Chapter 5: The Tobber Clanck Show

Tobber Clanck’s Thursday phone-in show is broadcast on ALL TALK, one of Dogaland’s national radio networks. It is, start to finish, going to be all about Billy Hall’s newest show on Tuesday night. Clanck has no show on Wednesdays - he works on another project. Tobber keeps Wednesdays to write his weekly newspaper column for The Currant. And ALL TALK just had to like it or lump it when they took him on, with a stand-in filling in for Tobber on Wednesdays.

He’d made his Currant column all about the Billy Hall show too. He’d said in it that women and wimps would be bleating and complaining, whereas anyone with sense could see that comedy has its own set of rules. Wimps is Tobber’s word for any men who think women deserve special treatment, like that DR plan to give them the vote. Or worse.

In the column, as standard, he goes out of his way to praise Home and Education Secretary Sardo Joinard. He quotes Joinard’s words directly where he said, on First!’s Political Roundup (broadcast literally just before the Billy Hall Show had aired on Popular), “Try imagining The Billy Hall Show without its bum-slapping gags!” He knows for a fact, because he’s often been told by people in the know, that several LC Government movers and shakers read Tobber’s weekly column in The Currant. He even knows, more or less, who they are. And Joinard is definitely one of them.

Tobber can’t stand the sight of the man, and personally thinks he’s a follow-where-the-horse-is-leading prat. But as Home and Education Secretary, the man wields a great deal of power. Plus, the grey-faced, dull-as-a-potato Jenger Vickles, Prime Minister in name if not in memory, seems inclined to leave home and education to Joinard - as a bone for the right-wing pure-breds to gnaw on. The CL51 Club and all that lot. In Clanck’s world too, it’s where the action is right now.

He’d tried urging, in his column, for Joinard to flip the in-flagrante age rules back from sixteen to a de-regualted nowhere at all - which is, more or less, where they’d been before those DR Nanny Staters went and poked their sticks under every last stone of the male libido. But Joinard hadn’t taken Tobber’s bait - which failure is partly why he thinks Sardo Joinard is such a silly prat.

But Joinard has been pushing Tobber’s line about teachers getting more powers to punish - not less like during the nightmare of DR. He’s been slipping that into his columns for a while, always linking it to school strikes and any youth misbehaviour in the news - even fudging some incidents committed by boys to seem like it was girls what done it instead - then forgetting to point out his category error.

Tobber’s theme tune plays. A pseudo-national-anthem pastiche. Not Dogaland’s actual Sailing By. A slightly more military continental-style piece.

He announces himself. He’s ready to take his first call of the day.

“Billy Hall, Billy Hall, Billy Hall!”

He’s told that to the call-takers who act as filters for who gets on air. “It’s Billy Hall start to finish today. Anyone wants to link it to schoolgirls, that’s optional as well - that’s a line I’d like to push, alright. And Sardo Joinard, anyone wants to big him up, let’s push that prat Joinard. But it’s Hall the show’s about today. Reactions. Any nay-sayers should be women, not men. And no-one too articulate against, pretty please. Thumbs-up callers, you’ll probably get a lot of them. Them you want to be articulate! Anyone who’s funny with it, even better. Any women who think he’s a real hoot, them too, especially women with proper sexy voices. See if you can get one of Hall’s female performers on the blower, to come and say what a lovely, lovely man he is. To maybe say, when they’re filming, that it’s not what it looks like - not really. A lot of it’s faked, right? But when it’s actually real, it’s actually fun. If you can’t get one of those girls, then some bimbo who does the late-night weather or those aerobics show girls where the cameramen can’t seem to stop focusing on crotches.”

“There’s a lot of copycat stories in the papers today, boss.” This is from one of Clanck’s brighter researchers, Rolla Feckle - a lad with ambition. “What if one of the victims phones in?”

Clanck says, “Only if it’s funny. No horrible ones, just the ones that sound like there’ll be laughs for the listeners. Any woman with a stupid whiny voice, who we can all have a giggle over, any like that.”

For a while now in his columns, on the talk show too, back to before the last election was called, he’d managed to link his schoolgirls-deserve-what-they-get meme to DR’s ideas about monitoring cameras. Democratic Reform’s majority had been just them and a handful of independent members, who’d lend their votes just to keep the Liberal Conservatives out (just so long as they got enough sweets for their constituencies). LC had forced a wedge between DR and the indies though, stopping DR from banning teachers outright from punishing schoolgirls. Just girls under sixteen were forbidden, and what teachers could give the older girls was controlled. That was when DR’s backroom boys and girls had come up with the video monitoring plan. We’ll prove how horrible it’s always been to punish girls like this, that was their plan. Their original proposal for those cameras had been for a limited number in half a dozen ‘problem’ schools. Boys schools as well as girls. LC had scuppered that one at the committee stage. Too much - too expensive. But DR, whose biggest bleeding hearts were all abnout protecting the girls, pressed omn anyway. The so-called Traditional schools - Scarleton Change and Lixmouth, plus some older, more rarefied state schools, they were the real problems. It was Tobber, amongst others, who’d craftily suggested that one way to stuff those plans up a spout was for LC’s Second Chamber stooges to insist on cameras going everywhere - in every school where any form of corporal punishment was used - though if course, now, just the girls’ schools. By selecting just a few, LC argued, you’re introducing a pre-determined bias. If you want a fair assessment then you have to put cameras in non-problem schools - which still retain some form of corporal punishment.

