Funny Girl

by Nick Hornby

  ‘He thinks anyone’s odd who hasn’t been to Cambridge.’

  Dennis looked momentarily embarrassed.

  ‘I take your point. Their geographical roots would form only a small part of their incompatibility. When did you first meet someone from London, Sophie?’

  She hesitated.

  ‘Not until … Well, quite recently.’

  ‘When you moved down?’

  ‘A bit before that.’

  And then, just because she felt safe in the room, she decided to tell them the truth. ‘I entered a beauty competition back in Blackpool. There was a girl from London who’d gone in for it too. A holidaymaker. Is there somewhere called Gospel something?’

  ‘You’re a beauty queen? Oh, that’s just perfect,’ said Clive with glee.

  ‘She only said she entered,’ said Bill.

  ‘I won it,’ said Sophie before she could stop herself. ‘I was Miss Blackpool. For five minutes.’

  ‘Well, this explains everything!’ said Clive.

  ‘What does it explain?’ said Dennis.

  ‘Look at her!’

  ‘I think she won a beauty competition because of the way she looks,’ said Dennis. ‘I don’t think she looks like that because she won a beauty competition.’

  ‘Why only for five minutes?’ Tony asked.

  ‘Because then I realized I didn’t want to be a beauty queen and I couldn’t live in Blackpool any more. I wanted to come to London and … Well, I want to be Lucille Ball.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Bill. ‘Now you’re talking.’

  ‘Am I?’ said Sophie.

  ‘Of course you are,’ said Bill. ‘We all love Lucy.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘We’re students of comedy,’ said Tony. ‘We love anyone who’s funny.’

  ‘Lucy is one of our people,’ said Dennis. ‘Galton and Simpson are our Shakespeare, obviously. But she’s our Jane Austen.’

  ‘And we’re literally students,’ said Bill. ‘We watch and listen to things over and over again. We prefer the repeats, because then we can start to take things apart.’

  Sophie burst into tears, suddenly and to her intense embarrassment. She hadn’t known she was about to cry and she couldn’t really explain the intensity of her feeling.

  ‘Are you all right?’ said Dennis.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Do you want to call it a day? You could come in tomorrow and we could all talk some more.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m fine. That’s the thing. I’m having fun.’

  They were all still there two hours later.

  ‘How about this? Alan is a handsome, snobbish, angry Conservative. Cicely is a beautiful, chippy, Labour-voting northerner,’ said Bill.

  ‘She’s hardly likely to be called Cicely, is she?’ said Clive.

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Bill. ‘What shall we call her?’

  ‘What goes with Blackpool?’ said Tony.

  ‘Brenda,’ said Clive. ‘Beryl.’

  ‘What about Barbara?’ said Dennis. ‘Barbara from Blackpool?’

  They all looked at Sophie, who seemed to have lost interest in the conversation and was staring hard at the ceiling.

  ‘I like it,’ said Tony. ‘Not too common. Just common enough. Alan and Barbara.’

  ‘I don’t like Alan,’ said Clive.

  ‘What on earth is wrong with Alan?’

  ‘I think what Clive is saying is that if she gets a name-change, he should too,’ said Bill.

  ‘It’s not that at all,’ said Clive crossly. ‘My best friend at junior school was called Alan. He was killed in the Blitz.’

  ‘I’m betting that’s an awful lie,’ said Tony.

  Clive smirked.

  ‘It was the word “friend” that gave it away,’ said Bill. ‘You’ve never had any. What do you want to be called, then?’

  ‘Quentin.’

  ‘Nobody wants to watch a programme about someone called Quentin.’

  ‘Jim, then.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t care,’ said Bill. ‘Jim is fine. Jim and Barbara. So how did they end up together?’

  ‘He knocked her up,’ said Clive.

  ‘I think you’ll find he didn’t,’ said Sophie firmly.

  ‘I don’t think it would go down so well upstairs either,’ said Dennis.

  ‘Oh, here we go,’ said Bill.

