The Giant Middle Finger

Robin looked around the set, it was still a little weird looking at T.V. from the otherside of the camera. He'd spent many a day as a viewer shouting at the telly and more accurately at the people on the screen in just this kind of open studio based set.
Robin liked the news and he secretly liked the early morning bottom feeder talk shows. Back when he was a student he'd nursed many a hangover with a bowl of cornflakes, a giant mug of tea and a rant at the folk bearing their dirty souls in public.
There had been an awful lot of Tuesdays when he'd fore-go his early morning Tuesday lecture to sit in his big fluffy dressing gown and watch as an estate ridden family shouted abuse at one another.
"Am I having sex with my boyfriends Dad?"
"Are you one of the father's of one of my five children?"
"Is my mum an alcoholic?"
"Why does my fourteen year old daughter stay out all night drinking and fucking prodigiously?" He loved it.
He managed to convince himself for nearly three years until it became clear he might not actually graduate with anything like a suitable enough grade to satisfy his parents having sponsored his carefree student lifestyle and if, like he wanted them too, they were going to fund his round the world trip as a gap year, job dodging galavant from exotic country to exotic country he'd was going to have to buckle down and damn well study.
But until then he'd genuinely convinced himself and his fellow slacker student roommates that he'd couldn't function during a day without getting at least two hours of fodder T.V. gawping.
Robin also liked vehemently disagreeing with so called experts and commentators on matters of culture and current affairs. The box in the corner of his living room was one of his best friends and certainly the one he had the most vocal relationship with. But now that Robin was required to be on the otherside of the T.V. screen it was a different matter.
Robin had conveniently forgotten this ranting behaviour of his youth as he sat being attended to by a girl with a black and decker workstation full of industry standard make up.
As a minor celebrity he was considering whether or not to sleep with the make up girl, as a recent minor celebrity he was still getting into the swing of all the does and don'ts of the trappings of minor stardom and wasn't sure if his current status as probably D maybe C list celebrity was worthy of a random expectation of casual sex with what he assumed would be a star struck young conquest.
He may only be a D maybe C list celebrity but his stock was rising and he felt confident that if he carefully managed his stardom he could make B list by the end of the year and start getting invited to the right sort of cool parties.
Once you were in on the celeb party circuit you were able to get yourself photographed falling out of nightclubs or taxis or restaurants or The Groucho Club with similar or higher ranking celebrites.
At that point it was all about social calendar management and less about being talented. There were rules. You rise up, meet the latest cool rock singer/up and coming actor/model/pulp fiction writer and you were in.
You stopped hanging around common folk and left the X factor rejects and soap actors behind and started hanging around expensive restaurants and gallery openings. Robin was eager for all of this to happen as soon as possible and in order to fast track this celebrity hob nobbing and ticket to being regularly featured in Heat magazine he was going to be on the telly. He was determined to make an impression. Not necessarily a good one, just a noisy one.
He had considered being drunk but that was apparently old hat and embarrassing at the moment so maybe shagging this make up girl might help but he couldn't do it on screen and it was only a couple of minutes to air so if he was going to he'd have to get a move on. Robin calculated that it wasn't logistically feasible to start shagging make up girls this close to air and still be suitably made up for the show but did make a mental note to arrive at studios earlier if he planned on shagging anything in the future. It was a valuable lesson he'd learnt he felt.
Robin, or Vanquish, as he was more popularly known was on set to talk about his latest art project. Robin had chosne to be an artist because when he'd tried to start a rock band he'd come up against a massive problem. He couldn't sing or play instruments or write songs. He still had a crack and may go back to it once he was famous enough but it had been harder work than he'd expected. It wasn't the coke fuelled, huge amount of sex rampage he'd imagined it was going to be. Robin guessed you needed to be famous before that all started.
Robin wasn't any better at art as he was at being a rock star but he'd stumbled upon the fact you didn't really have to be. Robin couldn't draw anything that resembled what it was suppossed to be, especially animals for some reason and when his school had organised an educational trip to a pottery his attempts at making a mug out of clay had been such a spectacularly embarrassing failure that it had won the dubious award of worst clay thing made. It looked like a gargoyle that had been radioactively melted. Even the kid with learning difficulties had had a decent stab at clay modelling and created a fairly decent ash tray.
