Idolism (6 page)
As I reached the car, I looked up. Michael was right. Through the foliage of the tree I couldn’t see the windows of Richardson’s office. I slid into the backseat of the car, quietly and elegantly like a snake, and closed the door.
“Very good,” Michael said. “Now take the laptop. There should be a card slot at the front of the case, right in the middle.”
“Found it, but there’s a card in there.”
“Take it out.”
“Got it.”
“Is it an actual memory card or just a plastic dummy?” Michael asked.
“Looks like just a piece of plastic to me.”
“Excellent. Looks as if he’s never used the card slot before. Probably doesn’t even know it’s there. Now all I need you to do is to put the SD card I gave you in the slot.”
“And then what?”
“Nothing. That’s all.”
“How is that supposed to work? The computer isn’t even running!”
“Relax, Tummy,” Michael said. “Just put the card in. The next time your dad powers up his computer, MINDY will give me remote access to it and erase the contents of the card. Your dad will never know, and if he should ever find the card, it will be completely blank.”
“If you say so, Michael.”
“I say so. And you better do it quick, because your dad has just left Richardson’s office.”
“Bloody hell!”
I put the memory card into the slot, but it wouldn’t fit. My heart started beating faster and I was beginning to sweat.
“Michael!”
“What is it, Tummy?”
“The bloody card doesn’t fit! I can’t put it in properly!”
“I need you to relax, Tummy,” Michael said. “Make sure that the bevelled corner or the card is on the top right hand.”
I turned the card around and put it in the slot again. It snapped into place.
“Got it, Michael!”
“Well done. Now get the hell out of there. Your dad will be down any moment now.”
I put the laptop back on the seat and pulled toe door handle. The door wouldn’t open.
“Michael!”
“What is it now?”
“The bloody door won’t open! I can’t get out!”
“Child-safety lock,” Michael said. “The man has a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old. What on earth does he need a child safety-lock for?”
“Oh I don’t know, Michael,” I said. “How about I hand him the phone when he catches me here and you ask him yourself?”
“All right, all right. Try the passenger door in the front. Do it now!”
I got on my feet and tried to squeeze meself through the gap between the front seats. I have been overweight for all me life, and apart from the usual bullying and mockery by the slimmer people, I never had a problem with me body. This was the first time in me life that I wished I was as skinny as Julian, because no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I twisted and turned, I couldn’t get to the front seat.
“I can’t get through!”
“Here comes your dad now,” Michael said. “I’m signing off. You’re on your own.”
“Thanks a lot, Michael!”
Me dad came out of the building, got into the driver’s seat and slammed the door shut.
“Hey, dad.”
He jumped in his seat and turned around. “Thomas! For heaven’s sake! What are you doing here?”
“I was on me way home and I saw your car, so I thought I’d catch a lift.”
Dad stared at me for a moment. Then his gaze fell on his laptop in the seat next to me.
“Give me that!”
I handed him the laptop. He opened it to check if it was switched on. It wasn’t, and he threw it onto the passenger seat.
“By the way, the Pope is dead,” I said.
Dad looked at me as if I’d just told him that mum had an affair with Santa Claus. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“The Pope,” I said. “He died. Just a few hours ago. I’ve seen it on the telly.”
“Jesus bloody Christ!” His shoulders sank and his head hit the steering wheel.
“Better not let Mum hear that.”
“A dead Pope is the bloody last thing I need right now, Thomas.”
I shrugged me shoulders. “Sorry. But it’s not me fault now, is it?”
It would have been nice to hear him say, ‘No, Thomas, I know it’s not your fault.’ But of course he didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything. He just started the engine and we took off.
The First Revelation of Edward Pickle
To be perfectly honest with you, for MMC—the Maddock Media Corporation—the death of the old Pope was a true godsend, pardon the pun. Now don’t get me wrong on this, if an 85-year-old man falls down the stairs and cracks his skull open, it is of course—despite its undeniable intrinsic comedic value—a terrible human tragedy. But even tragedies, as cruel as that may sound, do have their merits. For MMC as well as for the Roman Catholic Church, two of the biggest and most influential organizations in the world, it was, all things considered, the best thing that ever could have happened. I’m speaking strictly from a business point of view here. At the end of the day it’s all about marketing, and marketing is what I’m all about.
I first met Robert Maddock back in 1979. I was fresh out of college with degrees in marketing and public relations in my pocket, and I was looking for a job. At a friend’s birthday party one of my former co-students asked me if I was religious.
“Religious?” I said. “I don’t know. Not really. I mean, I don’t go to church or anything.”
“But you do believe in God, don’t you?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I suppose. Why are you asking me this?”
She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “Never mind. It’s probably not the kind of job you’re looking for anyway.”
“No, no,” I said. “Tell me.”
“Well, there is this young TV preacher down in Alabama. He’s got his own show on cable. It’s pretty popular. My grandma loves him. I’ve seen his show when I visited her last week, and I must say he’s not bad. He does have potential, I think, but he could do with a little help in the PR department.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah, but like I said, never mind. You probably don’t want to go down south and work for a redneck televangelist.”
I pondered this for a moment, and then I asked, “What’s his name?”
“Robert Maddock,” she said.
The following Friday I made my way down to Huntsville. My appointment with Mr Maddock wasn’t until Monday, but I wanted to see the man in action before I met him in person, so I spent my Sunday afternoon in a cockroach-infested motel room and watched his weekly two-hour show
The Vox
. It took me less than five minutes to realize what my friend had meant when she said he could use a little help in the PR department.