  Bill and Tony loved Dennis, and not just because he loved them. He was clever, and he was enthusiastic, and he was endlessly encouraging. But he was a Corporation man to the tips of his brown suede boots, and his playfulness tended to disappear if he thought that the future of the BBC, or his own future within it, was under any threat, real or imagined.

  ‘O.D. would go for it.’

  O.D., or Other Dennis as he was known only in their very small circle, was Dennis Main Wilson, another BBC comedy producer, much more experienced and successful than T.D. – This Dennis. When Tony and Bill were bored, or felt that they weren’t getting anywhere with an idea, they would drop the possibility of Other Dennis into the conversation, and spend a few minutes painting an idyllic word-picture of what their working life would be like with him.

  ‘Say what you like about O.D., but he’ll always go in to bat for his writers,’ said Bill, mock-wistfully.

  ‘Oh, this really is too much,’ said Dennis. ‘I have always gone in to bat for you. Always. Even when the match is lost, and the bowling is fast and hostile. Even when … Even when the bat’s got ruddy great holes in it. Like this one did.’

  Tony and Bill hooted joyfully.

  ‘Remember I’m a real person,’ said Sophie.

  They all stared at her.

  ‘I mean, I have come down to London from the North. And I have met a stuck-up snob. And I could have met him somewhere else.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ said Clive. ‘Such as?’

  ‘I used to work in Derry and Toms,’ said Sophie. ‘Have you ever been anywhere like that?’

  ‘Many times,’ said Clive. ‘And I have managed not to marry anyone who served me.’

  ‘Or a nightclub? I could have been a Pussy at the Whisky A Go Go. I thought of it.’

  ‘Oh, yes. That’s what those girls are for, taking home to mother.’

  ‘Your character doesn’t have to be exactly like you, though,’ said Sophie. ‘You could have human blood in your veins. You could be an intellectual who doesn’t meet pretty girls very often.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bill. ‘She’s right. You could try acting.’

  ‘I meet pretty girls all the time,’ said Clive. ‘And they meet me back.’

  ‘I think he was talking about the intellectual bit,’ said Tony.

  ‘Could you ever fall in love with someone who poured you a beer in a pub?’ said Dennis.

  ‘It’s funny you should say that,’ said Clive. ‘There’s a girl who works behind the bar in the Argyll Arms to whom I have in fact proposed. I was drunk at the time. But I was deadly serious.’

  ‘So there we are,’ said Dennis. ‘Barbara works in a pub and Jim comes in to meet a friend …’

  ‘I refuse to be a bloody Tory, though,’ said Clive. ‘Nobody in London with half a brain is going to vote for that lot next week. Anyway, what happened to him working at Number Ten?’

  Tony and Bill had forgotten that the hapless husband in Wedded Bliss? was originally going to be some kind of thrusting young politico, a press secretary or a speechwriter. That had been dropped when they had turned to the Gambols for inspiration, and the scripts had become so generic that he could only be employed in some unspecified, I’m-off-to-the-office-now-darling white-collar capacity.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Tony. ‘I’d forgotten all about that. It was just about the only decent idea we had when we started.’

  ‘And by the time it reaches the screen, Harold will be in,’ said Bill. ‘Jim will be in at the birth of our brave new England.’

  ‘My dad would kill me if I were Labour,’ said Sophie. ‘He says he’s worked too ha
rd to give it all away to the work-shy and the trades unions.’

  Tony looked at Bill, and Bill looked at Dennis, and each could tell that the other was thinking the same thing. Here was everything they wanted to bring to the screen, in one neat and beautifully gift-wrapped package, handed to them by a ferocious and undiscovered talent who looked like a star. The class system, men and women and the relationships between them, snobbery, education, the North and the South, politics, the way that a new country seemed to be emerging from the dismal old one that they’d all grown up in.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Bill to Sophie.

  ‘Will you let Brian know, then?’ she said.

  ‘Let him know what?’

  ‘About, you know … Whether you think I’m right for it.’

  The men all laughed, a lot, even Clive.

  ‘You are it,’ said Bill.

  ‘But you’d let me do it?’

