The Paradise Stain. Nick Glade-Wright

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      Over the two years the two men had become accommodating friends, almost by default, spending more time in consultation about the show than was probably healthy, drinking gallons of perilously strong coffee together at the station whilst debriefing after each new contestant had run the gauntlet. It was an alliance constructed primarily on Mackelroy’s steely belief in the show’s controversial format, and his absolute confidence that Kant played a huge part in its success.

      One reviewer had compared Kant to Michael Parkinson, whose smooth interviews “were undemanding because his guests are all celebrities”. But Barry Kant “has the uncanny ability to make distraught individuals feel at ease about articulating their worst nightmares, degrading abuses and horrific losses to an anonymous studio audience and hundreds of thousands of home viewers. Or is that millions now? On the small screen Barry Kant’s kind face, altruistic brown eyes and luxuriant mane of silky grey, somehow seem to make broken souls feel worthy and at ease in his presence, as if they are alone in private consultation with a judicious oracle” .

      Life for James Mackelroy, single but never short of nocturnal female company, was all about BKS, his baby, and basing it in Hobart rather than Sydney with exclusively Tasmanian contestants kept a perverse edge on the show. It seemed to reflect the dark passages of the island’s history. Mackelroy liked to crow about discovering Kant and grooming him for the position. BKS had injected the success serum into Mackelroy’s veins, transforming people’s misfortunes into dollars, lots of them.

      ‘BKS! You can’t buy this sort of marketing. It’s pure adulation. We’ve created a popularity avalanche in the suburbs with your smile and Rex Harrison good looks. Well, your own good looks really. You really are The Man BK! Don’t get me wrong, you prick, but this is the height of … it’s a fucking triumph! We’re up there now,’ Mackelroy, exuberantly drunk, had rambled, while pointing to some mythical nirvana in the ceiling, his zeal exploding like firecrackers at the celebration drinks after the second series had finished.

      BKS’s first two seasons had made a devastating impact on the TV ratings of the conventional current affairs programs with their banal, repetitive social docos. And after the third ten week season, several reality shows, with their puerile, mind numbing activities, were sent scuttling back to their drawing boards. Nobody had expected it, least of all Kant, who never forgot his humble beginnings reporting for the Mercury news paper at sheepdog trials, country fairs, traffic accidents and the court of petty sessions. That life was now an impossible solar system away.

      ‘It’s just like CNN, FBI and NYC; the letters are planetary institutions!’ Mackelroy had rambled on absurdly, foaming bottle of champagne in hand.

      ‘Don’t forget KFC,’ Kant had thrown in as an aside, exhausted and slumped on a couch underneath a parched and yellowing rubber plant.

      The studio set was awash with the entire Nerve Two work force. Everyone, including the cleaners, who had also been invited to the party, laughed convincingly at Kant’s comment.

      ‘Not so BK!’ Mackelroy lurched on jubilantly. ‘Some of the dishes might be a bit unpalatable but it’s silver service!’

      Kant hadn’t meant for such a cynical tone to wash his words. He couldn’t argue with the show’s popularity, or that he had made a significant, if not the lion’s share of the input into the style. So it was with some apprehension that he had begun to have concerns about the ethical nature of the show. Indeed, he even wondered whether he was in fact making a difference at all to the contestants’ lives. He knew that wasn’t Mackelroy’s motivation. Was he merely exacerbating their sorrows with false hope?

      Then the third series broke all the records again.

      Before BKS, the television station Nerve Two, a small set up in Moonah, just north of the city, had been a fidgety table tennis player frantically struggling for primacy amongst a melee of muscled VFL ruckmen, skipping around, dodging the stamp of giants, wanting to be taken more seriously in a highly competitive arena. The tables finally turned after the success ful marketing of the Barry Kant Show to several mainland networks, resulted in it connecting up to all other mainland states.

      *

      Kant’s iPhone rang. He picked it up from the kitchen bench. The highland lilt was music to his ears. ‘Vinny! Now there’s a voice I’ve missed hearing.’

      ‘Och. Sorry to bust in on your last day of holiday, Barry, but I’ve just stumbled on a young laddie, almost literally. A big story and he has a fine way with him too.’

      It had been a shrewd move by Mackelroy, after meeting Vince MacLean in Sydney, to offer him a crucial role on the show’s team in the beginning.

      MacLean’s reputation as a foreign correspondent, reporting on the Rwandan massacres, and the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina, had preceded him. But MacLean was exhausted, burnt out from the years in the field and needed a place to recoup, and maybe never go back to another front line again. The relentless reporting of so much horror had taken its toll in the form of chronic insomnia, his dark nights filled with demons and blood, the screams of innocents and the piercing silence of mass graves.

      A haven was what he had longed for. His cousin Hamish told him about the quaint city of Hobart, a peaceful paradise, picturesque and safe from the bad world. So MacLean signed up as crew on a yacht skippered by James Mackelroy, competing in the Sydney to Hobart white water sailing classic. He liked the idea of arriving by sea as the early settlers did. All that salty water and fresh air would surely commence the purge that his soul so desperately needed.

      Apart from MacLean’s observational expertise and zeal for uncovering the truth, Mackelroy had been instantly smitten by the lyrical sway of his Scottish accent, one thing the high lander would never lose. MacLean’s immediate answer was a firm no, but the journo in him was a restless spirit and by the time the yacht rounded the Iron Pot light in the mouth of Hobart’s Derwent River he had agreed to Mackelroy’s proposition. His brief, after a well earned respite, would be to locate broken shells, as he’d later refer to them, and encourage them to become contestants in a new reality show.

      Finding the right combination of people was time consuming. To begin with MacLean compiled a list of the hearing times at the Family Law courts. He strolled in the parks at dusk and dawn, he hung about at the soup kitchens, hospital waiting rooms, and bus malls in the city, then further out in the grimier suburbs. MacLean engaged with down and outs rummaging for fast food scraps in garbage bins, aimlessly wandering druggies, and eccentric loners who reeked of stale grog and urine and who slept in impossibly windless and murky crannies of the city.

      MacLean soon realised it wasn’t only the subjugated under classes that had the rights to dreadful misfortune. The well heeled and the comfortable could also share the fact that ‘shit can happen, any time, to anyone, anywhere’. And no matter how good their intentions to conceal their suffering from the rest of the world, out of dread or disgrace, it would be that hollow, disengaged look in their eyes that would give them away.

      Kant took his coffee and sat near the window, sighing loudly for MacLean’s benefit at the proximity of going back to work. ‘Can’t swing a few more days off for me, can you? I was just starting to get the hang of doing nothing.’

      ‘If I wasn’t just a wee cog in the wheel I’d let you have another year.’

      ‘Well, I appreciate the thought. So, who’ve you got?’

      ‘Young African dude, and when I say dude I mean … DUDE!

      He’s СКАЧАТЬ