Elimination Night - By Anonymous Page 0,3

an attempt to project confidence, before flicking through the sheaf of papers on my clipboard, one last time. Len’s notes were underlined in the right-hand margin:

11AM: HOUSE LIGHTS DOWN

On time, please!

11.05AM: VIDEO PACKAGE

Slow motion clips of previous Project Icon winners/contestants, set to Carl Orff’s “O Fortuna.”

Bill—this isn’t Carnegie fucking Hall.

Anything weepy and out of copyright will do.

11.07AM: INTRODUCTION

WAYNE SHORELINE (HOST)

Welcome, welcome everyone. This… [long pause] is season thirteen… [even longer pause] of PROJECT ICON! And I am your host, Wayne Shoreline, at your humble service. So, by now the whole world knows our incredible story: How the business genius Sir Harold Killoch discovered an obscure TV talent contest in Belgium—featuring a revolutionary system of telephone voting—and brought it here to the Rabbit network in America, where it shot to the top of the prime-time ratings and became a worldwide sensation. [Audience goes wild. Close-up of Sir Harold smiling front of house.]

Bill—talk to the smile-coach again.

Need Sir H. to look more Cuddly Grandpa,

less Dark Lord of Evil.

And who could forget our original, iconic lineup of judges? America’s favorite uncle, JD Coolz [applause]; the beautiful and dare I say sometimes a little unpredictable Pamela Crabtree Wayne—double-check with legal for approved crack-head euphemisms. and of course “Mr. Horrible” himself, our erect-nippled Scottish friend Nigel Crowther…

[Audience boos]

Bill—let this run a bit.… Erect-nippled—really?

Over the years our show has gone through lots of changes—most dramatically when Nigel sadly left the judging panel last year to pursue other opportunities at the Rabbit network. We wish him all the very best, of course, and we’re sure he’ll have many, many more successes. Wayne—NO FUCKING SARCASM. But one thing has remained a constant: Our NUMBER ONE ratings. So! [Tense music.] Back to the news that everyone has been waiting for. There has been talk. There have been rumors. We’ve all heard mention of many, many names. But now, finally, here in this room, we can reveal WHO will be sitting in the judges’ chairs over the coming months, helping us find.… [another pause] the next winner… [pause again, spoolup title theme] of PROJECT ICON!

Wayne—new delivery ideas?

All these pauses are getting

a bit old, no? Food for thought…

I wondered how many people would know that most of this intro was bullshit. In particular the bit about the “business genius Sir Harold Killoch” having anything to do with Icon’s success. I mean, yes, Sir Harold owned both the Rabbit network, and its parent company, The Big Corporation—so in that sense he was responsible for putting the show on the air. But as everyone who’d ever read ShowBiz knew, it was the mogul’s younger brother George who’d seen the original Belgian format—while on a beer-tasting vacation in Antwerp—and suggested that Rabbit license it from its creator, Sven Svendsen, a reclusive Swedish talent agent.

“Who the hell wants to listen to a bunch of piss-poor wannabes who can’t sing?” was Sir Harold’s response, according to his unofficial biography, Harold’s Killing. Nevertheless, he ordered Rabbit to buy the rights, and within a few weeks, a pilot had been commissioned. “Old Harry thinks it’s the dumbest TV pitch he’s ever heard,” as ShowBiz reported at the time. “But his baby brother George—like all Killoch family members—is a voting shareholder in Big Corp, and therefore needs to be indulged. We predict a swift cancellation.”

Rabbit aired the first episode at midnight on a Friday: “The hospice slot,” as I’ve since learned it is known (due to the fact that ninety percent of viewers at such an hour reside in assisted living communities). That in itself might have been enough to kill Project Icon, if not for the fact that Sir Harold asked Sven Svendsen—a.k.a. “Two Svens”—to help run the show.

Two Svens’ first move? Hiring his old friend Leonard Braithwaite as supervising producer.

I had no idea who Len was back then. No one in the US did. It was only later I found out he’d starred as a cruel-to-be-kind mentor in From Arse End to the West End, an acclaimed British TV documentary about the creation of a theater production using actors cast entirely from soup kitchens. That’s how Len persuaded Two Svens to hire exactly the same kind of villain for the Rabbit version of Project Icon. He couldn’t cast himself, though—the network wouldn’t let him—so he found a doppelgänger, Nigel Crowther, and spent months coaching him on “sneer technique” and “insult metaphors.”

Oh, America had no idea what was coming.

Pretty much everyone remembers the first time they saw Crowther on TV. Me? I was at my friend Maggie’s house,