Inconceivable

by Ben Elton

  Anyway, the very exciting news is that the BBC really want to get on with it. Nigel feels that the idea is very current and that everybody will be doing it soon. Besides which, the film will be extremely cheap to make, which means that the Beeb can pay for it all by themselves. The reason films usually take years to get together is because that’s how long it takes to raise the money, but we’re already past that hurdle and Nigel is impatient to become a film producer.

  ‘Movies work in a yearly cycle,’ he explained. ‘The festival circuit is essential for a small picture. Venice, Sundance, Cannes. You need critical heat under you before the Golden Globes in February.’

  He actually said ‘critical heat under you’. Strange. Whereas before I would have thought he sounded like a pretentious wanker, now I think he sounds knowledgeable and cool.

  The reason Nigel is in such a hurry is that the whole thing about being a Controller at the BBC is that you have to make your mark. When you start looking for a fat job in the independent sector you have to be able to say, ‘It was in my time that we did The Generation Game,’ or, ‘Oh yes, I commissioned Edge of Darkness and Noel’s House Party.’ These days the scramble to be seen to be successful is becoming ever more urgent. People move on so quickly that you have to make your mark quickly too and it seems that, thank you, God, I am to be the beneficiary of Nigel’s haste.

  Dear Penny,

  We went in to see Mr Agnew today at Spannerfield. He gave us our test results and everything remains clear. Sam’s sperm is fine (about ninety million of them, which is enough, surely?) and a sufficient number of them heading in the right direction to pass muster. Also my pingy thingy seems to have come up normal. Mr Agnew assured me that my tubes aren’t scarred, also there are no adhesions, fibroids, adenomyosis, or polyps in the womb, and that the area where the tubes join the uterus is similarly polyp-free. These polyps, it seems, are things to be avoided. I don’t really know what a polyp is. I suppose I think of them as sort of small cysts. Actually, I try very hard not to think about them at all. Quite frankly, just hearing about the eight million things that can go wrong inside a woman’s reproductive system is enough to make me ill. All Sam has to worry about is whether his sperm can swim.

  Anyway, Mr Agnew was very nice and agreed with me that since we have uncovered nothing operable or treatable and yet we remain stubbornly infertile, the time may now be right to commence a course of IVF. Mr Agnew said that not only would this give us a chance of becoming pregnant (obviously) but it might also prove useful in a diagnostic sense, i.e. we might discover what, if anything, beyond the most incredible bad luck, is the problem.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘When can we start?’

  Seven months, said Mr Agnew.

  ‘Bollocks to that,’ I replied (in so many words), and Mr Agnew explained that if we go private we can start next month, so that is what we’ll do and I don’t care what Sam says. If I’m going to have to do this I’ll do it as soon as I possibly can and start the long horrible process of getting it over with. Quite apart from anything else, as far as I can see, the NHS is under such a strain that if we can afford to pay we ought to do so and not take the place of someone who can’t. Sam says that that attitude simply reinforces the two-tier system. Well, what if it does? I have a home while other people are homeless, isn’t that a two-tier system? Should I go and sit in a doorway to avoid reinforcing it? I eat ready-prepared meals from Marks & Spencer while people in the Third World struggle to grow a few grains of wheat. How many tiers are there in that system, I wonder.

  Anyway, it’s not posh at all. We all get lumped in together and all the profits that Spannerfield makes out of the private patients go straight back into the unit to fund the research programme. Personally I thought that us making a contribution to funding research sounded like a pretty good thing but Sam says that NHS hospitals using private patients to fund their activities is the thin end of the privatization wedge. He says that the people who manage the NHS budget will say to the hospitals, ‘Well, if you’re partially self-funding already, we’ll cut back on your allocation of public money and force you further into the marketplace.’ Hence the financial necessity of having a private system will become entrenched within the funding bureaucracy.

  At that point I couldn’t be bothered to argue any further and told him to give all his food and clothes to Oxfam if he felt that strongly about it, which he doesn’t.

