by Nick Hornby
Marie managed to put the phone down on her just before she was cut off. The panic had been replaced by something else, something between nausea and an intense sadness. She’d always suspected that she was the sort of girl who wouldn’t go home to see a sick father if she had a shot at a television series, but she’d rather hoped that the news would be revealed slowly, and not for a while yet.
Every day, it seemed, more and more people had become involved in the programme. And there was something exciting about the idea being made real by props ladies and set designers, script editors and electricians, but there was something sad about it too, because it didn’t belong to the five of them any more. When Sophie arrived at Television Centre, she had to dodge people she didn’t know, people who hadn’t been there at the beginning and probably didn’t care about the programme very much, and certainly not as much as she did. It was just another job to them, and every time she saw a wardrobe mistress roll her eyes or heard a carpenter swear, she wanted to go back to the church hall where they’d rehearsed and where she knew everybody. She didn’t want this to be just a job, not to anybody. Sophie ached to be on television, but now she wished they could rehearse for another two or three years.
Tony, Bill and Dennis were in the corridor outside the dressing rooms, talking about the title.
‘I’m afraid Tom’s wedded to Wedded Bliss,’ said Dennis.
‘Not Wedded Bliss?’ said Tony.
‘Yes,’ said Dennis. ‘That’s what I just said.’
‘No,’ said Bill. ‘You said Wedded Bliss. You didn’t say Wedded Bliss Question Mark Ho Ho Ho.’
‘You knew the question mark had gone,’ said Dennis. ‘You are a bugger.’
‘I think it’s useful for you to be reminded on a regular basis of your past crimes,’ said Bill.
‘How can it be Wedded Bliss,’ said Tony, ‘when they’re not married for a single second in the episode? We know that if we get a series, they’ll be married in the first episode. But in this one, he clocks her for the first time in a pub and then spends thirty minutes chatting her up. In the old one, they were already married.’
‘He’s right,’ said Bill. ‘We can only call it Wedded Bliss if old Sloan guarantees the series before the Comedy Playhouse goes out. If it stays a one-off, then the title just seems potty.’
‘Here she is,’ said Tony. ‘Have you got a good title for us?’
‘Barbara,’ said Sophie.
To Sophie’s embarrassment, Dennis thought about it, or pretended to think about it, for a moment.
‘Hmmm,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t quite convey as much of the, the relationship side of things as we want it to.’
‘I think she was joking, Dennis,’ said Bill.
Dennis laughed at the joke, appreciatively, twenty seconds too late.
‘Very good,’ he said.
Tony caught Bill’s eye. Everyone loved Sophie, but Dennis loved her the most.
‘Perhaps the names of both the characters?’ said Dennis. ‘Barbara and Jim?’
‘Have you put a bloody question mark back in there?’ said Bill.
‘I was asking a question,’ said Dennis.
‘Barbara and Jim,’ said Tony. ‘Barbara and Jim.’
‘Thrilling, isn’t it?’ said Bill. ‘Things you will never hear the Great British Public say – number one in an occasional series. “Oh, I can’t wait to find out who Barbara and Jim are.” ’
‘You know what we were talking about the other day?’ said Dennis. ‘How this is Sophie’s show?’
‘Were you?’ said Sophie.
‘You weren’t supposed to know about it, though,’ said Tony. He looked at Dennis meaningfully.
‘Why is it my show?’ said Sophie.
‘Never you mind,’ said Bill.
‘I wonder if we can convey that in some way,’ said Dennis.
‘We’re not talking about it, though,’ said Bill. ‘We’re especially not talking about it in front of the cast.’
‘Why is it my show?’ said Sophie.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ said Bill. ‘Because you’re the pretty one and he’s smitten, you get all the gags and he’s the straight man.’
‘Oh,’ she said.
‘You hadn’t noticed?’
She’d certainly noticed that she’d got more laughs during the rehearsals, but she’d thought this was because she was winning, beating Clive at a game. It hadn’t occurred to her that she’d simply been given more gags.