  ‘We want you to do it,’ said Tony.

  ‘I’ve never done anything like this before.’

  ‘None of us had, until we did,’ said Dennis. ‘I didn’t know the first thing about producing comedy when they gave me The Awkward Squad.’

  ‘It’s not even worth making a joke,’ said Tony.

  ‘Like fish in a barrel,’ said Bill.

  ‘You never learn, Dennis, do you?’ said Clive.

  Dennis rolled his eyes.

  ‘But … Shouldn’t I go and be a funny secretary in a terrible play first?’

  ‘If that’s what you want to do, be our guest,’ said Bill. ‘And come back and see us in five years. But we haven’t really got time to plot out your career, because we urgently need someone to play Barbara. So if you’re not interested, clear off.’

  ‘I think I could do it,’ said Sophie.

  ‘You?’ said Bill, mock-surprised. ‘Well. That’s an idea. What do you think, Tony?’

  ‘Hmmm,’ said Tony. ‘I’m not sure. What’s she been in?’

  Sophie knew they were joking, but she was much closer to tears of desperation than to laughter.

  ‘Stop torturing the poor girl,’ said Dennis.

  The two writers groaned with disappointment.

  ‘Here’s the thing,’ said Tony. ‘If you’re lucky, you meet the right people at the right time.’

  ‘And we’ve met the right person at the right time,’ said Dennis.

  It took a while for Sophie to understand that he was talking about her.

  She went in to see Brian the next morning.

  ‘I’ve got a job,’ she said.

  ‘You didn’t have to do that,’ he said. ‘I told you. Do things my way and you’ll be fine.’

  ‘I thought I was allowed to do things my way for a month.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t want you going back to Barkers of Kensington afterwards.’

  ‘Derry and Toms.’

  ‘That may be a step up, I don’t know. But it seems like the same thing to me.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I used to work at Derry and Toms. I’m not going back there. I got the Comedy Playhouse part.’

  ‘The part of the wife?’

  ‘No, they’re taking a chance and giving me the husband.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Brian.

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

  ‘Of course I’m not pleased. It wasn’t a very good script, you’re not right for it, it won’t go to series and it’ll take me that bit longer to get you spray-painted.’

  ‘They’re changing the script.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I told them it wasn’t very good.’

  ‘They liked that, did they?’

  ‘They seemed to. They’re writing a new one for me.’

  Brian stared at her.

  ‘Are you sure any of this actually happened? Who was there?’

  ‘Clive, Dennis, Tony and Bill.’

  ‘And have they cleared this with Tom?’

  ‘Who’s Tom?’

  ‘Tom Sloan. The Head of Light Entertainment.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Maybe we shouldn’t call off the bikini-shopping expedition on Monday after all.’

  ‘You were going to take me bikini-shopping?’

  ‘Not me, dear. Patsy. I’m not interested in looking at curvy young women in bikinis. I’m deeply in love with my wife and I’m only interested in money.’

  She now understood that Brian emphasized his feelings for his wife over and over again for the same reason that people with a fear of heights told themselves not to look down when they were at the top of a tall building: he was afraid. Every time she went into his office, another beautiful young woman was coming out. It was sweet, really. He actually was deeply in love with his wife and he wanted to keep it that way.

  Tom Sloan told Dennis that he wouldn’t dream of casting an unknown actress in the role of Cicely.

  ‘Well,’ said Dennis, ‘she’s not called Cicely any more. She’s called Barbara and she’s from Blackpool. It’s a whole new script.’

  ‘Who on earth are you going to get to play someone called Barbara from Blackpool?’

  ‘Sophie Straw,’ said Dennis.

  ‘Who’s Sophie Straw?’

  ‘She’s the woman you said you wouldn’t dream of casting.’

  ‘Right,’ said Tom. ‘So your only argument is a circular one.’

  ‘It’s what the boys want.’

  ‘Really? What about you?’

