A writer, a whiner and an impossible mother…

Now for a couple of subsidiary characters. I thought it would be fun to have as one of my characters a writer from the soap. He must not be a claimant for Juliette’s hand – so either he should be gay or happily married. I called him…

Charlie

I don’t have much idea about Charlie at the moment. He is one of the script-writers on The Parks. He’s a sympathetic guy, somewhere in his forties, with something of an insight into people. I hope that he and Juliette establish a friendship. He’s the sort of guy I imagine who could give her good advice about love and relationships - and she’s the sort of person who might help stimulate his story-generating capacities. (She won’t hijack the storyline of the soap, a la Tootsie - but she will give him ideas that suit her conception of her character, and ultimately a big headache when she resigns from the production and he has to help rewrite many episodes to accommodate her escape from The Parks and more specifically Jonathan Nesbi.) He is married, with a teenaged son. He is watchful and sympathetic. He is a good friend of Simon’s - in fact his buddy and confidant.

And then, of course, there is Juliette’s ex, the whining, whingeing Rob…

Rob Whelan

A whiner. He had a brief relationship with Juliette. She basically felt sorry for him, and he, a practised and not-so-subtle manipulator, made full use of this weakness of hers for the underdog. (Ties in neatly with the more positive aspect of the same impulse: sympathy for the underdog - the inspiration that drives her to decide ultimately what to do with her life.) He is a pathetic creature willing to resort to any device and stratagem to elicit the sympathy, even the pity, of those he wants to enlist as supporters. He works in an old fashioned record shop (vide High Fidelity), earning a pittance. But he is an expert on South African recorded music. He is handsome in a soft-centred way, with big blue eyes and a shock of hair that characteristically falls over his right eye and that he frequently has to brush away with an ineffectual sweep of a hand.

Juliette’s mother

Juliette’s mother, who insists on being called by her first name, Veronica, is an infuriating dynamo. Not only is she highly successful in her own right, as the host of very popular daily radio talk show, but she also cooks superbly, has a series of low-key but entirely appropriate lovers. She demands that her daughter meet the same exacting standards, and is therefore deeply disappointed that Juliette (a) doesn’t have a career worth talking about and (b) a lover worth parading. I see two or three scenes between Juliette and Veronica from which Juliette retires reeling, feeling utterly unworthy and undermined. She would then score a victory when, in the closing phase of the story, she bags the most eligible man in town – indeed, in the country, (if television audience ratings are anything to go by) – and commits herself to a tough an demanding course of study (law)…

Veronica is, needless to say, impeccably dressed, poised and confident.