I walked out of that conference room like Audrey Hepburn floating upstairs in My Fair Lady, on a cloud of swelling music, ready to dance the length of our open-plan office, spin and spin and spin out of the door and all the way home. I was twenty-two years old. And yet not especially surprised: it felt as if everything I’d seen and experienced over the past year had been moving in this direction. There was a crazed buoyancy to YTV in those dying days of the nineties, an atmosphere of wild success built on wobbly foundations, somehow symbolized by the building we occupied: three floors and the basement of the old “WAKE UP BRITAIN” TV studios in Camden (we still had a huge rising sun, egg-yolk yellow and now completely irrelevant, built into our façade). VH1 was wedged on top of us. Our external tubular heating system, painted in garish primary colors, looked like a poor man’s Pompidou. Inside was sleek and modern, dimly lit and darkly furnished, lair of a James Bond nemesis. The place had once been a second-hand-car salesroom — before either music TV or breakfast TV — and the interior darkness seemed calculated to disguise the jerry-rigged nature of the construction. The air vents were so poorly finished rats crawled up from Regent’s Canal and nested in there, leaving their feces. In the summer — when the ventilation was switched on — whole floors of people came down with summer flu. When you turned on the fancy light dimmers, more often than not the knob would come off in your hand.
It was a company that set great store on appearances. Twenty-something receptionists became assistant producers, just because they seemed “fun” and “up for it.” My thirty-one-year-old boss had gone from production intern to Head of Talent in only four and a half years. During my own eight-month stint I was promoted twice. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed — if digital hadn’t killed the video stars. At the time I felt lucky: I had no particular career plans, yet my career advanced anyway. Drinking played a role. At Hawley Lane drinking was mandatory: going out for drinks, holding one’s drink, drinking others under the table, never declining a drink, even if on antibiotics, even if ill. Keen, at that point in my life, to avoid evenings alone with my father, I went to all office drinks and office parties, and I could hold my alcohol, I’d been perfecting that very British skill since the age of thirteen. The big difference at YTV was that we drank for free. Money sloshed around the company. “Freebie” and “open bar”: two of our most repeated office nouns. Compared to the jobs I’d had before — even compared to college — it felt like being in an extended period of playtime, in which we were forever expecting the arrival of adults, who never appeared.
One of my earliest tasks was to collate the guest lists for our departmental parties, of which there was about one a month. They tended to be in expensive venues in the center of town, and there were always loads of freebies: T-shirts, trainers, MiniDisc players, stacks of CDs. Officially sponsored by one vodka company or another, unofficially by Colombian drug cartels. In and out of the bathroom stalls we trooped. Next morning walks-of-shame, nosebleeds, holding your high heels in your hands. I also filed the company’s mini-cab receipts. People booked mini-cabs back from one-night stands or to airports to go on holiday. They booked them in the wee hours at weekends to and from all-night off-licenses or house parties. I once booked a cab to my Uncle Lambert’s. An executive became office-wide famous for booking a cab to Manchester, having woken up late and missed the train. After I left I heard there was a clampdown, but that year the annual bill for transport was over a hundred thousand pounds. I once asked Zoe to explain the logic behind it all and was told that VHS tape — which employees were often carrying upon their person — could be “corrupted” if taken on the tube. But most of our people didn’t even know this was their official alibi, free travel was something they took for granted, as a sort of right that came with being “in the media,” and which they felt to be the least they deserved. Certainly when compared to what old college friends — who had chosen, instead, banking or lawyering — were finding each Christmas in their bonus envelopes.
At least the bankers and lawyers worked all hours. We had nothing but time. My own calls were usually done and dusted by eleven thirty — bearing in mind I arrived at my desk around ten. Oh, time felt different then! When I took my hour and a half for lunch that’s all I did with it: lunch. No e-mail in our offices, not quite yet, and I had no mobile phone. I went through the loading-bay exit, straight out to the canal, and walked along the water’s edge, a plastic-wrapped, quintessentially British sandwich in my hand, taking in the day, the open-air drug deals and the fat mallards quacking for tourist bread crumbs, the decorated houseboats, and the sad young Goths hanging their feet over the bridge, bunking off school, shadows of myself from a decade before. Often I went as far as the zoo. There I’d sit on the grassy bank and look up at Snowdon’s aviary, around which a flock of African birds flew, bone-white with blood-red beaks. I never knew their names until I saw them on their own continent, where they anyway had a different name. After lunch I strolled back, sometimes with a book in hand, in no particular hurry, and what’s astonishing to me now is that I found none of this unusual or a special piece of luck. I, too, thought of free time as my God-given right. Yes, compared to the excesses of my colleagues, I considered myself hard-working, serious, with a sense of proportion the others lacked, the product of my background. Too junior to go on any of their multiple “company bonding trips,” I was the one who booked their flights — to Vienna, to Budapest, to New York — and privately marveled at the price of a business-class seat, at the very existence of business class, never able to decide, as I filed away these “expenses,” if this sort of thing had always been going on, all around me, during my childhood (but invisible to me, at a level above my awareness) or if I had come of age at an especially buoyant moment in the history of England, a period in which money had new meaning and uses and the “freebie” had become a form of social principle, unheard of in my neighborhood and yet normal elsewhere. “Freebism”: the practice of giving free things to people who have no need of them. I thought of all the kids from school who could have done my present job easily — who knew so much more than me about music, who were genuinely cool, truly “street,” as I was everywhere wrongly assumed to be — but who were as likely to turn up at these offices as go to the moon. I wondered: why me?