A Life In Soap

Once again the remote control
Has slipped down behind the cushions
When I need to change the channel
And get out of this soap opera
Where the disasters pile up
To the point of absurdity
Until nothing else can go wrong
That hasn't happened before
So I sing like Hilda Ogden
And dance on the cobbles
In the face of adversity
Sing like Stephanie de Sykes
In the basement studio
Of a burnt out motel
In a suburban facade
Where the walls all wobble
And my long lost children
Return with different faces
But it's not a metaphor
It's not a dream
Just a cynical director
Casting the producer's friend
As a sister I never mentioned
With problems of her own
And I don't mean the drugs
Or fast cars in the tabloids
We may dine at The Ivy
While she tries to kill me
We may go to a premiere
While I fail to notice
The sly looks to camera
With an eye to a spin off
Or a two handed special
With a black and white flashback
Where all is revealed
Despite contradicting
The previous season
When they wrote me out
So I could play in a pantomime
In another bleak suburb
Where the walls are more solid
And grimed with graffiti
It's almost the West End
My agent keeps telling me
The Tale of Harlequin
Retold in pop music
So the children don't fidget
As I lust after Columbine
Who once was a doctor
Or was it a vet
In a daytime reality show
That was cancelled last autumn
She remembered my voice
From a series of adverts
I made in the eighties
When my hair was still all my own
And my Hamlet was legendary
In yet another small suburb
With my Mum in the audience
Talking through the soliloquies
"I don't know where he gets it from
My family's respectable
Me, I blame his Dad, I do
Filling his head with stuff..."
No wonder I left my job
And dumped my old school mates
For a stint as an understudy
To a drunken film star
Returned to his acting roots
After hitting a studio boss
And seducing the leading man
A high profile marriage
Reduced to a photo shoot
Long distance Polaroids
Of wandering hands and lips
Botox and collagen
Champagne and heroin
You couldn't make it up
Except that they often do
And the scripts keep arriving
With my name further down the cast
A cameo walk on
As the comical uncle
Until the phone doesn't ring any more
And I just sit here watching
While the remote control slides
Somewhere under my bottom
In the depths of this sofa
Threadbare and beer stained
As they screen my obituary