The Morning Show

"Your marriage contract may be swiss cheese, but your TV commitments are air tight." He placed the two documents down, side by side, on the glass table, Steve and Sandra reflected across from him. Steve chewing the end of a biro, Sandra staring at the stains in an empty coffee cup, neither one having heard the words they wished to hear.
    "Six months," Hilary added, making an attempt to emphasize it as a short, fleeting expanse of time.
    The show always gave them a Summer break, starting in July, two new presenters - unmarried, younger, insipid - would step in until September. The contract had been for five years, ending at the start of the next break. This Friday lunchtime meeting was, they had both hoped, supposed to set them free from this commitment.
    "Bloody Hell, we could annul our vows in an hour or two, this has dragged on all sodding month, and you're saying there's nothing?" Steve flicked the pen with his thumb and the plastic lid sailed like a champagne cork across the desk and over the shoulder of Marcus Davitt. Davitt took a long, slow sip of water, thinking to himself how much it was costing his client.

The lights dipped down, the countdown to titles went quiet, in the distance the theme music played, in her peripheral vision Sandra saw the second hand nimbly pass over the hour, and as cameras tracked towards them the lights came back up, pulling the corners of their mouths with them.
    "Good morning," the two of them chimed into the round monocular machine that lunged forth.
    "On today's show..." Sandra beamed, she always took Monday, and so on, alternating Fridays.
    She curled her fingers back and forth, it was the first link, VT jumping hastily over them to deliver a - rare - pre-recorded menu of the day's programme. She pursed and pouted her lips, swilling salivia across her teeth and gums, nothing but bad taste.
    "Did it show?" he asked, craning his neck towards a floor-runner, the behind of their ears as wet as the post-Uni flu twinkling around their nostrils.
    "Did - did what show?"
    "My contempt."

The show continued without incident, as they discussed the best holiday destinations for a warm winter break, the plots of last night's soaps, a sombre yet uplifting story about a woman's double masectomy, Sandra and Steve began to reflect the calendar in their head that slowly peeled back time, edging them on tip toes closer and closer to the release from their contractual obligations.
    Steve had an in with a radio station, he wondered whether he'd get the driving to or driving from work slot, weighed up the pros and cons of each.
    Sandra knew that Bonnie Hodder was going to be giving up her chair on Chit Chat in May, she hoped that being stuck on The Morning Show until July wouldn't put the producers off of considering her to fill the void.
    So lost in their respective thoughts were they that they'd completely forgotten to sign off from Ethel's conclusion that had neatly, sweetly summarised her perspective coming out of surgery and how women shouldn't be afraid to see their doctor with any concerns. Instead, Ethel just sat there, her eyes drifting gradually, reluctantly, to look into the lens, a relationship only ordinarily broached by the two hosts.
    "Wake up!" barked the producer, lips kissing the microphone and relayed, distorted, into their ear-pieces.
    "Fuc-th-th-thank you, Ethel, inspiring stuff," Steve's limbs patted down his own body, checking his was all there, slowly returning to the studio, to this version of reality, and adopting the thoughtful, yet still cheerful, voice he always used following these 'life affirming' segments.
    "Very," was all Sandra could offer in response, before facing the camera, "Stay tuned, after the break we'll be making a five minute cheesecake and Cat's Eyes will be playing their new single."
    Simultaneously they plucked ear-pieces out and Ethel caught a fleeting snatch of expletives being bellowed from the gallery.
    "Where were you?" Sandra turned on her ex-husband.
    "Me? Did you read the script? That was my link to commercial, you're supposed to have wrapped up that natter."
    "Ah yes, always reassigning blame," Sandra flattened her skirt as she stood and walked over to the kitchen set.
    Steve, realising she'd somehow managed to re-reassign blame back to him leapt, propelled by impotent rage, from his chair in pursuit, leaving Ethel to look awkwardly around in search of a runner that wasn't either entranced by this erupting tiff or hiding their head in embarrassment.
    A few calls had already come in querying the exact nature of Steve's earlier stutter, but there was only 15 minutes of the show left to get through, a speedy, activity filled cookery segment and a pop band miming along to their single, cutting away to a few noddies.
    Harry's eyes grew wide and then quickly fixed themselves on his chopping board as the pair bounded over. Sandra's lips pursed, whilst Steve gracelessly flung himself from one end of the studio to another, managing to take the lead and blockade himself ahead of her.
    "Don't you think," his teeth were clenched, his finger wagging, "not for one second, that you can make me look bad by deliberately fluffing your own lines and pretending it was me. You may have got the house, but you'll see which one of us gets the career."
    "You think that's what this is?"
    "Has it ever been anything else?"
    "Grow up you fucking child."
    Lights up, cameras moving in, the tableau of an argument still lingering, a palm clapped to forehead can be heard without amplifcation from the gallery booth.
    "Welcome back," Harry, nervously, takes the helm, "now we join Harry Compton in the kitchen for some exciting, fast-paced dessert ideas. Harry, how are you?"
    "This isn't over," Steve snarls, turning towards the glistening, terrified chef standing a little too close behind him. "Christ!"
    "Harry," Sandra snatches the reins, "how are you?"
    "Fine," it's gulped not spoken, "Yourselves?"
    "You're going to make us a five minute cheesecake today, yes?" Steve grins, pronouncing forced enthusiasm from some long-since-scraped-dry reserve.
    "Yes," Harry leans across for a pre-prepared bowl of mascarpone, Steve, startled, steps back and his sudden elbow connects.
    "Ow! My boob!" screams Sandra, slapping Steve firmly across the back of the head in response, like a reprimanded Dickensian urchin.
    "Cunt!" howls Steve.