You could barely credit it, how well that had worked. DR were so convinced by their own shiny shitshow - that gathering evidence for their bee-in-bonnet project would inevitably bring about their favoured end result - of banning CP in every school, particularly any an all of them in girls schools - that they just kept on agreeing every increase to the budget, every time the LC stooges upped the stakes and bounced it on back to the Reps. And that became a running sore in the press, which Tobber had been all too happy to rub salt in.

The stupidly inflated funds for cameras in girls schools, just to monitor their punishments, had finally got voted through just months before the election was called. Then DR had been so effing keen not to lose the initiative on their passion project that they’d handed out the money in no time at all, lodging orders with any old startup, any wannabe Dogaland tech king on the make, all to make sure the project went on full steam ahead, just in case of any electoral upset.

Then Democratic Reform promptly went and lost the General Election by a country mile! So, new government, new rules. DR might have ring-fenced their investments in the tech, but how to parse all that data they’d record? Clanck and a few other public loudmouths started dropping heavy hints about scuppering plans for the Safeguarding Committee. Stuff DR’s effing Moral Monitors was Tobber’s word to the wise in his column. And that had worked too. The new LC Government just faffed about and fiddled, till Tobber got his wish and they fudged the whole Committee idea by failing to schedule any parliamentary time to create the thing in the first place.

First caller. “I never laughed so hard for years, Tobber! Billy Hall is such - a funny - man!”

“What about the big sketch at the end? Did that go on too long?”

“Too long? You’re having a laugh with me! Too long? The whole show could have been all that sketch, if you’re asking me! The expressions on some of them poor girls’ faces!”

“Some people seem to think the women’s reactions seemed a bit too real.”

“Yeah, I know! So did I! Oh my God, that was the best bit, Tobber!”

“So you really think - I believe the girl’s name is Jeneela Clooper - that she might have been in some actual pain?”

“By the end, oh yeah, deffo! Letting them all have it, wasn’t he? You can see it now, can’t you? Explaining that sketch to them girls who’d be in it. It’ll just be a bit of a pull, they’d tell em. Then they tell them stupid bimbos, I dunno ... the cameraman fucked up, we’ve go to do retakes! Or just, I dunno, not telling them how hard they meant to do it! Fuck me Tobber, wouldn’t you like to do that to Jenneela whatever her name is? The one with the massive great tits - you know - her?”

Tobber and his populist mates had started asking in their columns, on their shows - why not have a wider group of stake-holders looking at the schoolgirl captures? School Governors, Heads, maybe teachers themselves? Bods setting out the curriculums. Bods in Local Authorities in charge of looking after local education. Maybe even concerned parents - they could be dropped in there. The more people who can monitor, the more feedback you’ll get, so the better you’ll know what the real people think.

The backroom LC boys picked up on their talk and fed in to the Ministers and backbenchers with influence. This is what the word on the street thinks, boss. The CL51 backbench committee, they lapped it right up. Meanwhile, Tobber and the Loudmouths rattled other chains as well. Striking female students just shouldn’t be allowed! More powers for the teachers! Control must be taken back, and taken back fast!

Striking schoolgirls, though? The press had blown that one way out of proportion. Truth was, it was a few minor incidents, really. A mini-strike here, a mini-strike there. A few girls trying to work out another way to handle things. But the press will be the press. It’s their job to blow things out of proportion!

And finally the monitoring cameras were arriving - a girls school here and a girls school there. Someone, somewhere, was seeing what those cameras were recording. And every week, a few more schools got wired up to the database. So, right, what was it they were meant to record? Right, any and all punishments for the older post-pubescent girls. To gather up the evidence! To feed it all to a central archive where - well, who was reviewing all of that stuff?

You heard stories here and there. Techies and nerds wiring whole schools up for centralised capture, making sure all their cameras caught interesting angles. Installing basement tech rooms where temporary terabytes of data could be kept. Wiring those up to this shiny new Dogaland-central super cloud. Tobber found it hard to get his head around the scale of the thing - this bizarre application of those stupid pots of money.

New caller. A woman. “Hello?”

“Hello. What’s your name, my love?”

“It’s Mamella.”

“Really. Mamella. And what opinion do you have for us today, Mamella?”

“Billy Hall.”

“You have something to say about Billy Hall?”

“Yes.”

“And what would you like to say about him, lover?”

“I think he’s funny.”

“So you watched Tuesday’s show right through, I take it?”

“Yes I watched it with my husband, Jord.”

“Did he like it too?”

“Yes, he loved it! Do I call you Tobber?”

“That’s my name, Mamella. What did you and your husband love so much about Tuesday’s Billy Hall Show, darling?”

“All of it, Tobber. It was all really good!”

“And what did you think of the nurse sketch, honey?”

“My husband couldn’t take his eyes off of it, Tobber!”

“And what did you think?”

“I thought it was funny. He wanted to try it all out on me after.”

Tobber leaves a pause. “He wanted to try it all out on you? Did you let him then, Mamella?”

“If my Jord wants something, he usually gets it!”

“Is that right, now? Slightly personal question here, Mamella. How big are your breasts, dear?”