by Nick Hornby
‘I’m Bill.’
He was the older-looking one of the two. He wasn’t necessarily older, but Tony had a young face, and his beard wasn’t as bushy.
‘Sorry,’ said Dennis, and he introduced everyone.
‘Clive thinks this is the worst comedy in the history of television,’ said Tony. ‘That’s why the laughter is ironic.’
‘And he’s right. We haven’t laughed much today,’ said Bill gloomily.
‘Well, I enjoyed it,’ said Sophie. ‘It must have been fun to write.’
The writers both snorted, at exactly the same time.
‘ “Fun to write”,’ said Bill. ‘Ooh, that was fun to write, Tony!’
‘Wasn’t it just,’ said Tony. ‘I’m so glad I’m a writer!’
‘Me too,’ said Bill. ‘It’s just fun all day!’
They both stared at her. She was mystified.
‘It wasn’t,’ said Tony. ‘It was horrible. Torture. Like everything else we do.’
‘And before you say anything,’ said Bill, ‘the question mark was Dennis’s idea, not ours. We hate it.’
‘I do wish you’d stop going on about the wretched question mark,’ said Dennis. ‘That’s the first thing you’ve told everybody who walks through the door.’
Dennis began to bash his pipe furiously against one of the half-dozen ashtrays on the table. All of them were overflowing, and the hall smelled like a smoking carriage on a train even though they were only occupying one small corner.
‘Our names are underneath your bloody question mark,’ said Tony. ‘We are trying to make a living writing comedy. You’ve made us unemployable.’
Dennis sighed.
‘I’ve agreed it was a mistake, I’ve apologized, we’re going to get rid of it, now let’s try and put it behind us.’
‘But how can we, when you’re supposed to be a comedy producer, and we now know what you think comedy is?’
‘What do you want me to do? Tell me, and I’ll do it.’
‘It’s too late,’ said Tony. ‘It has been sent out to our fellow professionals.’
‘Like Sophie here,’ said Clive. She knew he was being sarcastic again.
The annoying thing, Sophie thought, was that he was very handsome. Actors who looked like him didn’t usually speak in silly braying voices on radio comedy shows; they were always too busy rescuing busty damsels in distress on the television or in the cinema. He was, she thought, even better-looking than Simon Templar. He had the most disconcertingly bright blue eyes, and cheekbones that made her envious.
‘Did you think it was funny, Sophie?’ said Dennis.
‘The question mark?’
‘No,’ said Bill. ‘We know that’s not funny. The script.’
‘Oh,’ said Sophie. ‘Well. Like I said. I enjoyed it very much.’
‘But did you think it was funny?’
‘Funny,’ she repeated, as if this were a quality that she hadn’t previously considered in her assessment of their comedy script.
‘Jokes and things.’
‘Well,’ she said. And then, because she’d now met them all and she wasn’t going to see them again, ‘No.’
For some reason, this answer seemed to delight Bill and Tony.
‘We told you!’ Bill said to Dennis.
‘You always say everything’s awful,’ said Dennis. ‘I never know when to believe you.’
‘What do you think is wrong with it?’ said Bill.
‘Can I be honest?’ she said.
‘Yes. We want honesty.’
‘Everything,’ she said.
‘So when you said you enjoyed it …’
‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘Not at all. I’m not being funny …’
‘You’re not the only one,’ said Clive.
‘But … I didn’t understand what it was supposed to be about.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Tony.
‘Why did you want to write it?’
‘We were asked,’ said Bill.
‘Asked to do what, though?’
‘We were asked to come up with a show about marriage,’ said Dennis.
‘Oh,’ said Sophie. ‘So why didn’t you do that?’
Bill laughed and clutched at his chest, as if Sophie had just stabbed him in the heart.
‘See, in The Awkward Squad, the people seemed real, even the sort of cartoonish ones. These two, the husband and wife, they seem like cartoons even though they just say normal things without jokes in.’
Bill leaned forward in his seat and nodded.