  Sam has just asked me whether Hysterosalpingogram begins with ‘HY’ or ‘HI’. He seems to have suddenly got very enthusiastic about doing his book and getting all the details right. I know I should be glad, and I am in a way. After all, it was me that made him start it in the first place. It’s just that I wish he’d share some of those thoughts and feelings with me. The way we talk to each other and react to each other has become just a little bit mechanical and predictable. Is that what happens in a marriage? Is it inevitable? I’d love to talk to Sam about that sort of thing but I know he’d just try and change the subject.

  Oh well, at least now he’s writing down his feelings, which I’m sure is the first step towards him being able to share them.

  I’m trying not to think too much about wanting a baby at the moment. I find it drains me. I wake up feeling all fine and then I remember that according to my life plan I ought to have a couple of five-year-olds rushing in to jump into bed with me. That’s when a great wave of depression sort of descends, which I then have to fight my way out of by reminding myself how incredibly lucky I am in so many ways. Sometimes it works.

  Dear Self,

  Long meeting with George and Trevor at Television Centre today.

  Nigel was there for the first hour but then he had to rush off to Heathrow (two-day seminar in Toronto: ‘Children’s TV: Did Bugs Bunny Win? Cartoons and our children’s mental health’).

  Inconceivable is moving at a hell of a speed now. They’re already talking about casting and a director, which is quite unprecedented. They do have some problems with the script, though. Nothing major, but it’s something I’m going to have to think about very hard. It came up after we’d all been laughing at the ‘communal masturbation in West London’ scene. We’d been improvising some gags about Colin sneaking a funnel in because those pots are far too small and of course ejaculation is scarcely an exact science. Then George brought up what was worrying them.

  ‘It’s too blokey, mate. Colin’s stuff is really good, hilarious, in fact…’

  ‘And touching in a strange sort of way,’ Trevor added.

  ‘But Rachel is a worry,’ George went on. ‘Frankly she’s a bit two- dimensional.’

  I couldn’t deny that I’d been worrying about her myself and was pleased to have the chance to discuss it. We all agreed that she has some good lines, but George and Trevor (and the ninety other BBC bods who seem to have read the thing) felt that she was clearly being drawn from a male point of view.

  ‘There’s no real heart there,’ said Trevor, ‘and let’s face it, essentially this has to be a woman’s story. You can’t base a movie about infertility simply on a load of knob and wank gags.’

  ‘Excellent though they may be,’ George added.

  ‘You have to get inside the character of the female lead. Maybe you should take on a woman co-writer.’

  I can’t even bear to write down the terrible thought that leapt immediately into my mind when Trevor said that.

  This will need careful consideration.

  Dear Penny,

  The die is cast. I’m booked in to start after my next period, presuming, that is (and I must at all times remain positive), a miracle hasn’t happened naturally.

  Oh God, I do so want a child. Sometimes I think about praying. Not like going-to-church praying, but just at home in the quiet. In fact, if I’m honest I do occasionally offer up a silent one, just in my head when no one’s about. But then I think that that’s wrong and presumptuous of me because I don’t believe in God in any conventional sense so I have no right to pray to him (her? it?), do
I? On the other hand, if he doesn’t exist I’ve lost nothing and if he does exist then I imagine he’d prefer even a sceptical prayer to no prayer at all so I can’t really lose, can I?

  I’m certainly not an atheist anyway because there must be something bigger than us. There are so many questions that scientists can’t answer. Who are we? Who made us? Is there a reason? The easy answer to all that of course is God. The universe is a mystery and we shall call the author of that mystery God. That’s how I see it, anyway. I suppose I’m an agnostic, which I know is the easy way out. And also very self-indulgent because basically it means not believing in something except when it suits you.

  Actually I think it’s amazing how arrogant we’ve become about God. He used to be a figure of fear and majesty, the ultimate authority before whom humanity was supposed to prostrate itself in humble repentance for our sins. Now you hear people talk about God as if he was some kind of rather eager stress counsellor or therapist. I was watching a bit of daytime American chat show the other day and someone said, ‘I hadn’t talked to God in a long time but when I needed him he was there for me.’ The presenter nodded wisely and added, ‘You have to make time to let God into your life.’ This unbelievable banality actually got a round of applause! I couldn’t believe the arrogance of it! Like this person and God were equals, pals! It’s amazing, this ready appropriation of the supreme being as some sort of spineless yes man who is on ready call to tell you that you’re beautiful and that everything is fine whenever you feel a bit low. I can just imagine God sitting in his heaven amongst his mighty host thinking to himself, ‘Oh no, some self-indulgent, self-obsessed sad sack of de-caf and doughnuts hasn’t called…If only these people would make room in their lives to let me in.’

