Hal Valance

Hal Valance, the creator and sole proprietor of The Aliens Show and the creative half of the Valance & Lang Partnership, embodies a world in which identity, entertainment and even national feeling can be made into marketable products. He hires Saladin Chamcha, profits from his voice and screen persona, and later dismisses him when political pressure makes his presence seem commercially inconvenient. Behind Valance’s theatrical self-presentation, the novel briefly uncovers a skilled maker whose craft preserves a connection to family history that his public image otherwise appears to overwrite.

Identity and Public Persona

Valance has made himself into a conspicuous image: a large, cigar-smoking advertising man who styles his body as being in training to resemble Orson Welles and surrounds himself with signs of wealth and national allegiance. He owns a Union Jack waistcoat, flies the flag above his agency and Highgate home, and performs Maurice Chevalier at major presentations, complete with straw boater and silver-headed cane. He also claims to own the first Loire château equipped with telex and fax machines and boasts of an intimate association with the Prime Minister. The accumulating props make his persona look less like an expression of an established self than a collection of signals chosen for effect.

That performance extends to his business reputation. Valance’s agency is known for cheap, exuberant advertising, and a story about his threatening a larger man after a car accident has become part of the legend surrounding him. Chamcha suspects Valance invented the episode himself: it is too perfectly assembled from advertising-world components to be trusted as straightforward biography. The possibility matters because Valance’s public image works like one of his campaigns: it converts a carefully arranged story into an apparently natural sign of genius.

Chamcha, Advertising, and The Aliens Show

Valance first meets Chamcha over lunch at the White Tower, shortly after the Falklands war, to thank him for voicing a successful Slimbix campaign. Chamcha has supplied the voice of a cartoon calorie, making a comic pitch for diet food. The role captures the commercial arrangement between them: Chamcha lends his voice to sell a product, while Valance rewards the performance with champagne and lunch. Valance praises his employee but also makes clear that race shapes the advertising business. He describes campaigns altered to remove a Black child, a singer judged too Black despite being white, and airline advertising that excluded Black employees. Chamcha says he has never felt that he belonged to a race; Valance’s production company nevertheless puts him on its preferred list, and Chamcha eventually becomes Maxim Alien on The Aliens Show.

The show’s success does not protect Chamcha when its racial politics become contentious. Black radicals criticize the programme, and Dr. Uhuru Simba helps organize pressure that includes mass pickets and a television appearance. Valance responds by firing Chamcha and recasting the programme with a large blond Germanic figure in prosthetic makeup and computer-generated imagery. He also replaces Mimi Mamoulian with a voluptuous blonde doll. Valance calls this a process of removing politics from the show, but the production choices do not make race disappear: they change which racialized images can be presented as commercially acceptable. Chamcha, meanwhile, is reduced by some critics to a derogatory label that links his private-school education and association with Valance to political betrayal.

Valance explains the dismissal over the telephone after allowing exactly seventeen seconds to congratulate Chamcha on being alive. He tells Chamcha that audience research shows ethnic viewers do not want ethnic programmes and argues that Chamcha makes the show too racial for its larger commercial prospects. The market is his decisive measure: the programme is an idea to be expanded into merchandising, and its cast is adjustable when research or protest threatens sales. Chamcha recognizes the language of marketing, but understanding the calculation does not soften its effect. The call ends with Valance asserting that Chamcha has no contract and should consult a lawyer; in Valance’s account, the former star is already obsolete.

Nation, Class, and the Business of Newness

Valance’s commercial instinct is inseparable from his vision of national identity. During the first lunch, Chamcha expects a conventional patriotic speech from a pro-Falklands man. Instead, Valance praises British technological ingenuity, recounting how engineers studied the right-angled corrections of houseflies to improve missile guidance. His account turns national pride into admiration for applied invention: Britain is valuable because it can devise something effective and sellable. Later, speaking about The Aliens Show, he declares his intention to sell the nation to audiences around the world. Patriotism and commerce converge in his imagination; the flag is both an emblem of attachment and a product to be marketed.

At the last lunch before Chamcha leaves for Mumbai, Valance offers a related account of political change. He presents the Prime Minister’s project as an attempt to create a new middle class by displacing older elites and promoting people without inherited background or history. He extends this imagined replacement to intellectual and artistic life, describing a future for people with the wrong education and an appetite to advance. Chamcha does not fully understand the argument and pretends that he does. The episode shows Valance admiring upheaval when it promises new consumers, workers or cultural producers; his enthusiasm for novelty is less a rejection of hierarchy than an appetite for remaking who gets to occupy it.

Craft, Inheritance, and the Limits of Self-Invention

The last lunch also opens onto an unexpected private room. After the meal, Valance leads Chamcha to two delicate clavichords and admits that he made them to relax. Chamcha recognizes genuine cabinet-making skill in the instruments. When Valance says that his father worked in the trade, Chamcha understands the revelation as a glimpse of a self grounded in family history rather than in the restless image Valance has constructed. The distinction is striking: the man who celebrates people without background has himself inherited a craft, and the apparently incongruous instruments preserve a connection to that inheritance.

The glimpse is brief. Once they leave the room, Valance returns to his familiar manner and resumes talking about political transformation. Soon afterward he tells Chamcha that it is time for him to leave; Valance and his young wife intend to spend Sunday watching pornography. The abrupt shift from the clavichords to this pronouncement underscores how little the private disclosure alters Valance’s public performance. Chamcha later understands the lunch as a warning of the uncompromising world he had failed to recognize: accommodation will not secure a place when the people in control decide that an older figure has become expendable.

Narrative Role and Significance

Valance’s importance lies in the way his polished performance turns private employment into a test of public belonging. Chamcha has built an English identity through work in advertising and entertainment, yet Valance’s decisions show that professional success can be withdrawn when the market recategorizes the person who earned it. Chamcha’s voice and image are welcome while they serve the show; when protests and audience research make his presence inconvenient, the producer replaces him and invokes commercial logic as if it were impersonal necessity.

The contradiction between Valance’s declaration of national love and his readiness to sell the nation, like the contrast between his manufactured persona and inherited craft, keeps him from being only a caricature of an advertiser. He is capable of real skill and of perceiving large social changes, but he translates both culture and politics into opportunities for production, promotion and control. In his final telephone call to Chamcha, that outlook becomes personal: the small print of a contract matters more than loyalty, and a relationship built through successful work ends when the worker no longer fits the product.