Star Struck Read Online Free PDF Page B

amazingly sensible question given his condition.
    Dennis shrugged. “Some of them can’t be bothered. They know we’ll be out of there before their new tenant needs the premises, so they’ve got nothing to lose. Some of them have a go. I keep somebody on the premises all the time, just in case they try to get clever and repo the place in the night. You can get a homeless kid to play night watchman for a tenner a time. Give them a mobile phone and a butty and lock them in. Then if the landlord tries anything, I get the call and I get down there sharpish. He lays a finger on me or my lad, he’s the criminal.” Dennis smiled with all the warmth of a shark. “I’m told you get a very reasonable response when you explain the precise legal position.”
    “I can imagine,” I said drily. “Do the explanations come complete with baseball bat?”
    “Can people help it if they get the summons when they’re on their way home from sports training?” He raised his eyebrows, trying for innocent and failing dismally.
    “Profitable, is it?” I asked.
    “It’s got to be a very nice little earner, what with Christmas coming up.”
    “You know, Dennis, if you put half the effort into a straight business that you put into being bent, you’d be a multimillionaire by now,” I sighed.
    He shook his head, rueful. “Maybe so, but where would the fun be in that?”
    He had a point. And who was I to talk? I’d turned my back on the straight version of my life a long time ago. If Dennis broke the law for profit, so did I. I’d committed burglary, fraud, assault, theft, deception and breaches of the Wireless and Telegraph Act too numerous to mention, and that was just in the past six months. I
    These days, I wasn’t quite so sure.
     
     
     

Chapter   4
     
     
MOON SQUARES MARS

An accident-prone aspect, suggesting she can harm herself through lack of forethought. She is far too eager to make her presence felt and doesn’t always practice self-control. Her feelings of insecurity can manifest themselves in an unfeminine belligerence. She has authoritarian tendencies.

From
Written in the Stars
, by Dorothea Dawson
     
     
     
    Anyone can be a soap star. All you need is a scriptwriter who knows you well enough to write your character into their series, and you’re laughing all the way to the BAFTA. I’d always thought you had to be an actor. But two hours on the set of
Northerners
made me realize that soap is different. About tenper cent of the cast could play Shakespeare or Stoppard. The rest just roll up to the studios every week and play themselves. The lovable rogues are just as roguish, the dizzy blondes are just as empty-headed, the salts of the earth make you thirst just as much for a long cold alcoholic drink and the ones the nation loves to hate are every bit as repulsive in the flesh. Actually, they’re more repulsive, since anyone hanging round the green room is exposed to rather more of their flesh than a reasonable person could desire. There was more chance of me being struck by lightning than being star struck by that lot of has-beens and wannabes.
    They didn’t even have to learn their words. TV takes are so short that a gnat with Alzheimer’s could retain the average speech with no trouble at all. Especially by the sixth or seventh take most of the
Northerners
cast seemed to need to capture the simplest sentiment on screen.
    The main problem I had was how to do my job. Gloria had told everyone I was her bodyguard. Not because I couldn’t come
    Besides, members of the public weren’t allowed on the closed set of
Northerners
. The storylines were supposed to be top secret. NPTV, the company who made the soap, were so paranoid they made New Labour look relaxed. Everyone who worked on the program had to sign an agreement that disclosure of any information relating to the cast characters or storylines was gross misconduct, a sacking offense and a strict liability tort. Even I had had to sign up to the tort