'She Could Switch From Mother Figure To Dominatrix Before The Victim Realised They Were Bound And Gagged'

The third section of Good Guys Lost moves to the 2000s and the world of talent shows. Meet Missy, the nation's favourite auntie, a starmaker with a very dark side

Part two of Good Guys Lost here

Girl Power

“Just say the word, please. Just say it. Please. Just give me this one chance. I’ll be better, I promise. I’ll do anything. All I want is one chance. I’ll change. Everything will change. Please, please, please... Just say the word. I’m not asking for much… I’ll do anything… please. It means so much.”

And as her forbearers had mumbled in desperation to deities, the young girl implored a woman on judgment day to intercede for her. Her hands instinctively formed a prayer shape as she wept with the agony of growing hopelessness.

“She was good,” said the man on the left, in an angelic Welsh lilt. “I like her.”

“Thank you, thank you, please, please, please,” the girl said, momentarily shifting her focus from the centre of her attention. From the right came a growl.

“Why, what’s she got? She’s boring.”

“No, she can sing.”

“She can hit the right notes.” The men argued while the woman watched the pleading with an unbroken stare, not even stopping to blink.

“But so can a million people. Where’s the star quality? Where’s the charisma? Just say no and let’s move on.”

A nondescript pop star from a 1990s boy band looked on, semi-detached and not sure how to manage his role as a judge. He shrugged and said, “I like her.” That was two votes. She needed a third.

The girl gibbered, mumbling a simplified rosary of pleases and chances and change. Until the woman spoke.

“No, not much there…” and the girl wilted visibly. “But I can see something. I can see something… Yes, there’s something I recognise. When I’m finished with her millions will see it.”

Now the girl fell to her knees as the man on the right snorted.

“I’m going to say… I’m going to give you a chance,” the woman said. “You’re through, Baby Lamb.”

The girl leapt to her feet, bounced about and ran to the table. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. You’ve changed my life. You’ve changed my life.”

The woman smiled, the Welshman smiled, but they were not smiles of belief, merely indications that it was time to move on. There were more, many more, to be weighed and accounted for and time was short. The other man scowled.

“I’ll prove you wrong,” the girl said to him. “I’ll prove you wrong.” The gift granted, bravado began to rise. “I’ll be better next time.”

“You’d better be,” he said, before turning to the woman. “I don’t know what you saw but it wasn’t charisma. Isn’t that what we’re looking for? This is a joke.”

Outside the room, the girl whooped and yelled and screamed. Hundreds looked on with envy and hate, dreaming that they would come hopping from those doors howling with joy before the day was out.

They sat there, a congregation craving the same thing, all mumbling the same words in their minds and under their breath: “Please let it be me. I’ll do anything. I promise. I’ll change. I’ll be better. Just let me be the one. Please.”

So the vast mantra, something like prayer, rose from the convention centre where they queued and stood and waited. It was vaguely like prayer, but prayer needs common cause and humility. This was a million shards of prayer, sharpened and made dangerous by ambition, spinning uncontrollably and invisibly with slashing brutality, damaging all those who came into contact with it.

And the cameras rolled on. Redemption is entertainment and entertainment is redemption. The girl skipped on, loudly lauding herself as she set off on the journey of discovery. “I’m in heaven,” she said. “Heaven.”

* * *

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“Why do they call you Missy?” the interviewer asked. She smirked. “Because I’m in charge. Because I’ve always been a bossy little miss. You don’t do what I say, then I’ll punish you.”

Suggestive, flirty, with an undercurrent of steel that gave delicious substance to the threat, Missy accepted without question the stardom that had come to her. She was warm and funny, that much was clear, and seemed to have a core of humanity that the other judges on the show did not possess. She was a natural. She could switch from mother figure to dominatrix before the victim had realised that they were bound and gagged. She carried a riding crop as a prop to enhance the effect. The public loved her.

“What makes you such a good judge on the show?” Missy mused a moment, as if reflecting on the question but she didn’t need to think. “I can see something,” she answered, and the image of the girl flashed in her mind again, unexpectedly. “I can see what the people are going to love before they can.”

And she could. She had an unerring instinct about what touched and moved the British public. The superficialities of the toneless, nervous and gauche wanabees did not register with Missy; she could see beyond that, to the solid ore of marketability. It was not always talent she saw, but that something, that unquantifiable element that would get people off their backsides and drive them to the shops.

