Chapter 74: Colonial Reality

Harry was sat at the bank of CCTV monitors watching the girls in the house. He looked bored. There wasn't much going on. The girls had all had a good go at the drinks cupboard and now they were sleeping it off. "Do people actually watch this stuff on their televisions?" Harry asked.

I nodded. "Yepp. It's pretty popular in the real world. But then getting to vote someone out on a reality show is probably the closest a lot of people get to having the sort of control over someone else that our clients take for granted. Maybe the desire for 'ownership' is more deeply seated than we know."

"Given the choice between a dozen sleeping women and your ideas of philosophy, I think I'll go with the women," he said, turning back to the monitors.

I felt he was being a bit unkind but it had been a long day. "I'm not sure I understand why you don't just scoop them up straight away," I said.

"It would be easier," said Harry, "but I'm pursuing a cock-up prevention programme on this one. Given that they've been told to tell no one where they've gone we're just going to sit on the house for a few days to make sure that they really have been good girls and that there aren't any tabloid journalists sniffing around for a story."

Basher was getting impatient. We managed to pacify him by letting him have tapes of some of the sessions in the "Speak To The World" room where the girls poured out their hearts and their innermost thoughts and fears to the camera. I could imagine Basher would be watching them with only one hand on the TV remote.

As it was we waited a week, just to give the Sundays their chance too, but there wasn't a sniff. Harry's team had been checking out their homes too and it all looked O.K. The pick up itself we organised so that we could take them one at a time. I guess we could have walked in with machine guns at the ready but there's always a risk that something will go wrong and Harry likes safer approaches.

The girls had been used to having some sort of competition in the afternoons. The first few days they'd won access to a case of wine on one night, the use of a CD player for an evening on another and a fancy party on a third.

For this task we'd installed a tube that ran from their lounge through to a hidden internal room and they had been told that they had to decide which order they would go through the tube. They'd all been given uniform, short-sleeved, white shirt-waister dresses with their country's logo embroidered on the breast pocket. "No prizes for guessing why we've got these," Angie said as she looked at how short the skirt of her dress was. "They'll be looking for great arse shots as we crawl into that pipe, won't they?"

One girl was to go as soon as the first green light came on. Then a red light would come on until it was time for the next to and so on. There was more debate than I'd expected. It turned out that Mylene was quite claustrophobic and the others had to persuade her that she really had to do it or they'd lose out on whatever treat the producers had in store for them.