Chapter 2

Playabout is a big outfit based in an old high-rise office block in Chiswick. Big for a licensing agency, that is. Forty five staff on two floors, full team of sales, marketing, retail liaison, artwork approvals, finance, the lot. Been in the game even longer than I have, opened up in Soho in the early seventies before anybody in the UK had even heard of licensing. Forty five staff and only six blokes. The same six blokes who’ve been in the firm since 1985. The same six blokes including the three who started it all off, Ted and Brian Harris, the terrible twins, the salesmen, the pioneers/buccaneers, the take-the-money-and-runners, and Peter Jaye, their straight-shooting, laced up accountant.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of women work in the licensing business, from straight-out-of-college young wonders to mature matrons who like to curl up and listen to Barry Manilow with the best of them. There was just something about the Harris’s very masculine ego that made them want to surround themselves with females whom they could either lord it over, lust after or be mothered by depending on how the mood struck them. The women have run that business for years, truth be told, but Ted’s not going to give up until he’s got himself into the Hall of Fame and Brian won’t give up until he’s beaten Ted to it. Peter just does the numbers like he always has.

Actually I lied about the six blokes. There used to be seven. Ted’s protégé, brought in to the firm in 1986 from a music marketing outfit. Hot-shot, did well for a few years working on publishing, then food, then finally headed the toys division. Regular visits to China to see all the big toy firms before he was caught in a Hong Kong hotel by a surprise visit by Brian Harris. In the room with the protégé was a hot Chinese bird and an even hotter business plan for a new licensing agency to be headed by the protégé. Tut, tut. Not very sporting. Protégé fired on the spot, comes back to the UK and starts his own agency anyway. The protégé? Phil Menwith. The agency? Coolthings. The rest? History.

So it’s not really surprising that when the trade press got the story about Phil’s parachute-free sky-diving stunt the first people they called for obituary stuff were the brothers Harris. Not surprising, but stupid. Maybe it’s another reason why the Harris’s employed so many women, but they certainly didn’t intend to be ‘betrayed’ again. No love lost. Ted wouldn’t say anything to the press, Brian managed to get the words ‘we haven’t had much contact with Phil since he left the firm in 1995’ out through gritted teeth before putting the phone down.

So after the Harris’s it was me. Why me? I did the first deal that meant anything to Phil back in his Playabout days. I was running the licensing for a children’s book business and signed the small-format paperback rights from Phil for Andy’s Adventures, a TV series running on BBC 1 that was doing quite nicely at the time but then hit it big when a piece on News at Ten claimed that children learned to read twice faster than average when introduced to the Andy’s Adventures books. Over the next three years a ten thousand pound guarantee produced two million quid in royalties for Playabout, a promotion to marketing director for me and a twenty grand bonus for Phil. Everybody in the business for more than five minutes knew about this deal as Phil never tired – after he’d left Playabout – of complaining about the pile he’d made for the twins and how he’d never been suitably compensated for it. You usually got the story about midnight at the Licensing Awards or the LIMA Gala or the Spring Fling after Phil had drunk his customary eight bottles of red wine and felt compared to share this tragedy with you.

So I pick up the phone and it’s Dave Sutton from Licensing Review.

‘Lance, I wanted a few words from you about Phil Menwith. We’re doing an obit and we’re talking to all the folks who knew him for a fair while. Can I ask you a few questions or do you want to do me five hundred words and e-mail it over?’

I decide I don’t want to talk about Phil so I promise the five hundred words. By tomorrow. Morning. I hang up the phone. Phil’s been dead for three days, it’s five o’clock on Thursday afternoon and I’ve had enough. Then, Meryl, my cleaning lady, arrives with her cat on a lead as usual and her hair hidden under a pink wig, wearing a get-up like the girls on the ‘Clinique’ counter at Harrods only she’s twice as lovely as any of them. Not really a cleaning lady by profession since she won three million on the lottery two years ago. She used to do the entire floor of this office building but now she just does mine. Keeping her hand in, as she puts it, should disaster strike. I saved her cat once, from two Doberman pinchers who were part of some hare-brained licensing presentation some berk was giving me about the Powerdogs or some such idiocy. Died the death, anyway, unlike Meryl’s cat. I think that’s really why Meryl still cleans my office. I hum a bit of ‘My Old Black Cat’ by Ian Anderson, apologise to Meryl that I’ve got to go, and skip out before she starts a conversation.

Chapter 1

The problem with being in the licensing business as long as I have is that you start to believe that you’ve seen and heard everything. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon on a wet February morning and I’m staring at the window trying to put off making a call to Phil Menwith at the Coolthings agency. Why I am trying to put off making this call? Because I think I know what Phil’s going to say, and I don’t really want to hear it. See? I’m even arrogant enough to think I know what he’s going to say to me before I’ve picked up the phone. So I do it anyway.

‘Coolthings. To whom may I direct your call?’

‘Phil Menwith, please’

‘Who shall I say is calling?’

‘Tell him it’s the Archbishop of Canterbury about the photographs Phil borrowed’


I wish. The truth is it went like this.


‘Lance, how’s it going, mate?’

‘The usual, Phil, keeping the pieces stuck together as best we can.’

‘Got a proposal for me yet on the Moonsters? Any of your mob interested? I’ve got offers coming out of my ears and it’s toy fair next week and I expect to be signed up in all sorts of categories by the time I get to New York.’

I can picture Phil Menwith in his fourteenth floor office off Tottenham Court Road, feet up on his ten-grand Heal’s black-lacquer desk. Made a lot of money ten years ago on the Purple Avengers and never got round to spending it. At least not on drinks bought for me.

‘Phil, all my clients are looking at the Moonsters but we probably need a bit more info on the TV before we can be definite. I’ll talk to you in New York about that. I was actually calling on something else.’

‘Can’t wait forever, Lance, I’ve got ‘em queuing up here. 104 eps in production and you’re still fannying around on it. Confectionery’ll be gone soon, all the toys as well……..’

I interrupt. Time to get it over with.

‘In New York, Phil, OK? I promise. Before the Kidscreen bash. Now, we need to talk about the Blastboys audit. ‘

‘What’s to talk, just send us the money. Bang-to-rights your guys at Entwhistles, no doubt. Shouldn’t even talk to you, lawyers stuff by now, this.’


‘That’s not how we see it, Phil. Your auditor’s got his numbers completely arse over tit, not to mention asking for penalties that aren’t even in the contract. We reckon there’s about three grand owing, hardly enough to cover the audit costs. I’m wondering if we can make a quiet agreement and put it behind us.’

‘Your guys not going to pay up?’

‘No, Phil, they are not. This has always looked like a stitch-up and they’re not buying. I might be able to get you five grand if we can square it before New York’.

‘Just a minute, Lance, will you mate? Need something from the other room.’

So I hang on the phone and try staring at the window again hoping the view might change to something more spectacular than the bad side of the Isle of Dogs in the rain. Two hundred quid a square foot and you get to look at the back of an old crane. Actually you can see a bit of Millwall Dock if you lean way over to the left. I get so into it I don’t notice nearly ten minutes go by. Then the phone again, a woman’s voice.

‘Hello? Who’s there?’

‘it’s Lance Crane from the Everything Company, I was talking to Phil. Is he coming back?’.

‘I’m afraid not. He’s just jumped out of the window.’