This flair enraged her enemies because they could not even identify it, never mind emulate it. But this skill is not what drew people – men especially – to Missy.

In an industry where beautiful women are commonplace, she was often overlooked in the first scan of a room. Her entry to a party went undetected – at least until the television show brought instant recognition.

It was certainly not her intellect that got her noticed, either. She was sharp rather than clever and people who can grasp reality immediately have no need to philosophise.

No, Missy was able to make people gasp and laugh in a single instant. She had the knack of turning danger into comedy and controlling the situation while others were still trying to understand what was developing. Men, powerful, handsome men, found this seductive, though Missy understood their thought processes, too, and ultimately kept her aloofness even during and after the sexual act. They came back for more but Missy was the boss. She was in control. She had learnt early on that men in the entertainment business could not be relied upon and she refused to be compromised.

But few who had been exposed to Missy would ever forget her. Now the nation was exposed to her every Saturday night.

*

By the 1950s, Irish emigrants were no longer heading for Liverpool. They were driven by economic opportunities rather than desperation. The south of England was their preferred destination.

Missy’s parents were among this new influx. They were simple, unsophisticated people whose desire for a modest life should have kept them a long way from London but their urge to give their child a good start forced them away from the depressed west coast of the 26 counties. They arrived in the capital and headed along the Thames, where the ragged east end had worn away and begun bleeding into Essex. Missy was born in… can anyone be sure of the year? It was definitely in the 60s. No, that is wrong, too. Missy was created much later. Someone quite different from the television personality arrived kicking and squealing somewhere near Barking while Kennedy was still alive.

One of her enemies once said that Missy had “risen without trace”. It was not quite true but when the evil spotlight of publicity fell upon her in early middle age, it found little sensation to illuminate. Her previous success was all behind the scenes and she appeared to come from nowhere to her vast body of fans. She seemed like living proof that history is over.

So what did the nation know about her?

The News of the World was first to recognise her potential for putting on sales and gave her a double-page spread, headlined: A man’s world? Not while I’m here says Charisma’s dominatrix.

The woman with the power to create stars last night laughed off suggestions that she is a puppet of the show’s producers. “They brought me in because they know I can see talent,” said Missy, the Charisma judge who has become the nation’s favourite flighty aunt. “Those boys on the panel haven’t got my eye for potential. They need me to point them in the right direction. Men do.”

Viewers of the No 1 television show have voted Missy the star of the series and love her mix of shrewdness and sympathy. But while crowds flock towards her in public, she lives a solitary private life at her Essex mansion. Is she, like many fortysomething single women, looking for love?

“You must be joking,” she laughed, producing the cackle that has become her catchphrase. “I work in showbusiness. I learnt early on not to trust men in this profession. They’re all vain and self-centred. Have fun but do it on your own terms. Men want me, I don’t want them. At least not full-time.”

T2 in The Times was even less revealing.

You can see what’s attractive about Missy. She is not beautiful but her vivacity enchants even the most curmudgeonry of interviewers. She makes wide-eyed eye contact and flatters constantly. “That is a superb question, Baby Lamb,” she says and then thinks about it before answering. It is not a good question but you are won over.

Yet, by then, she is already secure. She has seen – quickly – that this will not be a hatchet job. And, knowing that, she turns the interlocutor into a confidante. It is heady for an interviewer and the seduction is impossible to avoid.

The Mirror loved her. Its approval of working-class achievement jumped out of the page as the paper’s prized female columnist was let loose with characteristic ballsy boorishness.

They laugh at Essex girls but who would snigger at Missy, the queen of British entertainment? The Eastender has all the qualities that made the people from that corner of London famous. She shoots down the theory that Charisma, the talent show that made her a household name, is lowering standards in the entertainment world.

“It’s about giving people a chance,” she said. “People whose lives are difficult and who have the talent but have never had the opportunity. We give them the platform to show how good they are. Not everyone can go to stage school or afford to work their way up the ladder. We give those with no chance a chance.”

Yet none of the millions of column inches added a shred of insight to the image on the television screen.

Popbitch, the scurrilous email, was able to hint at a darker aspect of her personality. Its readership was hip, showbizzy and addicted to gossip. There was plenty of chatter about Missy around the Groucho, Soho House and The Ivy. Those in the know knew who this snippet was about.