‘And all the stuff about marriage … It’s like it’s just been stuck on. I mean, they’re always arguing. But there’s no reason for them to argue, is there? They’re exactly the same. And he must have known she was a bit dopey before he proposed.’
She got her first laugh from Clive then.
‘You can shut up,’ Bill said to him.
‘And why is she a vicar’s daughter? I know her father’s a vicar. But … it never gets mentioned again. Are you just saying she’s got iron knickers? What’s she going to do with them, once she’s married? They’ll have to come off.’
‘Right,’ said Bill. ‘Thanks.’
‘Sorry,’ said Sophie. ‘I’ve probably said too much.’
‘No, this is all very helpful,’ said Tony.
‘And why is she so dopey anyway? It says in the script she’s been to college. How did she manage that? She couldn’t find her way to the bus stop, let alone university.’
‘Well,’ said Clive, with an air of satisfaction. ‘There’s nothing left to audition for. You’ve destroyed it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and she stood up to leave. She had no intention of going anywhere until they threw her out, but if nobody said anything to stop her, at least she’d know it was over.
‘We can read through it, and then Bill and Tony can go off and do another draft.’
‘Another draft of what, though?’ said Bill. ‘It’s like Clive said. There’s nothing left.’
‘Let’s read through it anyway,’ said Dennis. ‘Please. We’re recording it in just under two weeks.’
There was a lot of grumbling, but no dissent. Everyone turned to the first page. Sophie was torn. She wanted to read as well as she could; she also wanted to read at a snail’s pace. She was desperate to make the afternoon last as long as possible; she wanted to stay in this room, with these people, for ever.
COMEDY PLAYHOUSE
4
Tony Holmes and Bill Gardiner met in a holding cell in a police station in Aldershot the week before Christmas in 1959. The local police wanted the military police to take them back to the barracks; the military police didn’t want anything to do with them. While the two sets of authorities wrangled, they sat there for twenty-four hours, talking, smoking and not sleeping, both of them feeling stupid and very afraid. They ascertained that they had both been arrested in the same place in the same street, two hours apart; they didn’t even tell each other what they had been doing wrong, or where precisely they had been doing it. They didn’t need to. They just knew.
Neither of them had ever been caught back at home, in London, but for different reasons. Bill hadn’t been caught because he was smart, and knew the places to go, the clubs and the bars and even the public conveniences, although he didn’t use them very often. The evening’s events had reminded him why. The policeman who’d arrested him in Aldershot may well have been an agent provocateur, one of those officers who hated his kind with such a peculiar and obsessive passion that they were prepared to spend entire evenings trying to catch them. There were plenty of them in London too. Tony had never been caught in London because he’d never tried anything in London, or anywhere else for that matter. He wasn’t sure about a lot of things, including who and what he was, but he had no clear idea why he’d decided to try and find the answers to these questions right before the end of his National Service. Loneliness, certainly, and boredom, and the sudden desperate need for the touch of a fellow human
being, of any gender, though admittedly he was only likely to find one of the two in the gents’ conveniences in Tennyson Street.
In the end, nobody had the stomach to prosecute them, and the following day they returned to the barracks to complete the rest of their National Service. Whenever they looked back on that evening – which they did frequently, although never together, and never out loud – there wasn’t much they recognized about the circumstances of their arrest. Had they really been desperate enough to get so near to humiliation and possible ruin? But the content of their twenty-four-hour conversation stayed reassuring and familiar, even years later: they talked about comedy. They discovered their mutual passion for Ray Galton and Alan Simpson within minutes of meeting, they could quote whole chunks of Hancock’s Half Hour at each other, and they tried to remember as much as they could of ‘The Blood Donor’ so that they could perform it. They were pretty sure they were word perfect on the hospital scene, with Bill playing Hancock and Tony, with the higher, more nasal voice, taking on the Hugh Lloyd part.