There were costs involved, fees and fines to various departments responsible for keeping pre-watershed television clean and safe, but they weren't paid too begrudgingly.
    At first the producers had wallowed in their own hypothesised demises, until their social media intern showed them the morning's trending topics, the gifs posted to tumblr, the 'Ow! My boob!' memes that had already been re-applied to numerous pop culture stills, the shakily filmed on a mobile phone from Tivo playback clips uploaded to Youtube of awkward pauses, curled lips and the sweary deneoument in all its glory, with a muffled commentary of giggles and a wealth of thumbs up button hits.

Fingers drummed on her dressing table, she flinched at every footstep passing her door, waiting for the summons up to the conference room for the inevitable reprimand.
    But it never came, and she tentatively picked up her bag, play-acted walking to the door a few times before committing and, when she found that she wasn't stopped, continued walking to the exit, got in her car and drove home for the afternoon.

He watched the cold latte he had been handed swirl down the plughole, his half-asleep eyes drifited over to the pink pages on his dressing table, late additions to the show. It was getting near nine, he had to go to make-up.
    As they brightened his face and calmed down the dark circles he'd fostered in the hotel bar last night he heard Sandra stomping through the corridors, she was berating someone somewhere via her mobile phone, so he grabbed the nearest possible distraction - a copy of Hiya! magazine - and buried his face in it, feigning interest.

    "And at half ten," he found himself reading from the teleprompter, "we'll be talking to Adrian and Charley Simmons, who went to a marriage rehabilitation centre, about their experiences..." His features scrunched up into a question and his gaze stared beyond the camera.
    "You seem puzzled," she relished the acknowledgment. "Did you not read your notes this morning?"
    "No, I, just... just something in my, er, nose..." he hastily lied and scratched at the aforementioned proboscis to illustrate.
    She shared her eye-roll with the viewers at home. "Now, here's Carol with today's weather. Carol..."
    "Maggie!" Steve yelled, not remembering that his cry could be heard on the weather set in the corner of the studio.
    "Keep it down," came Maggie's voice in his ear.
    "What's this marriage rehab bollocks?" he whispered, "We're not having on-air counselling."
    "It's not for you two, it's human interest, their experiences, the usual fluff."
    "Good, because don't try and turn this into something it isn't."
    "Wouldn't dream of it, dear."