  I really don’t know what I feel about religion but I do know that if I’m going to have a God I want a great and terrible God, a God of splendour, mystery and majesty, not one that spends his time chatting to whingers about how stressed they are.

  Perhaps I’m just being mean. If people find comfort that way why should it worry me? I wish I could find comfort, just a little, because I do want a baby so very much and sometimes the feelings are so strong I don’t know what to do with them.

  Dear Sam,

  Lucy got her period today. We’ve drained the dregs at the last- chance saloon and now it’s time to put our trust in the medical profession. Lucy asked me if I’d thought about praying and I said I hadn’t but I was happy to give it a go if she wanted me to. We must leave no avenue of opportunity unexplored. Who knows, it might work. It seems to me that the idea of an old man with a white beard sitting on a cloud dispensing goodwill doesn’t sound any more absurd than the bollocks most physicists talk. I mean really, every single bloke I know bought A Brief History of Time and not one of them, including me, understood a single word of it.

  Why do we have such faith in scientists? When I was at school they told us that in days gone by simple folk believed the world was balanced on the back of a tortoise. How we laughed! ‘What a bunch of prats,’ we said. Ho ho ho! Because we know better, don’t we? Apparently, according to Stephen Hawking and his pals there was this tiny lump of infinitely dense stuff the size of a cricketball, contained within which was the entire universe.

  Where this cricketball was and where it had come from are questions which apparently only stupid people ask. Anyway, one day the rock exploded and all the energy and stuff blasted out from the epicentre and formed into stars and galaxies which are still hurtling outwards to this very day.

  Now why is that any more convincing than the tortoise?

  They keep saying that if we spend another trillion or two on a new telescope they’ll be able to tell us exactly how the universe began. They keep telling us how close they are, saying things like, ‘When the universe was three seconds old, protons began to form…‘ Well maybe, but I think that a hundred years from now they’ll discover that the universe got farted out of the arse of a giant space elephant and school kids will all be laughing to think that anybody ever believed in the big bang theory.

  Sometimes the self-righteousness of the scientific profession really gets on my nerves. They always seem to assume that science is sort of outside society, that what scientists do is pure and that it is other people who corrupt it. I saw a documentary about Einstein and Oppenheimer on the Discovery Channel the other day and it was going on about what simple, peaceful men they were and that during the war they sent a letter to President Truman pleading with him not to drop the bomb. They said that it was too big, too terrible and man had no right to unleash such a force. All I could think was what a couple of hypocrites! For years they’d struggled. For years they’d devoted their colossal brains to developing a bomb which the rest of us would have to spend our lives living in the shadow of, and then they reckon they can get out of their responsibilities by saying, ‘Please don’t drop it,’ and go down in history as sad-eyed, white-haired old peacemakers.

  I went in to see Nigel today. He’d rung me twice from Toronto sounding me out about directors and co-producers. He feels we need to bring some experienced film-making talent into the mix.

  He’s right, I think. I mean George and Trevor are great but what do they or I know about doing a distribution deal with a chain of movie houses in France? Besides which, Nigel feels that the budget will need to expand somewhat and put it outside the reach of the BBC alone. The reason for this is not because the film has got any more expensive but because Nigel feels it has such potential that we need to take it to a name director, someone with a proven track record. That of course means paying the going rate, which can run into a great deal of cash.

  It’s a fact that with most movies, particularly the Hollywood variety, a very large chunk of the vast budgets that are quoted so gloatingly in the press is actually spent on the wages of just a few individuals.

  Anyway, as I say, Nigel wants to make this movie in partnership with another production company.

  ‘We need someone with experience,’ he said to me over the phone with the voices of Canadian TV execs crackling in the background, ‘but hip. We must remember at all times that we are positioning ourselves at the cutting edge.’

