Ormskirk Spies

SCENE ONE

Soaring choral music. JARL’RMAI walks unhappily through a series of rooms, all of them crammed with wood panelling, tracery and heraldic stained glass, into a vast sixteenth-century quadrangle filled with handsome young men in blazers and servants in bowler hats.

Caption: ‘Edge Hill University College, 1999’.

ROBIN (off screen): Jimmy!

ROBIN runs up to JARL’RMAI. He wears a striped blazer and is carrying three tennis rackets and a barrel of champagne.

JIMMY: I hate all this. It should be destroyed.

ROBIN: I hate it too, utterly. But I think we’re being watched.

He glances up to a first-floor window where DR FALLAIZE is standing, unsmiling.

SCENE TWO

DR FALLAIZE’s study, interior. He is still at the window. LYNSKEY is wallowing on the sofa, scratching his bum and flinging handfuls of Marmite at the William Morris wallpaper.

DR FALLAIZE: Do you think they’ll do?

LYNSKEY: May I just say something totally disgusting and irrelevant to the plot?

He pulls out a blunderbuss and fires it at a priceless Ancient Greek sculpture of a delicate naked youth, which disintegrates.

LYNSKEY: Never mind, I forget it now.

He belches.

DR FALLAIZE: I shall never understand what Lenin sees in you.

SCENE THREE

The college lake. Dozens of punts, each containing a haughty young woman lolling on the cushions while an Aryan-looking young man in a blazer skilfully wields a punt pole – apart from the one nearest the camera, which contains ROBIN lolling on the cushions gnawing an enormous cucumber sandwich (at least two feet square) while JARL’RMAI struggles to control a punt pole that is twenty feet long and looks like a caber.

ROBIN (talking with his mouth full): We have to make a choice between Fascism and Corrin-ism. Anything else is appeasement.

JARL’RMAI: I think they want to recruit us –

ROBIN (inadvertently spitting bits of cucumber) : – to the Drunks! The most exclusive society at Ormskirk! They say there are only two members –

JARL’RMAI: – because nobody wants to join.

A fully grown tree crashes on to their punt and sinks it. Standing on the bank is A STEREOTYPE YOUNG UPPER-CLASS SHIT. He is red in the face, has an axe in his hands and has obviously just cut down the tree.

STEREOTYPE Y U-C S: Haw haw haw! That’ll teach you to belong to whatever minority you happen to belong to, won’t it? Haw haw HAW!

Close-up on ROBIN’s and JARL’RMAI’s heads poking out of the water, looking embittered.

SCENE FOUR

DR FALLAIZE’s study. He is at his desk. ROBIN and JARL’RMAI stand in front of him looking abashed. Behind him LYNSKEY is trimming his toenails with a pair of garden shears.

DR FALLAIZE: The college takes a dim view of students who allow trees to be cut down on top of them. But on this occasion I think we can come to some – arrangement…

LYNSKEY, smirking, pushes a custard pie into ROBIN’s face, and another into JARL’RMAI’s.

JARL’RMAI (through a mouthful of custard): Are we Drunks now?

DR FALLAIZE (smiling indulgently): Not quite.

SCENE FIVE

The college ball. Hundreds of unpleasant-looking young men in blazers are strolling about on a sumptuous lawn, many of them drinking champagne from a sort of aqualung on their backs. CELESTE whizzes around, frequently ducking behind bushes to put on a different dress, trying to create the impression that there’s more than one woman in Ormskirk. ROBIN and JARL’RMAI are not drinking. They look nervous. LYNSKEY is swigging from a bottle of liquidised temazapam and ingesting absinthe via an intravenous drip. He looks highly amused. DR FALLAIZE climbs into a sort of stone pulpit attached to the college tower.

DR FALLAIZE: Gentlemen, these are solemn times. We must all choose. Fascism – or Corrin-ism? Swastika – or Shirokuma? The destinies of millions may rest upon our choice.

Close-up on ROBIN and JARL’RMAI looking earnest and brave.

DR FALLAIZE: But we must also remember that this is a BBC costume drama in the early twenty-first century, and that brings with it certain responsibilities which we may not shirk. So – take your places for the Historically Implausible Gratuitous Nudity!

Everyone starts groaning. Then – in a resigned, rueful way – all five hundred young men start wearily removing their clothes – until the screen turns black out of sheer self-defence…

Next week: see Stalin as you’ve never seen him before…