Ray Galton and Alan Simpson
They kept in touch when they were demobbed. Tony lived in east London and Bill was up in Barnet, so they used to meet in town, in a Soho coffee bar – once a week, at first, when they were both still working in the jobs they were trying to escape. (Tony was helping his father in the newsagent’s he owned, Bill was a pen-pusher at the Department of Transport.) They spent the first few months talking, and then eventually overcame their embarrassment and started trying to write together, on two notepads. Later, when they took the leap into unemployment, they met every day, in the same coffee bar, and would continue to do so until they could afford an office.
They never talked about the other thing they may or may not have had in common, but Bill was still shocked when Tony got married. He’d never even mentioned seeing someone. Bill went to the wedding, and Tony’s bride, a sweet, quiet, clever brunette called June who worked at the BBC, seemed to know all about her husband’s partner, or as much as she would have wanted to know anyway. And maybe there wasn’t anything else to find out. Bill and Tony wrote comedy scripts together; that was who they were, and Aldershot Police Station had nothing to do with anything.
They did much better than they had dared to hope. They sold a few one-liners to some of the older radio comedians almost immediately. They were employed full-time to provide material for Albert Bridges, whose only remaining listeners were still grateful to him for his company and good humour during the Blitz. When first the people of Britain and then, eventually, the BBC came to the conclusion that Bridges was past his best, Bill and Tony sold The Awkward Squad, a comedy series inspired by their National Service experience – or the parts of it they felt they could draw on, anyway.
And now they had been invited to write for Comedy Playhouse. They had been itching to try their hand at TV, but when Dennis took them for a drink in Great Portland Street one evening and told them that he wanted a breezy, light-hearted look at contemporary marriage, they were a little cowed by the brief. After Dennis had gone home, neither of them said anything for a while.
‘Well,’ said Bill, ‘you’re married.’
‘I don’t know if my marriage is going to help us very much. It’s quite, you know. Particular.’
‘Can I ask you something about your marriage?’
‘What about it?’
‘Did June know when she married you?’
‘I don’t know what there was to know.’
‘You got nicked for importuning in a men’s lavatory. She might want to know that.’
‘I was released without charge. And I didn’t importune anybody, if you remember.’
‘So you didn’t think that was information worth passing on?’
‘No.’
‘And what about the … well, the practical side?’
‘Is this going to help us come up with an idea?’
‘No. I’m just interested.’
‘Too bad.’
‘You’ll have to be helpful somehow, though. I don’t know what it’s like to sleep with someone night after night. Or argue with them about what side to watch. Or what it’s like to have a mother-in-law.’
‘We always agree about the television. We have exactly the same tastes.’
‘Do you think he knows I’m queer?’ said Bill. ‘And he’s playing an elaborate practical joke on me?’
‘How would he know?’
Bill was extremely careful. He always made sure that he knew the Test score, and that he dressed badly, and sometimes he made careful reference to girls. But then, he was afraid, like a lot of men in his position. He was always one mistake away from prison.
They decided, like God, that if they got the man right, the woman could somehow be made out of him. And the man in Wedded Bliss? wasn’t too bad, they thought. He was sort of odd, and oddly lovable, prone to fits of surreal rage provoked by everything in England that drove Tony and Bill insane – a sort of sitcom Jimmy Porter from Look Back in Anger. But Sophie was right about Cicely, the woman. She turned out to be hopeless, a cartoon sketch. This was unsurprising, seeing as they had borrowed her wholesale from a cartoon, the Gambols comic strip that appeared in the Express. The character of Cicely was as close to Gaye Gambol as they could get in script form. She didn’t look anything like her, though: Cicely, they imagined, was going to be sweet-looking, rather than curvy, probably because all the actresses that Dennis had suggested seemed very BBC, and BBC actresses all had big eyes, sweet natures and flat chests. They certainly weren’t sexy. But they extracted all of Gaye’s feminine idiocies from her and sprinkled them liberally over the script. Cicely lusted after mink coats, burned dinners, overspent her housekeeping allowance and made complicated, childlike excuses for doing so, missed appointments, failed to understand the simplest mechanical instrument. It wasn’t as though Tony and Bill ever believed that Gaye Gambol was real, or true, and nor did they believe that there were any housewives (or women, or people) like her. But they knew she was popular. If they didn’t have the nerve to produce somebody original and fresh, then at least they wanted a safe bet.
