Fat Chance by Nick Spalding Read Free Book Online Page B

whether Stream FM have got some kind of sponsorship campaign running with the well-known restaurant chain, but if they have, these two folk of Jamaican extraction would have to owe their place in the competition to it. I like Frankie; she’s a friendly, happy sort with a big booming voice, and a laugh you can probably hear in Paris. Benny looks like he’d rather be anywhere else than right here, given the tormented expression on his face most of the time. I would be critical of his attitude, but then I can look round and see the exact same expression emanating from Gregory Milton’s face next to me, so I’d better not judge the man too harshly. The cynic in me would think that these two had been included in Fat Chance just to fill out a quota of some kind, but I’m sure Elise wouldn’t have anything to do with that kind of discrimination, so I guess Frankie and Benny are happily here on their own merits (unless I’m right about that sponsorship deal).
    The biggest couple out of the six of us are Shane and Theresa. Theresa outweighs me by a good three stone and poor old Shane looks like the Grim Reaper is perched on his shoulder, waiting for him to make a sudden movement and over-exert his vital organs. The man must be over thirty stone. He makes my portly husband look positively anorexic. Shane’s face has that unhealthy pallor of the morbidly obese and you can tell that just living day-to-day life is a struggle for him. Theresa isn’t that far behind, either. I know damn well that she is who I’ll become in the next few years if I don’t do something about my life. I asked her how old she was last week and was distraught when she revealed that she was three years younger than me. The woman looks in her late forties, such is the strain being put on her body by all that extra fat. If anyone needs the impetus to lose weight that this stupid competition provides, it’s these two.
    At the bottom of the heap are Lea and Pete. I’ve barely managed to engage them in conversation so far, as when they’re not outside chain-smoking cigarettes—having dumped their enormously fat three-year-old offspring named Ashton onto an unsuspecting production assistant—they’re sitting on their iPhones in the corner, ignoring the rest of us. He’s always playing Candy Crush and she’s always leaving Facebook status updates about how wasted they got last weekend, or how wasted they’re going to get this weekend. Pete has five teeth from what I can count (I can’t look at his mouth for longer than a few moments without feeling nauseous) and Lea has a hairstyle that suggests some sort of horrific and violent encounter with a malfunctioning blender full of red food colouring. You can tell they’ve been hired for their shock value by Elise and her cronies. You can’t do a reality show without at least a couple of people who look like they’ve barely made it through the early stages of human evolution.
    . . . and there you have it. Along with Greg and me, these are your contestants, competitors, guinea pigs, and objects of mild public interest for the next few months. A broad cross-section of modern society, designed to appeal to as much of the listening demographic as is humanly possible. Stream FM is injecting an awful lot of cash into this project, so it’s understandable that they’d want to get as big an audience as they can, but I can’t help thinking that the obvious pigeonholing going on here creates an air of artificiality that—
    What the hell am I saying? This entire process is one thousand percent artificial.
    I need to remember that the people who will be benefitting most from this process are not any of us fatties, but the radio station executives who dreamt the whole thing up in the first place. The number of promotional deals the station has struck in the past few weeks with the local gym chain and health food stores is testament to the fact that Fat Chance is all about dragging in the profits for a bunch of