But Robin did know you didn't need to be. He'd been reading a supplement from a Sunday newspaper on one of his infrequent and boring visits to his parents to ask for some money and pretend to like his family and it had a feature about up and coming artists. It became clear to Robin that the only difference between a lot of the art and a giant pile of rubbish was the bullshit that the artist placed on their reasoning for creating the art.
The more pompous and vain the better it seemed and if Robin had anything in spades it was pompous vanity gained from a lifetime of subsitance funded middle class loafing.
He'd started off banging out a piece that was essentially three packs of Christmas trees from one of those poundland type stores into a hideously anti Christmas statement. It looked shit but he'd called it, rather controversially "Fuck Christmas" and released it in June to add to the irony. Despite it being a hamfisted and clumsily built looking thing had put him on the map as a thrusting young, controversial artist.
Robin had had a young journalistette and a photgrapher from a small and insignificant art journal turn up at his parent funded studio and ask him about his art. He'd tried to shag the journalistette, but obviously wasn't quite famous enough, yet.
Robin knew that if he'd stuck to music and he'd followed this abstract, bullshit route the best he could hope for was freeform jazz and he'd rather empty bins than be a freeform jazzist. They were the wrong sort of celebrity. Not X factor bad but at the same time not famous enough to get invited to anything good or worthwhile, plus the sort of people that like freeform jazz are weird and none of them are sexually attractive.
He was in the studio today to talk about his latest project. It involved creating a dozen human hands out of ice. They were all six feet tall as some sort of oblique metaphor and all of them had the middle finger raised in a daring swipe at social moraes. It was entirely designed to shock. It was designed quite literally to stick a giant middle finger up at society and to get society to take notice of it and start taking about "Vanquish" the vibrant and extremely relevant new artist. The fact that they would melt before anyone apart from the very fast would see them was besides the point. It was about getting the right sort of people to see them and talk about them before they melted.
The melting thing was also designed to increasing his money making cache, obviously if art melts you can't really sell it. Unless you can find someone gullible to buy a puddle of water and he had thought that he might at one point. But the fragile nature of making art out of ice meant that although he was an artist there wasn't that many pieces of "Studio Vanquish" to buy and this it was hoped would raise the exclusive nature of owning a rare piece of Vanquish of art.
It had worked enough to get him on the telly talking about it at least.
As Robin was revisiting his decision not to screw the make up girl the studio became a noticeably busier place. It was getting closer to air time. People started moving cameras about with an increased endeavour and picking up bits of equipment and making themselves look like they were doing something really important. The make up girl disappeared and took Robin's last chance of some casual sex with her and the lights in the studios all dimmed, leaving only the camera lights to illuminate the set.
The host walked on set, he had a brief chat with a guy attached to a head set, the guy with the head set spoke into his head set and there was a brief pause before a young guy of probbaly seventeen brought a bottle of still water onto stage and tried to hand it to the host.
"In a fucking glass. Christ! Jeff, where do you get them from?"
The boy scuttled away to find a glass and came back with a plastic wine glass presumably left over from a Christmas party or some such festivity.
"A fucking wine glass. Jesus. I can't have that on fucking set. People'l think I'm a fucking alky."
A voice came over a loud speaker. "60 seconds Roy."
"Shit."
The host made came and sat down next to Robin. Robin noticed that the hosts seat was a lot more comfy looking than his, plus it swivelled. Robin's seat was a fixed position chair, this displeased him.
Robin decided it was time for an introduction. "Hi Ray, it's good of you to have me on."
"Fuck off."
Robin wasn't expecting that. And even as a voice that he wasn't really listening to started to say "Eight, seven, six, five, four, three.......and air." he was still reeling from the "Fuck you" sideswipe when he heard.
"And tonight we'll be looking at Maggie O'Donald's latest novel and we've got a report from the set of the BBC's latest costume drama but first we've got a new arist in the studio, his name is "Vanquish" he's just opened a piece called Giant Middle Finger at the Talbot Gallery but you'll have to quick to see it, here to tell you why is Vanquish."
Robin said nothing. The Fuck you had really affected him. Damn.