  I knew what was coming and I wasn’t wrong. Today I had my second meeting with Justin, Petra and Ewan Proclaimer from Above The Line Productions.

  I must say it was a very different affair this time. Petra actually smiled at me and Justin gripped my shoulder saying, ‘On the money, pal. Kickin’ ass.’ Even Ewan stopped snarling and treated me with a degree of civility. It seems that he’s even hotter than he was when I met him at Claridge’s. He’s landed a three-picture deal to direct in Hollywood. I doubt any of these films will be the Aids and Heroin project he showed me. In fact he mentioned something about a sci-fi thing with Gary Oldham and Bruce Willis.

  Anyway, it seems he has a six-month ‘window’ before he begins pre-production ‘across the big pond’, and he loves my script.

  ‘I love romantic comedy,’ he explained. ‘I’ve always liked romantic comedy but not shite romantic comedy. I like romantic comedy with edge, with bite, with bollocks! To me Macbeth is a romantic comedy, so’s Oedipus. I mean what could be more romantic than a man loving his ma so much he wants to shag her? And what could be more comical?’

  Slightly worrying, but I let it go. After all, Ewan’s name attached to the project certainly ups the ante all round. And of course his timetable makes the whole thing even more urgent, which is fine by me. Every film I’ve ever heard of seems to have spent years in the planning and here I was taking shortcut after shortcut.

  That brought us on to the script, with which there are still two problems one little and one big. The little problem is that I haven’t given the story an end yet. I say this is a little problem because I’ve actually worked out two endings that would work dramatically, one happy and one sad. I haven’t been able to choose which one I want to go with yet. I suppose because Lucy and I are just starting IVF ourselves I don’t want to tempt
fate.

  The bigger problem remains the woman’s voice in the film.

  Everyone agrees that I haven’t got it right yet and that it’s crucial. It’s not a big thing, the story’s fine as are the jokes, it’s just a matter of tone and emotional emphasis. I have to try and find a way to make the female perspective more convincing. I’m trying. I’ve been trying for days but the more I try the more Rachel turns into a bloke.

  Time’s running out. Petra and Justin are setting up auditions.

  Ewan is scouting for locations. I must find the woman’s voice.

  Dear Penny

  Picked up my first sackload of drugs from Spannerfield this morning. Me and a bunch of other women, all feeling a bit self-conscious. I have to sniff the first lot, which I’ll begin tonight. You sort of shove a pump up your nose and give it a blast. It doesn’t sound too difficult so far. Incidentally, although we’ll be paying Spannerfield for the process, Dr Cooper says that he’ll pay for the drugs. Apparently some local health authorities will fund fertility treatment and some won’t. Ours will, which is very lucky because the drugs cost literally hundreds of pounds! Life is such a lottery, it really is.

  Sam’s going to Manchester for a night the day after tomorrow. It’s this huge charity concert for the Prince’s Trust he’s involved with. The BBC are broadcasting it and for some reason it’s fallen to Sam to represent them. I could go, of course, and normally I’d love to, but I’ve told Sam that I’m still feeling a little under the weather after the pingogram and I could really use a quiet week.

  This is a lie!

  My God, I can scarcely believe what I’m writing, but I’ve decided to see Carl. He rang me at work and asked me out to dinner and I said yes! Of course there’s no reason for me to feel guilty or anything, I’m just going to have a bite to eat with a friend. I’m not going to do anything with him, obviously! But nonetheless, I can’t say that my conscience isn’t troubling me a bit. Because let’s face it, I’m not going to tell Sam about it. Well, how can I? I can’t say to him, ‘Oh, by the way, while you’re away I’m going to have dinner with the dishiest man in England whom incidentally I have already snogged,’ can I? Of course, I could say, ‘Oh, I’m having dinner with a friend,’ but then he’d say, ‘What friend?’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, you don’t know him,’ and he’d say, ‘Him?’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Sam, it’s not like that,’ and he’d say, ‘Like what?’ and…Oh well, before we knew it the Green-Eyed Monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on would be knocking at the door, suitcase in hand and planning a long stay.