Sandra nodded sympathetically along with Charley as she told her story, with a bittersweet smile, about how her and her husband had begun drifting apart shortly after their second child.
    "I mean, I was never a glamour model," she smiled and Adrian gave her a theatrical leg squeeze, "but after our second my figure wasn't what it was, an' I think that Adrian just lost interest in, y'know, bedroom things."
    "Right, right," Steve nodded, hunched forward, his index fingers propping up his chin.
    "I think," Adrian added, "all couples go through things like that. But it caused a rift between us, the rehab centre, well, that put things in perspective."
    "How do you mean?"
    "Hmm?"
    "What 'perspective' did you get?"
    "About?"
    "About your marriage, I mean, what were the magic words? People change, they fall out of love, you can't expect to stay besotted with someone as they reveal themselves to be a crooked, distortion of that person you believed they once were."
    Sandra shuffled.
    "But if you loved someone, then there must be something there, something that never goes away."
    "Nah," Steve arched back, "that's boll-a load of rubbish."
    "I think we're getting away from the point," Sandra interjected.
    "Are we?" Steve wheeled his attention back to the wide eyes of Adrian and Charley, "Tell me guys, what do you think the most important thing in a relationship is?"
    With almost rehearsed precision they looked at one another and responded in sync; "Trust."
    Snapping his fingers and then pointing towards his ex Steve grinned, "She said stability."
    "That's important," Sandra protested.
    Leaning further forwards, censoring her from the conversation, "Roughly translated: money."
    With a huff of indignation Sandra aimed to kick Steve in the shin, but missed and instead inched his chair back, causing his already flimsy perch to shift away and Steve toppled face first into the small, round glass coffee table in front of himself, remarkably, instantaneously, re-decorating it with a sudden red wash of blood from his nose.

Fortunately it had been a slow news day, exotic conflicts relegated to inside page column inches, so the bloody nose incident was all over the front of the red tops; Morning Gory was the pick of the headlines.
    Steve, not wishing to concede any sort of hypothetical 'victory' was sat on the sofa, running through the script, a large, square bandage taped across his face, a dull reddish brown stain from yesterday's gush. His sip of coffee was soundtracked by a wince as the plastic lid, ever so gingerly, tapped the end of his nose.
    "He's got that martyr's air," Sandra griped quietly to a runner who stood awkwardly holding a clip mic, uncertain as to whether she was supposed to put it up Sandra's top or not. "If he makes one light-hearted reference about it, one pun, I'll..." Sandra calmed herself down, realising the futility of her own threat.

Moving onto a makeshift cocktail bar set the two of them shook the hand of the highly groomed mixologist who would be showing them a few recipes and tricks.
    "Cocktails this early," Steve smiled, "I'll hand you over to Sandra on that one."
    She heard a cameraman snort a laugh.
    "Well," Jim blinked the comment away and grabbed his shaker, "let me show you some simple and colourful cocktail recipes, that'll be sure to go down a storm at parties."
    Jim shuffled down the bar towards the prepared fruits, Steve flipped up the counter-flap and scurried after him, staying with the camera. Sandra, naively expecting courtesy, found herself under a descending counter-flap which, though it managed to dodge most of her, took a strong liking to the little finger of her left hand, clamping it tenaciously in its hinged section causing, the now off-camera Sandra, to let forth with an unexpected cry of:
    "The absolute fuckery!"

They, once again, cut to an impromptu episode of Shed Loads Of Cash, despite Steve's protestations that he could finish the show alone whilst Sandra was hurried to hospital, her finger carried by an intern now struggling to contain their breakfast.
    And so it continued, some days were quiet, the rage bubbled under the surface, yet tensions were all too perceptible whether the faces showed scars or not. A cross word here, a snide remark there, a jibe about how they looked, what they wore, a turn of phrase.
    Papers continued to reproduce pixelated, blurred stills of the couple's on-screen friction, and the internet gathered together, in an ever growing huddle, for each new episode, hands poised over keys, ready to live-tweet their hysterical shock, outrage and hilarity. You could do an online test to find out if you were a Steve or a Sandra, it became a popular costume choice for couples attending fancy dress parties, they could jokingly dismantle their own relationship through the playful pretence that they hated one another, it was a coping tool that put their foibles in perspective in many ways.
    And it brought in so much revenue, fearing the end the channel nudged up the price of advertising slots, first in tentative increments, but soon doubling, tripling airtime, for which companies were all too eager to stump up the cash to capitalise on that daytime, disposable-income demographic.
    It became, for the hosts, par for the course, a succession of fluff until the first one would crack. It was inevitable one of them would, and they barely flinched now at the elbowed rib, the tripped foot, the palm to the skull, the jab in the arm, the kicked shin, the slapped face.

Under ethereal Christmas tree lights sat presents that Steve and Sandra handed out to the guests of that Friday's episode, and come the end of the gift giving the only empty hands were their own. As a pop band joined them all to sing a carol, fingers curled, lacking a brightly wrapped package, they became balled fists and, with nothing holding them back, the two quietly, sadly, pummelled one another in the back of shot.
    And the camera pushed in.
    And the ratings kept climbing.