Which TV judge picked up some male talent at a boutique hotel in the West End and handed down a stern sentence? On finding the beau was married and his wife out of town, the nation’s darling tied the man to the bed and, instead of performing the acts she’d promised, invited her friends up to the suite to torture the unlucky seducer. After ordering nearly a grand’s worth of champagne on room service, the coven of harpies cut up their victim’s credit cards and left a message on his wife’s answering machine telling her that hubby was a cheat and to check his swollen and bruised balls if she believed otherwise.

But nothing written had any real solidity. Facts were few and no one was able – or willing - to capture the essence of this oddly overpowering woman. A couple of things were agreed and easily checked on Wikipedia: that she worked her way up from the most humble beginnings to become one of the foremost A&R operators in London. That’s it. Detail was thin. None of the pieces even used her real name.

*

After the girl passed the audition, she was taken aside by a researcher who was clearly a level up from the minions she’d dealt with before. He was extremely camp and supercilious.

“OK darling, this doesn’t mean you’ve made it. What number are you?”

“2063.” He ticked off her name from the list on a clipboard.

“Got you. Now Julie, where are you from? You’ve got a nice northern accent.” It was not a compliment.

“Warrington.”

“Oooh, nice. Do you have a story?”

“A story?”

“A back story. Troubles in your life. It’s almost as important as your talent. The viewers like a story.”

She sat and thought. No, there was no story. “No.”

“Mmmm,” he mewed. “Well, you’ll be hearing from us. Have a think. Everyone has a story. You won’t get far if you leave it to looks and talent.” He glanced at his clipboard and added “Julie” as if it was in a different, but equally contemptuous sentence. “You can go now.”

As Julie rose, the door burst open and Missy appeared. “Baby Lamb, you were wonderful,” she gushed. “You have it. I saw it. You will be huge. I’ll make you a star. Kiss me. Hug me. I want to meet your Mum. God, we’ll have a great time. You like champagne? We’ll drink magnums. I love you, I love you, I love you. Go home. When you come back, I’ll teach you how to deal with queens like him.” Missy pointed at the cowering man. “We will have so much fun. So much fun.”

*

The press were obsessed with Missy’s sex life. Gossip about her adventures over the years fired the imaginations of editors but there was little printable. It was understood that she had conducted liaisons with numerous well-known people but most of them were before she burst on to prime-time television. The redtops scraped around for kiss-and-tells but the majority of the men involved with Missy had more to lose by exposure. So she remained an enigma. “I don’t need men, I don’t need love,” she repeated in almost every interview. It merely made stronger the public appetite to see her lovestruck and in a relationship.

She did yearn for one man, though. For two decades, her father had been the only male she had not toyed with. He kept her going when she was at her weakest and most vulnerable and asked nothing in return. After the death of his wife, he invested all his emotional stock in his child and this little Irishman, somebody who seemed to operate in a different, rural dimension, took it in his stride as his little girl shaped her life in the world of entertainment. He never seemed to grasp the enormity of the household names who shuffled in and out of his daughter’s life and through the terraced property they shared in the no-man’s land between Essex and London.

He never lived to see Missy famous. He would not have understood his own notoriety, either. Film stars, soap-opera actors and musicians swapped tales of his hospitality and unintelligibility. After a night of outrageous antics in a nightclub or at a party, Missy would drag the privileged few across the capital, often arriving home as her father met the new day. After a traditional breakfast – soda bread and a fry up – and a top up of love, Missy would be ready for the next adventure. “What a little monkey you are,” her father would say indulgently after the latest episode of mayhem was recounted. It was about the only thing most people could recall him saying. When addressing his daughter’s friends his accent became preposterously dense. He seemed permanently to misunderstand how or why some of the most recognisable people in the land arrived on his doorstep. The more sober and astute began to think the old man was taking the mickey out of them. After all, his daughter was doing the same.

It was the worst day of Missy’s life when she lost him.

Men like this did not reach old age. Ground down by poverty, exile and loss, they work themselves into ill health and their families rarely notice until it is too late. Their children live in the same world but with parallel existences. Awareness of the older generation’s plight, and strength, often arrives too late. It came to Missy, who had retained the frivolity of youth long into her 30s, just before fame transformed everything.

Like her father, Missy wasted little time on reflection. Life was for doing and being. So they both let the spectre of death creep up without too much sentiment. The old man was not old but the end was coming. They both knew.

