Warning: Spoilers for Thank Goodness You’re Here lie ahead (it’s nice and short, just go play it now and come back when you’re done).
Is that light blinding you? Good. I’ll cut to the chase.
I’m on to you, Coal Supper. I’ve got you sussed. I know what you are. It’s all over.
I’ve heard about what goes on in Barnsworth. I’ve sent a man in, undercover, to see it for himself. Don’t even think about revenge, he’s gone now, you can’t touch him. He had you all fooled, when he arrived on that bus over the rolling hills, posing as a salesman. I knew you’d underestimate him, because he was just a little fella with a lemon-shaped head. That’s the thing about little fellas, you see, they can slip into every nook and cranny without anyone noticing they were there. Or realising that they’re a threat.
He told me about the trap you laid for him when arrived. The mayor’s busy, and here’s a poor idiot, arm stuck down a drain, grasping for a tuppence piece. Help him, won’t you, impressionable stranger, ambitious young lad just trying to make your way in the world. Fetch that damn buttery nub!
It was a test, wasn’t it? You wanted to see how easily coerced he was into doing favours, and you got what you wanted. He played along. They were freed, and he was freed from suspicion. He marched the path you’d set out for him, spoke your language. No, not that language you all pretend to speak, the one with all those cute little phrases that work to obscure the truth. Yeah, I know your stairs aren’t really made from apples and pears. I know that when you’re ginnin’ o’er a glass o’ bitter, no one should be searching for tonic to go with it.
He spoke the real language of your organisations. He spoke pure, unfiltered, emotionless violence. He slapped and smacked his way into your good graces, looking for clues all the while. He even killed those happy little flowers, all just to fit in. He came across that Scot, Jasper, whose tools you’d stolen because he was an outsider, one who helped anybody, no matter where they stood on the issue. Because it doesn’t really matter which side you take on the issue, but you’ve got to take one. That’s how you control people, isn’t it, keep ‘em in line? Yeah, that’s right, I know about the pies!
Big pie people, like Ron. Little pie people, like that other guy, the one with the beady eyes. You’ve got to be one or the other, swear an oath. You’ve got to stick with your kind, too, even if you’re involved in a fair bit of fish and chips or tea on the side, as a lot of you are, because you just can’t resist. He saw the stickers in the windows, the arguments between in-laws from different sides, the attempted sabotage of businesses. The ones that deal in contraband on the side, like that guy selling fish, cigarettes, and other fish that’ve probably contracted lung cancer.
He saw the less obvious stuff, too. The locksmith kept sauced by the landlord, so you can all steal his keys whenever you want and let yourselves in anywhere you want. The young girl with braces that works in almost every shop in town, because you know she’s grown up among this, and she won’t say nothing to nobody. He saw her sister, striking wink, wink, nudge, nudge agreements with strangers to totally wreck aisles of her shop, causing the rats and mice to come out of the woodwork so the owner can claim the insurance.
He saw the one cop in the area, bought and paid for. Busy polishing his truncheon because he knows if he takes one look into what’s really going on, the money’ll stop and bad things’ll happen. It’s why that counterfeiter always gets away. You know the one I mean, the one in the hat and coat – the watch salesman. Even when our man managed to find a way to hand him to Bobby Bash on a silver platter, you all banded together to let him scarper. Because he’s part of your plan. The small fry, the petty criminal distracting from all the real crime that goes on inside the terraced houses and among the marrows planted in the gardens.
You’ll protect him, but when it comes to the innocent folks who won’t play your game, you’ve got a tidal wave of misery to unleash. That poor fellow with the huge bottom just trying to run his food truck. A thousand clashings of hand on cheek to teach him a lesson. That poor fellow who just wants to sit and read the newspaper in his very boring living room. A thousand sooty chimney messes for him to clean up, over and over again, because you want to break his spirit. That poor vegetable salesman with the big head. Relentlessly bullied from birth because he could have been different. He could have changed things, but you drilled your ways into him, and now he won’t stop lobbing parsnips at people’s heads.
They’re Barnsworth people, just like you, and they shouldn’t have to live under your iron fist. And they won’t. Not anymore. You see, that little lad, he pulled through. He took on all the tests you sent his way, even though he nearly lost his mind along the way. He earned your trust. He hung on just long enough to plant the kiss of death on your condiment-stained lips.
You see, Mr Mayor, when you sent him to fetch that a jar of mustard, the one we’d seized after it was illegally shipped into the UK in exchange for fifty tonnes of the finest black market Wensleydale cheese and enough bob for you to be able to buy Mallard from the railway museum in York – as you’ve always dreamed – we knew it.
We had you. We’d dragged you, kicking and screaming, out of the dark depths of your pit shaft of lies and into the lantern light of justice. And we wept tears of joy.
Tek ‘im away to the cells!