The Northern Barstows, Coronation Street." Richard tracked it down and did his best to understand the argument before phoning her and offering to spring for train tickets and accommodation over an unspecified period if she |
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