‘Perhaps we should make it official,’ said Dennis. ‘And I know you’ll laugh, but I have another punctuation idea.’
‘I’m not going to laugh,’ said Bill. ‘I promise.’
‘Brackets around the “and Jim”. Barbara (and Jim). Barbara open bracket and Jim close bracket.’
Bill laughed.
‘Funny?’ said Dennis hopefully.
‘Only because of what it will do to Clive’s self-esteem,’ said Bill. ‘That makes it hilarious.’
‘Oh,’ said Dennis. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’
‘Then let’s not tell him until after the recording.’
‘We can’t do that,’ said Dennis.
‘Put it another way,’ said Tony. ‘We definitely can’t do it before. I know him. He won’t show up.’
‘Can you do that?’ said Sophie. ‘Just not show up?’
It had never occurred to her, and maybe it was something to consider.
‘Of course,’ said Bill. ‘As long as you don’t mind never working again.’
Sophie stopped considering. She decided that her personal problems were of no relevance to her colleagues and went to get changed for the final rehearsals.
6
On the day of the recording, Clive discovered that from the dressing room you could hear the conversations of the audience members queuing outside. You couldn’t not hear them, unless you hummed loudly to yourself at all times.
‘At least the tickets are free,’ the loudest voice, a man, from the sound of it middle-aged, was saying.
‘They had to be,’ said a woman. ‘Nobody would have paid for them. Have you heard of anybody?’
‘The bloke rings a bell,’ said another man. ‘Clive somebody.’
‘What’s he been in, then?’
‘That’s just it. I haven’t a clue.’
A fourth person joined the conversation, another woman.
‘Did you listen to The Awkward Squad?’
‘Oh, that was awful.’
‘Did you think so?’
‘That daft Captain, with his silly posh voice.’
‘Well, that was Clive Richardson.’
‘Oh, Gawd. Not him.’
‘I thought he was funny.’
‘Come off it.’
‘I did.’
‘That silly posh voice?’
‘He was putting it on. For comic effect.’
‘I hope he leaves it off tonight. Still, it’s only half an hour, isn’t it?’
There was a knock on Clive’s door.
‘It’s me,’ said Sophie. ‘Are you listening to all this?’
Clive let her in.
‘I don’t have much choice. Only the BBC would let the audience queue up outside the dressing rooms.’
‘I thought it was quite interesting.’
‘That’s because they haven’t been talking about you.’
With exquisite timing, Clive’s female fan brought up the subject of Sophie.
‘She’s supposed to be hopeless, though.’
‘I thought she was a newcomer.’
‘Oh, no. My daughter saw her in Clacton, in a summer show.’
Clive looked at Sophie and Sophie shook her head.
‘Thinks she’s it, apparently. My daughter waited half an hour for an autograph and she just walked right past her. Mind you, what my daughter was going to do with her autograph I don’t know.’
‘Might be worth keeping if this takes off,’ said one of the men.
‘Yes, but it won’t ta
ke off, will it?’ said the woman. ‘Not with her in it.’
‘Or him.’
‘She’ll be the problem.’
‘They both will.’
‘I don’t mind him.’
‘I don’t like either of them. Oh, well. What else are you going to do?’
‘I’ve been to one before,’ said the woman. ‘It’s nearer an hour, once they’ve got everyone settled and the warm-up man’s told his jokes.’
‘What was the warm-up chap like? Last time?’
‘Oh, you know. Not very good. Not as funny as he thinks he is.’
‘Oh, lumme,’ said the man. ‘I’ve half a mind to go home.’
‘Oh, don’t,’ said the woman. ‘It might not be as bad as all that.’
Sophie puffed out her cheeks.
‘Shall we go and stand in the corridor?’ she said.
‘It’s going to be great,’ said Clive.
‘We’ve all been living in a bubble,’ said Sophie.
‘What sort of bubble?’
‘A lovely squishy pink bubble.’
‘I wouldn’t knowingly live in a squishy pink bubble,’ said Clive.