Robert Maddock was young, around 30 years of age, very attractive, very charismatic, very likable. Until he opened his mouth. His communication skills were a complete and utter disaster. Here was a man who was so much in love with the sound of his own voice that whatever it was that he was trying to say became trifle and irrelevant. His language was a convoluted mess, interspersed with grotesque metaphors and clumsy, awkward humour. Cringe-worthy would be too kind a description. And yet there was something about this man, about his vision, that I found very intriguing. He had potential; a raw diamond that just needed to be cut and polished.
When I met him the next day, I asked him how many people usually watched his show.
“A quarter of a million,” he said, gloating like he was Johnny fucking Carson.
Maddock was living in a bubble, a bubble inhibited by a quarter of a million ultra-conservative, right wing Christians, and because he was at the very center of that bubble, surrounded on all sides by his own kind, he was oblivious of how big a world outside his bubble he was unable to reach. Convincing him to tone down his message, to make it less bat shit radical and more appealing to a wider audience would be a herculean task. But I was up for it.
“Give me two years,” I said, “and I’ll turn your quarter of a million viewers into two and a half million.”
My offer was met with roaring laughter as if I’d made a particularly hilarious joke, but when he saw that I wasn’t laughing back, he stopped and said, “Son of a bitch, you really mean it.”
We shook hands and never looked back.
To make a long story short, I didn’t meet that target of two and a half million viewers within two years. I exceeded it by more than a million. By 1981
The Vox
was available on basic cable in 15 states in the South and Midwest, and we kept growing at an exponential rate. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I was somewhat less successful in fine-tuning the voice that stood behind
The Vox
. Business strategies, branding, and marketing were one thing, but when it came to his message and the way he chose to convey it, Mr Maddock proved to be, shall we say, resistant to any form of advice. He would listen to me, he would listen to all the advice I gave him about what to say and how to say it, and he would nod emphatically and say, “All right, Ed. You got it.” And then the moment the red light on the camera came on it all went flying out the fucking window and he’d just blurt out his crude, unrefined ramblings about God and the world the same way he’d always done it. It was frustrating.
By the early to mid 1980s I was seriously considering to chuck it all in, to just pack my things and go back home to Montana, to leave Mr Maddock to it and move on with my life. But then I realized that I didn’t have a life. In the past few years I had been working for Mr Maddock 60, sometimes 70 hours a week. I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t have any social life to speak of. All I had in terms of leisure time were my Saturday nights that I liked to spend listening to symphonies by Brahms and Mahler while emptying bottles of expensive red wine. And I had
The Vox
. After all the years of hard work that I had invested in it, I think it’s fair to say that
The Vox
was my child just as much as it was Mr Maddock’s, even if I was just its adoptive parent. Either way, I hated to think what Mr Maddock would do to
The Vox
if I just left him to it, how he would mess it up and ruin it until it would wither away and die. I wasn’t going to let that happen, and so I decided to stay. I stayed, but I started developing a new business strategy to take us to the next level.
I wanted to get Mr Maddock out of the spotlight, because if he stayed there, he was bound to do us more harm than good in the long run. Despite his charisma and his stunningly good looks he wasn’t spotlight material, simply because he didn’t know when it was the right time for him to shut up. It was a nasty piece of work, but I eventually managed to convince him that it would be best to remove him from the TV screen. The first step in that direction was our acquisition of WTFU, the TV station from Huntsville that had originally aired
The Vox
. Like most of the stations we were on, WTFU was a small and reasonably, albeit not extremely, successful broadcaster catering for a small to medium sized market, and its buying price was relatively cheap. Mr Maddock initially rejected the idea of buying the station, like he initially rejected all ideas that weren’t his own, because he usually failed to see the bigger picture.
“Just think about it,” I said to him. “Right now you have two hours of airtime per week. You have two hours in a 168-hour week to get your message across, and you have absolutely no control over the remaining 166 hours. How can you compete with 166 hours of cheap and ludicrous programming that actively seeks to appeal to the lowest of human instincts? You’re a beautiful flower, but you’re surrounded by dirt and rocks. You can’t flourish in an environment like that. You can’t flourish in a wasteland. What you need is fertile soil, a mild climate, warm rain, and soft sunbeams. Imagine what you could do with 168 hours of programming every week. Imagine you could mould a whole TV station to fit your narrative.”
“I’d like that,” he said.
Of course he would. It was an idea that played directly into his vanity.
He took the bait. We bought WTFU for a handful of dollars, repackaged it, rebranded it to T-Vox, and the rest is history. A year later Mr Maddock made his last appearance as a TV preacher before he started concentrating on his new job as CEO of the newly formed Maddock Media Corporation.
Today MMC is present in media markets in over 120 countries. We own and operate hundreds of TV and radio stations and newspapers, and in recent years we’ve been increasingly active in the new media with our acquisitions of cellphone and Internet service providers. Our flagship brands are T-Vox for general programming, and our around-the-clock news channel MMC News24. We are often accused of pursuing an extremely ultra-conservative, right wing agenda. I won’t even deny that. What I will deny, however, is the notion that this is a bad thing per se. We are catering for a market that has existed long before us and that will always exist, and that market is huge.
There are very many people out there who, when they turn on the news, don’t want the world explained to them in a fair and balanced way. They want their existing worldview mollycoddled and comforted. They want their beliefs validated and vindicated. They want to hear what they think they already know.