In his 20s, after arriving in London, he had worked on building sites. He was ‘on the lump’, a casual labourer, undocumented, untaxed and unprotected. Like many in the building and demolition trade, he tore apart walls and ripped down ceilings packed full of asbestos. Those tiny, invisible spores had been sucked deep into his lungs, unexpellable. Over the years the sharp little edges of the fibres tore at the spongy tissue and left him breathless.

Slowly, stealthily, the dust of a different era was killing him. A dry cough became the soundtrack to life as the energy drained from his busy little body. He had always moved with a breathless force. Now he became merely breathless. He shuffled about the house, rejecting his daughter’s attempts to make life easier and hung on to his independence to the end. His hands became clubbed and useless but still he rose from sleepless nights to clang pans in the dawn. Only now no one came back for breakfast.

Stairs became an insurmountable climb, so Missy had the room downstairs converted into a bedroom. One night, about nine o’clock, he headed for bed with a cup of tea, vibrating gently with the pain of everyday life. When Missy went to check on him, half an hour later, he was dead.

It did not come as a shock. It was a moment she had been rehearsing mentally for some months. He was slumped rather than lying and she gently moved him into a prone position, as if she was tucking him in. Then she climbed beside him and held him. It was clear he was gone. There was nothing that could bring him back.

At first she was dry-eyed. She stroked his hair and kissed him lightly. There was relief, too, because the pain had been growing and she could see the agony in his eyes and hear the torture in his voice. But slowly the tears came.

They lay nose to nose, but he did not seem comfortable, she thought, so she turned his slight body outward and hugged him from behind. He was tiny. Missy’s nose nestled in his hair and his smell, a distinct, otherworldy odour, brought back her earliest memories. And suddenly she was aware that this smell would fade into the background of the world and disappear. Yes, it would linger for months but, insidiously, it would be overwhelmed by the stink of everyday life. That special tang, that hogo of safety, would evaporate and be replaced by the smell of a future without love.

As she sucked at it, trying to gulp so much that it would leave an inexhaustible supply inside her, she began to sob. It started as a jerk of the head and built a momentum that was physical and all-encompassing. Each spasm came with a whiplash that jerked her father’s desiccated body as if she was giving it an electric shock. For an hour, her energy transferred to the corpse as she held it tighter than she would ever hold anyone again. All the desperate craving, all the agonised yearning, every shred of love in her body, was converted into a brutal kinetic force that pulsed both their frames violently and shook the bed with a cataclysmic power.

But even this could not keep the warmth in the old man. And as midnight chimed, she began to breathe more slowly, more regularly and finally she unclenched her grip and rolled free. He was cold, she thought, so she straightened him up as much as possible and gently placed a duvet over him. The untouched tea sat at the bedside, spilled slightly in the earthquake of grief the room had experienced. Then she climbed back into the bed and fumbled for his hand. She took the stiff fingers and pushed them awkwardly onto her knickerless groin and held the digits against her body. It was her last chance to commit incest and she could not let that pass.

The old man had been almost sinless during his life but the dead can no longer transgress. He would never have done anything like this. His daughter’s dangerous, warped sexuality was beyond his imagination. Missy wanted to try everything, though. Ticking off two taboos reset her psyche after all the grief: it helped her to move on.

After a minute or so, she put his arm back by his side. Then she picked up the tea, carried it into the kitchen and phoned an ambulance as if calling for a takeaway.

Two hours later, after the paramedics confirmed the death and the formalities had begun to run their course, she stood and watched two ambulancemen prepare to take her father away. As they readied the corpse, one spoke softly, respectfully and carefully to the grieving daughter. It was tones he had used a hundred times before.

“If you want to take off any jewellery, now would be a good time…” he said.

And the retort came out of Missy’s mouth without even a second thought.

“Oh, yes, I’d better get his cock ring.” She moved towards the body and then stopped. “What am I thinking? I took it off before. Grief, eh?”

Later, she told the story to friends, acquaintances and strangers alike, shrieking with laughter. “It was a good job they hadn’t picked him up. They would have dropped him. Their jaws hit the floor. And these poor boys must see some sights…”

Yes, she was Missy again. She was in control. She could sense what people wanted and knew how to shock. She was, and everyone who knew her said the same, a star. Except her father, who would have shook his head and gently chided “the little monkey” for her capacity for mischief.

It was the knack that made her famous. For better or for worse.

• Next: Missy goes to Miami…