If media folklore is to be believed (and it so often is), there is no group of arbitrarily assembled people more vain, self-serving and irrelevant than a literary prize-judging panel.
Places on such panels, the naysayers insist, are allocated on the principle of Buggins’ turn: one literary editor, one publisher, one television celebrity with a degree, and one random bird loosely linked to the industry who might get her tits out at the gala dinner. This motley crew then sets about pretending to read 140 novels (and whingeing about the “workload” in interminable “diaries” in The Guardian Review), while in fact merely pushing whatever crap their husbands, wives or school chums have published recently.
Huddled in dark hotel rooms, shielded from public view, they deliberately discount anyone who has actually made a long-term literary contribution and devote their attentions to digging out unpunctuated 300,000-word interior monologues by Polynesian child-abuse victims and hermaphroditic zoo-keeping poetesses to “champion” with tragic and lachrymose futility in the face of “conservative opposition”.
Finally, on awards night, they reach a compromise which involves giving the prize to a book originally intended for children, which none of the judges liked, because it will “get people reading again”.
It’s happening again this year with the Man Booker Prize. In a scandalous turn of events, a young novelist who has met two of the judges once or twice before has been included on the long-list at the expense of Roddy Doyle, David Lodge and Hari Kunzru, the three richest men in Britain. Ooh, scandal. When the shortlist is announced later next week, the knives will be out again. Blunt as old bald men’s heads, but trying ever so hard to stab palpably.
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So if you’ve had enough of all that elitist posturing and shady dealing then what you want to do is tune in to End of Story on BBC Three tomorrow night when the most open and transparent literary judging panel in history begins sifting through the most democratically assembled and longest long-list ever known to literary Britain. I know, because I’m one of them. And a happier, more honest, attractive, sexy and downright watchable panel of judges you couldn’t hope to see.
The chairman is Claudia Winkelman, the beautiful Cambridge-educated art historian who is not too proud to turn to camera at the end of the occasional holiday programme, raise a piña colada, and say, “Cheers!” Then there is Muriel “Scary Mary” Gray, the former Tube presenter turned best-selling horror author and media baroness; and Carole Blake, the super-agent who put chick-lit on the map and her cut of the royalties from most of it into the hands of London’s finest jewellers (just keep your eyes peeled for her costume changes).
For the ladies, there is Kwame Kwei-Armah, that big, beautiful, brilliant hunk of black man, first famous as the heart-throb paramedic Finn on Casualty, then as a singer, and now as an award-winning playwright, supporter of young writers and a critic of deep perspicacity and wisdom. And, finally, me. I’m the one who might get my tits out at the dinner.
What we’re judging is the 17,000 entrants to a competition, launched in the spring, which invited BBC viewers to complete half-written short stories by Ed McBain, Sue Townsend, Fay Weldon, Ian Rankin, Alexei Sayle, Shaun Hutson, Joanne Harris and Marian Keyes. “Finish the story in 1,200 words better than anyone else,” viewers were told, “and you will get to meet your favourite author, feature on a television show in which your half-story is dramatised, see your work published and eventually be in a position to blank J. K. Rowling at the Ivy because she isn’t rich enough to merit so much as an eyebrow raise from you.”
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And what a laugh choosing the winners was. I don’t know what all the grumbling is about with workloads. But, then, we did have a huge team of professional readers to whittle down the 17,000 to 48 — six for each author. I ended up reading about 50,000 words — which is a little less, I think, than the number of words in The Old Man and The Sea. And we only had to whittle the six down to three, leaving the final decision to the author of each original story half. And we did get to hang out in inns and castles all over Scotland, not to mention purpose-built spa-motels in the Home Counties. No, really, not to mention those.
As every word of the debate was filmed there was no room for gerrymandering or backroom pacts. With Claudia reminding us of the plot of each story as we went and not giving us all that long to put our case, we had no option but to tell it like we found it — always half aware that we might yet be selected to confront the six finalists in that particular category, and reveal to them on camera who had won and who had lost.
Debate was fierce, disagreement intense. Kwame, for his part, rose above it. Always waiting for silence before speaking, he gave precise, heartfelt and soulful analyses of each story and then, as the rest of us squawked and squabbled over what was left of the carcass, retreated into a sort of aloof meta-critical trance. Carole kept pulling the “Listen to me, I’m an agent, I can smell the money in any story” line and Muriel usually went for the “I was just going to say that, only better” tactic. Me, I just tried to look cute on camera in case any girls were watching.
There were big faultlines in the topography of our literary taste, though. The other judges thought the Ed McBain entries were brilliant, for example, whereas I thought reductive noir pastiche was too easy to get excited about. They said I was a smug public-schoolboy snob and we moved on. Carole and Claudia got all excited about a resolution to one story that turned on a pair of expensive shoes. I said I was fed up with women writing about shoes; they overruled me and pushed it through.
When it got to the Marian Keyes entrants I tried to explain that chick-lit is a pile of poisonous old bilge and that all the entries should be burnt. Carole argued (again) that I was a small-minded public schoolboy snob. And (again) the others concurred. When it came to Shaun Hutson, I explained that horror was a ghoulish sub-genre for middle-aged virgins and thwarted Trekkies and we should just pick three at random. Muriel, a writer of fine horror novels herself, said that I was a small-minded public schoolboy snob, but that I was right in the case of Hutson.
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In that instance, though, my words came back to haunt me in a way most literary panel judges never have to worry about, when I was forced to confront the six heavily tattooed and lugubrious horror entrants on camera — just after they had listened to my taped denigration of their art — and tell them who had lost. I swear, I feared for my life. At least Chris Smith, this year’s Booker chairman, didn’t have to sit down in front of Kunzru, Lodge and Doyle and, with the mock heroic revelatory style of Ant ‘n’ Dec expelling celebrities from the jungle, tell each of them, in turn, to sod off home.
End of Story, BBC Three, tomorrow, 7pm
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