‘Any colour you like, then. We all love the script. I do anyway. Tom Sloan loves Dennis. Dennis loves Tony and Bill. And now it’s all gone pop. Suddenly.’
‘That’s what bubbles do,’ said Clive. ‘That’s why you shouldn’t choose to live in them.’
‘People don’t come to these things because they want to cheer you along, do they?’ said Sophie. ‘They come because they’re bored. Or because they want to see the inside of a TV studio.’
‘Or because they applied for tickets months ago in the hope of getting something good,’ said Clive. ‘And they got us instead.’
‘We’re good.’
‘We think so. But they’ve never heard of us. So now they’re cheesed off. I went along to one once because the producer had turned me down for a job. I went because I was hoping it would be awful.’
‘And was it?’
‘Anything can be awful if you want it to be.’
‘Even good things?’
‘Especially good things, sometimes. They make people jealous.’
‘I don’t want it to go out in the world,’ said Sophie. ‘I want to stay like we were.’
‘It’s a TV programme,’ said Clive. ‘It belongs in the world.’
‘Oh, hell,’ said Sophie.
Dennis knocked on the door.
‘Everyone all right?’
Sophie made a face.
‘Oh, you’ll be fine,’ said Dennis.
‘How do you know?’ she said.
‘Because you’re not normal,’ he said. ‘Nothing matters to you as much as this. You’re not going to mess it up.’
And she didn’t. Clive had been in plenty of student productions in which the object of the exercise was to destroy one’s friends, classmates and contemporaries onstage, but he’d never experienced anything like this: the moment the red recording light came on, Sophie was at him, like a vicious dog that had been kept in a dark shed and then released into the light. All through the rehearsals she had been trying things out in an attempt to wring more out of the script than Tony and Bill had intended to provide: she made faces, held a line back for a couple of seconds longer than anyone was expecting, found intonations and emphases that could turn a simple ‘Thank you’ into something that made people laugh, or at least watch her. So he shouldn’t have been surprised by her energy or her relentlessness, but he was rocked back on his heels fighting her off: she was everywhere, in every gap, over and under every line, hers and his. Poor old Bert, Clive could see, was lost, which meant that some of her performance was too. Clive felt as though he’d gone three goals down in the first two minutes of a football match, and though he now suspected that even a draw was beyond him, he could at least make a better fist of things. He was always decent, in any part he was given, but nobody had ever pushed him to go further, and because he hadn’t been pushed, he coasted. Sophie wasn’t ever going to let him coast. Perhaps that was even a good thing, if you looked at it the right way. Now, though, he had to watch, listen, feel, during every single second of the performance, and respond to what she was actually doing, rather than what he’d presumed she was going to do. It was all rather exhausting.
At the end, the man with the APPLAUSE board didn’t even have to lift it above his head. Clive ushered her forward so that she could take a bow, and the audience cheered, and he applauded too. He hadn’t been left with a lot of choice.
Sophie was beside her father’s hospital bed by lunchtime on Monday afternoon. He hadn’t died, and he hadn’t had any more heart attacks, and he was awake and talking. There was an argument to say that this was the worst of all possible outcomes, because now he could sit there, looking wounded. Marie was on the other side of the bed. She wasn’t wounded. She was just sour and disappointed. Sophie gave her dad the grapes she’d bought in London, and a bottle of Lucozade, and a Commando War Stories book called At Dawn You Die.
‘You must be made of money,’ he said, by way of thanks.
‘Or made of guilt,’ said Marie.
Sophie took a deep breath.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Yes, but what are you sorry for?’ said Marie.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t come.’
‘Not good enough,’ said Marie. ‘We talked about this. We decided you had to be sorry you didn’t come. Not sorry you couldn’t come.’
She understood the difference. They wanted her to admit she’d made a mistake.
‘I couldn’t come,’ she said. ‘I wish I had been able to.’
‘So why couldn’t you?’ said her father. ‘What was so important?’
‘I was in a BBC programme.’
‘What do you mean, you were in it? In the audience?’
‘I was in it. Acting in it. A Comedy Playhouse.’