At which point Sophie walked in. She had Gaye Gambol’s wasp waist, large bust, blonde hair and big, fluttery eyelashes, and Tony and Bill burst out laughing.
Sophie and Clive ended up performing the script from beginning to end, mostly because Tony and Bill wanted to keep Sophie in the room. They loved her. She delivered her lines with an ease and a sense of timing that had been beyond the reach of every other actress they’d seen that week, and she even got a few laughs out of the script, much to Clive’s chagrin, although some of the laughs were derived from her decision to read Cicely in her Jean Metcalfe voice. Sophie smiled politely at a couple of his lines, but that was the most she could manage.
‘That’s not fair,’ said Clive.
‘What isn’t?’ said Bill.
‘You might at least have pretended to laugh. I have been reading the bloody thing all bloody day.’
‘The thing is,’ said Bill, ‘you hate comedy.’
‘He does,’ Tony said to Sophie. ‘He’s always moaning about it. He wants to do Shakesper-hear and Lawrence of Arabia.’
‘Just because it’s not my favourite thing doesn’t mean I don’t want laughs,’ said Clive. ‘I hate the dentist, but it doesn’t mean I don’t want fillings.’
‘Nobody wants fillings,’ Tony said.
‘No, but … if they need them.’
‘So laughs are like fillings to you?’ said Bill. ‘Painful and unpleasant, but necessary? What a bundle of joy you are.’
‘You’re good at comedy, though,’ said Sophie. ‘You’re very funny as Captain Smythe.’
‘He hates Captain Smythe,’ said Tony.
‘Well, forgive me if I’d rather play Hamlet than some twittish upper-class ass.’
‘Sophie, what would you like to do?’ said Tony.
‘How d’you mean?’
‘What character would you like to play?’
‘Well,’ said Sophie uncertainly, ‘Cicely, really.’
‘No,’ said Tony. ‘Cicely’s dead. Gone. Chucked out of the window.’
‘Oh, Christ,’ said Clive.
‘What?’ said Bill.
‘You’re offering to write something for her?’
‘We’re just chewing the fat.’
‘You are. You’re offering to write something for her. Bloody hell. You’ve never asked me what I want to do. You just say, “Here’s an upper-class twit with a silly voice. Make him funny.” ’
‘Because you’ve made it very clear that you’re destined for better things,’ said Bill.
‘Well, I wouldn’t mind having my own series.’
‘Oh, that would dull some of the pain, would it?’
‘Yes. It would, rather.’
‘You see, we can’t even tell if you’re joking,’ said Tony.
‘Which is why we’re not rushing to write you your own comedy series,’ said Bill.
‘Where are you from, Sophie?’ said Dennis.
‘I’m from Blackpool.’
‘You see, that’s interesting,’ said Dennis.
‘Is it?’ Sophie was genuinely surprised.
‘Coming from Blackpool is more interesting than being a vicar’s daughter.’
‘Couldn’t she be a vicar’s daughter from Blackpool?’ said Tony.
‘She’s no vicar’s daughter,’ said Clive.
‘I’m assuming that’s rude,’ said Sophie.
There was something in the room, Dennis thought. It had been a long day, with unsuitable actresses reading from a very average script, but Sophie had energized everyone, and she and Clive were sparky with each other.
‘What’s interesting about her coming from Blackpool anyway?’ said Bill.
‘There hasn’t been a North–South romance in a comedy series that I know of.’
‘Would anyone buy it, though?’ said Clive.
‘It’s an odd-couple romance. That would be the fun of it.’
‘Stone me, Dennis,’ said Bill. ‘Two people coming from different parts of the country means they’re an odd couple?’