The Bowmans of Sogmarsh

Sogmarsh Wireless Presents — being thirty minutes of an actor's triumph, tragedy, and drowning.

A studio. A table, a microphone, a bucket of water and a stick for the fen sound-effects. Rain, naturally, both real and simulated.

ANNOUNCER. Sogmarsh Wireless presents The Bowmans of Sogmarsh; in which Mr Horace P. Dudgeon, President for Life of No. 4½ Sump Lane, joins the wireless's own daily serial, and cannot be got rid of, even by drowning.

Interior. The kitchen, that morning. HORACE brandishes a letter.

HORACE. Mercy! Sogmarsh Wireless requires a new voice for The Reed-Cutters — the daily serial of fen life, beloved in nine parishes! They have engaged me. I am to play — (reading, thrilled) — "Second Drover." (beat) A small part. For now.

MERCY. (flat) You've never droved in your life.

HORACE. I shall bring to Second Drover a depth the role has never known. Mercy — the whole realm listens to The Reed-Cutters of an evening. By Friday I shall be its heart.

Interior. The studio. DOLLY QUICK, who controls the joke and the script, and a harried PRODUCER. HORACE at the microphone, over-acting.

PRODUCER. (wearily) Mr Dudgeon. The line is "Aye, wet again." That's all. "Aye, wet again," and you drive the cattle off.

HORACE. (sonorous) "Aye... (enormous pause) ...wet... (longer pause, trembling) ...again." (beat) — and then, I thought, Second Drover might deliver a short soliloquy on the nature of wetness, the transience of —

PRODUCER. It's a cattle scene, Mr Dudgeon. There are no soliloquies in the droving.

HORACE. (magnanimous) There are now.

DOLLY. (sweetly, to the Producer, aside) He's given Second Drover a tragic backstory and a catchphrase. Yesterday he made the weather report last four minutes. Mrs Pell wrote in. She thought someone had died.

PRODUCER. (through teeth) Right. Write him out. Today. The bog can have him.

SFX: the bucket-and-stick fen sound-effects, ominous. A dramatic organ sting.

ANNOUNCER-WITHIN. And so, as the mist came down over the Slough, Second Drover took one step too many onto the treacherous green...

HORACE. (as Second Drover, milking it outrageously) "Aye... the ground... it gives! Farewell, cruel fen! Tell my — (no backstory exists) — tell my cattle I loved them! I regret NOTHING! Except the — (glug) — except the —" (elaborate, protracted drowning) "...bloop."

PRODUCER. (relieved) — and he's gone. Thank heaven. Struck the character. Never to return.

DOLLY. (reading a note, eyebrows up) ...Ah.

PRODUCER. What.

DOLLY. The post. (reading) Nine parishes have written in. They're distraught. Second Drover's four-minute drowning was, and I quote from Widow Rush, "the most moving thing the wireless has ever done — I wept into the cat." (another) The Hand and Reed held a wake. (another) There's a petition. They want Second Drover back.

PRODUCER. (despairing) He drowned! On air! Elaborately! With a "bloop"!

DOLLY. (smiling) They don't care. They want him back. (beat) You'll have to bring him back as somebody else.

Interior. The studio, later. HORACE, resurrected, insufferable.

PRODUCER. (grimly) Mr Dudgeon. By popular and frankly baffling demand, you return to The Reed-Cutters. Not as Second Drover, who is regrettably drowned. As his long-lost brother. Arriving from —

HORACE. (grandly) — from abroad.

PRODUCER. There is no abroad, Mr Dudgeon. This is Sogmarsh.

HORACE. Then from somewhere the audience cannot check. His name is — (savouring) — Horatio Drover. A man of mystery. A man with a past. A man who will require, I think, a theme.

PRODUCER. (defeated, head in hands) ...He'll require a theme. Of course he will.

DOLLY. (cheerfully, to us) And that's how Horatio Drover became the heart of The Reed-Cutters for eleven years, and could never be written out again, because every time they drowned him he came back more popular as his own relative. There are, at last count, six Drover brothers. The audience believes in all of them. (beat) He's ruined the serial and made it, both at once. Very Sogmarsh, that.

Interior. The kitchen. MERCY. HORACE, luminous with triumph.

HORACE. Mercy. I died today, on the wireless, before nine parishes, and they loved me so well they would not let me stay dead. I am, it seems, un-write-out-able. Immortal, by public demand.

MERCY. (flat) You drowned going "bloop," Horace. I heard it. We all heard it.

HORACE. (with vast dignity) A "bloop," Mercy, that moved a widow to weep into her cat. Not every actor can say as much. (beat) Second Drover is dead. Long live Horatio Drover. And his four brothers. And whoever I have to be next.

MERCY. (fond, flat) You'll drown again Thursday, I expect.

HORACE. (serenely) Inevitably. And rise again Friday. It is, Mercy, the nearest thing to eternal life the wireless affords, and I intend to abuse it thoroughly.

ANNOUNCER. Sogmarsh Wireless has presented The Bowmans of Sogmarsh. The Reed-Cutters continues nightly. The Drover family now numbers six brothers, all played by the same man, all beloved, none quite drownable. In Sogmarsh, not even a character is permitted to properly finish.

The fen sound-effects, one last stick-in-bucket "bloop." Slow fade.

— end —