  It was what Dennis wanted, but whenever he was in Tom Sloan’s office, the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’ seemed impossible to say. They contained none of the ambiguity that meetings with his superiors seemed to require. In the past, he had found himself watching what everyone else was doing before committing himself firmly and irrevocably to tea or coffee, if it was being offered. But he did want Sophie. He thought she was funny, and magnetic, and beautiful. And also he thought she’d be brilliant in the role that the boys were creating for her. They would all regret it if Tom put his foot down.

  Oh, to hell with it.

  ‘I think it’s an interesting idea,’ he said. He could feel his pulse start to race.

  ‘A good idea?’

  Tom Sloan (left) in happier Eurovision days

  He hesitated.

  ‘Well. On balance, I don’t think it’s the worst idea in the world.’

  He hadn’t known he had it in him.

  Sloan sighed.

  ‘You’d better give me this whole new script, then.’

  ‘It doesn’t exist yet. They only met Sophie on Thursday.’

  Tom shook his head impatiently.

  ‘Well, you’d better bring this Sophie up to see me, then.’

  Dennis took her up to the fourth floor the following afternoon. She looked enchanting, he thought. When she’d come in to audition she looked like a film star, but she’d toned it all down a little for Tom, who was a stern Presbyterian. The dress was longer and the lipstick wasn’t as bright.

  ‘You look terrific,’ Dennis said as they were waiting for the lift.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘For the interview, I mean.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And … in life. You look terrific in life and appropriate for the interview. At the same time. Terrific and appropriate.’

  He decided to stop there.

  ‘Have you got any advice?’ said Sophie. ‘Should I be flirty?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘With Tom Sloan.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. I see what you mean. No, not flirty. And he’s very suspicious of people who he thinks are telling him what he wants to hear.’

  ‘Right-o. What happens if he says no? What do we do then?’

  ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’

  ‘We’re about to come to it.’

  The lift had arrived, but Sophie made no move to get into it. The doors closed and it was called elsewhere.

  ‘Brian doesn�
��t think he’ll say yes.’

  ‘He’ll love you.’

  ‘But what will we do if he doesn’t?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Dennis. ‘We’d have to have a chat.’

  ‘Would you just make it without me?’

  ‘The boys wouldn’t like that. They’re writing for you.’

  ‘So what could they do?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘What are their choices?’

  ‘It depends on how cross they are, I suppose.’

  ‘What about if they’re very cross?’

  ‘They could march off and show it to the other side, I suppose.’

  ‘They don’t have Comedy Playhouse, do they?’

  ‘No. They’d have to sketch out a series, but they’ve got lots of ideas. Anyway. It’s not going to come to that.’

  ‘Would you go with us?’

  ‘No. I’m a BBC employee. More’s the pity. The money’s much better over there. But please. It’s all going to be fine.’

  The lift came back and this time Sophie got in it.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said when the doors had closed.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘I’ve got something to come back with if he doesn’t think I’m a good idea.’

  ‘No,’ said Dennis. ‘No. We don’t want to mention any of that to Tom. He hates the other lot. He’s losing all his best people.’

  ‘I can see why,’ said Sophie.

  ‘He hasn’t even done anything yet!’ said Dennis.

  He didn’t want to get out of the lift when the doors opened upstairs, just as Sophie hadn’t wanted to get into it downstairs. But Sophie had already gone, and he was obliged to chase after her.

  ‘So,’ said Tom Sloan, when they had been served tea and talked about Sophie’s favourite BBC series. ‘I understand the boys are jigging the script around a bit for you.’

  ‘They’re chucking the old one altogether.’

  ‘I rather liked it.’

  ‘Well,’ said Sophie, ‘there’s no accounting for taste,’ and she laughed.

  Dennis felt a sudden urge to go to the lavatory.

  ‘What was wrong with it?’

  ‘Ooh, it was awful,’ she said. ‘They were a right couple of drips.’

  ‘And there was me hoping it might become a series,’ he said, and laughed.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Sophie firmly. She was, Dennis could see, trying very hard not to tell him what he wanted to hear.

  ‘Well,’ said Sloan, ‘the thing is, as Head of Light Entertainment, if I want something to be a series, it usually happens.’