They both stared at her.
‘Comedy Playhouse?’
‘Yes.’
‘On the BBC?’
‘Yes. That Comedy Playhouse. And we had to rehearse on Saturday and they recorded it on Sunday and if I’d come home I might have lost my chance. And it’s a big chance. They want it to be a series, and it’s about a couple, a man and a woman, and I’m the woman.’
They stared at her some more, then stared at each other.
‘Are you … Are you sure?’
She laughed.
‘I’m sure.’
‘And did it go all right?’
‘It went well. Thank you. Anyway. Do you understand better?’
‘You couldn’t have come,’ said her father. ‘Not if you had a Comedy Playhouse.’
‘With the hope of a series,’ said Marie.
‘You’re going to be on telly!’ said her father. ‘We’d be so proud of you!’
It had never occurred to Sophie that she would be forgiven so readily for her trespasses and she wasn’t sure that she liked it. She had refused to visit her dangerously ill father in hospital because her career was more important to her, and the least he could do was judge her. You could get away with anything, it seemed, if you were on the telly.
THE FIRST SERIES
7
Clive Richardson was an actor because being an actor was easily the best way of meeting pretty girls. He’d suspected as much before he got into the game, and he hadn’t been disappointed: there were pretty girls everywhere he went. It started at LAMDA, his drama school, where he understood properly for the first time that actresses were better-looking than ordinary people; if he’d gone to teacher training college, or a school of medicine, then he’d have had to reject nineteen out of every twenty classmates. At LAMDA, he wanted all of them. And then he left, and went on to work at the BBC and in the repertory theatres, where there were hundreds more.
Out in the real world, he discovered that it wasn’t just pretty actresses who were available to him. Pretty girls who worked in other professions loved actor
s. Sometimes they were looking for a way into the entertainment business – and as far as Clive was concerned, he was as good a way in as any – but mostly they just wanted the association. An actor has the pick of the pretty girls, so any pretty girl he looked at seemed to feel validated in some way: he wants me! It was beautiful. Being an actor was like having a system for the horses that actually worked.
Clive’s chief objection to comedy was that he feared the system would stop working for him if all he did was make people laugh – especially if he made them laugh by being stupid. He wasn’t at all sure pretty girls liked that. Richard Burton and Tom Courtenay and Peter O’Toole were movie stars, and that brought advantages of a different order entirely: Clive had not yet bagged an Elizabeth Taylor. But were they movie stars because they were born movie stars? Or were they movie stars because they refused to play Captain Smythe? The only comedian whose career gave him pause for thought was Peter Sellers: he had recently married Britt Ekland, and there had been rumours about his off-screen relationship with Sophia Loren. If Clive could be guaranteed women of Ekland/Loren quality, he’d speak in silly voices to whoever would listen, but Peter Sellers was doing his voices in Dr Strangelove, on the big screen, not The Awkward Squad on the wireless. He suspected that Sophia Loren wouldn’t be terribly interested in the man who played Captain Smythe. Wedded Bliss was a television programme, at least, but his character showed very few signs of doing him any favours.
Sophie would be an interesting test case. She was more Sabrina than Sophia Loren – Sophia Loren was an Italian film star, not a Blackpool beauty queen – but she was magnificent, in her own way. He’d thought he detected a tiny spark of something, when they first met, but then she’d trampled all over him in the Comedy Playhouse, and that was before he heard about the change of title.
Clive had not yet had a telephone installed in his flat, and had not yet been persuaded of the benefits of doing so. His parents couldn’t call, and neither could girls who had turned out not to be exactly what he was looking for. He lived off Warren Street, and if anyone wanted to reach him, they knew that they could leave a message at the Three Crowns on Tottenham Court Road with Davie behind the bar. Davie didn’t mind. He thought that writing down phone messages for Clive, and very occasionally accepting scripts on his behalf, was the most glamorous part of his job. After a couple of months of regular patronage, Clive came to the conclusion that this was true. The Three Crowns was not a glamorous pub.