by Nick Hornby
‘Which part?’ said Tony.
‘I don’t mean Barbara’s experience … They’ll be fine with that. No offence meant.’
‘A lot taken,’ said Sophie.
‘It’s Jim. Jim, to my mind, is not a virgin.’
‘I didn’t think he would be, to your mind.’
‘I can act, you know, insecurity and donnishness and shyness and the rest of it. But I can’t do anything about what I look like.’
‘I didn’t think you’d have the nerve to go through with it,’ said Bill. ‘But you have.’
‘I make no apologies for frankness.’
‘I’m not sure I quite understand what he’s being frank about,’ said Sophie.
‘Clive thinks he’s too good-looking to be a virgin,’ said Tony.
Sophie laughed. Clive looked pained.
‘It’s a serious point,’ said Clive. ‘I knew I’d be mocked for it, but that doesn’t make it less valid.’
‘You don’t have to wear specs and have acne to be a virgin,’ said Bill.
‘I understand, but … Don’t you think it shows on my face?’
Bill wrinkled his nose up in disgust.
‘What?’
‘Experience.’
Sophie looked at him, because he was inviting scrutiny, and decided that even though he had probably slept with loads of girls, there was an innocence that could be mistaken for sexual inexperience. He hadn’t lived much, as far as she could see. He’d spent too much time waiting around for something to happen to him.
‘And anyway,’ said Clive, ‘why can’t I … Why am I a virgin until the end of the script?’
‘What we’re implying,’ said Tony, ‘is that you’re, you know … hopeless.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Well. There are various forms of hopelessness, obviously. The one we were thinking of was impotence.’
Clive slumped into his chair. He couldn’t speak for several moments.
‘Where does it say that?’
‘It doesn’t.’
‘Oh, bloody hell. Where is it implied?’
‘Page nine. Did you not understand a word you were saying just now?’
‘I just read the lines. I don’t think about them.’
He scanned the page.
‘Oh, Christ. “Hydraulic failure?” What would happen if I marched straight round to see a solicitor the morning after the first episode has gone out?’
‘A solicitor?’
‘There’s got to be something legal here. Slander. Libel. Something.’
‘You’d be suing a fictional character who you’d agreed to play. I’d go to every day of the trial, if it came to court.’
‘I should never have agreed to those brackets,’ said Clive. ‘I’ll be saying that for the rest of my life.’
‘It might have been the brackets that made us think of it,’ said Tony. ‘They’re sort of a droopy punctuation mark, aren’t they?’
‘Well,’ said Clive, ‘mark my words: nobody’s going to believe it.’
He was wrong. They believed it and loved it and carried on loving it. There was one kind of life for them before the first episode of the new series and another kind of life afterwards, and the night the programme was transmitted marked the end of the life before. They would all remember the transmission at some point or another in the years to come, and they never failed to be surprised by the memory: their new lives had already been born, but they watched television with people who belonged to the old. Sophie went home to watch with her father and Auntie Marie; her father was appalled and confused and proud, and tried to anticipate jokes and plot developments, and always got it wrong, and then tried to make a case for the superiority of his own version, which meant that half the lines, and all the subtleties of timing and delivery, were lost. Dennis watched with Edith, who didn’t laugh once, and told him at the end that it was very good indeed, if that was the sort of thing one liked. Clive could not resist going home to Eastleigh, to watch with Cathy and his mother and his gratifyingly disbelieving father, who had recovered himself by the end of the episode. He enjoyed the brackets and the hydraulic failure more than Clive’s performance, he said, and told Cathy that she was well off out of it. Tony watched with June, who wept tears of pride at the end; they had both invited Bill, but he went home to Barnet to watch with his parents, who, he felt, with absolutely no evidence, seemed relieved by the unambiguous heterosexuality of the programme. After that night, they belonged to each other as much as they belonged to anyone else.
TELEVISION REVIEW:
BARBARA (AND JIM)
You will probably remember Barbara, the pneumatic, kinetic Blackpool lass who leapt, thrillingly, through the screen and into our living rooms, from a recent and especially noteworthy episode of Comedy Playhouse; you may even remember Jim – or, as the title of the show cruelly has it, (Jim), who was lucky enough to pick her up in the West End pub where she was working. Jim is now her handsome but hapless Home Counties husband, and he works for Mr Wilson at 10 Downing Street. But now Barbara (and indeed Jim) have been given their own BBC Television series, they will be as hard to forget as one’s own immediate family.
We are, of course, talking about a comedy series here, and therefore one should hesitate before invoking the practitioners of other, greater, art-forms. But the superb work of Tony Holmes and Bill Gardiner (who wrote the popular but generic radio show The Awkward Squad), with its careful attention to the cadences and rhythms of ordinary speech, and its affection for the sorts of people who, until the last few years, have been under-represented in any form of drama or fiction, brings to mind the work of Messrs Braine, Barstow and Sillitoe; none of these writers, however, are famous for their jokes, as yet, so one must of course acknowledge the debt that Mr Holmes and Mr Gardiner owe to Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, and perhaps even to Kingsley Amis.
There is, as yet, no Galton and Simpson series that attempts to deal with the relationships between men and women, however, specifically the relationships between husbands and wives; nor have the creators of Hancock’s Half Hour yet ventured north of Watford to find their characters. Mr Holmes and Mr Gardiner, both from London, have to these ears provided Sophie Straw, the young and hitherto unknown actress who plays Barbara, with strikingly authentic dialogue; she must be thanking her lucky stars for their ears every single day she goes into work. But then, she has repaid them in heaped spades, because Miss Straw is the most extraordinarily gifted comic actress I have seen since the war. She could not shine as she does without the subtle, unshowy but nonetheless impressive work of Clive Richardson, another Awkward Squad alumnus, but Miss Straw is a revelation, and the soul of the series.
Last night’s episode revealed, startlingly, that the marriage between Barbara and Jim had not yet been consummated – a sorry state of affairs that had clearly been remedied by the end of the programme, when we were presented with the ecstatic and amusingly metaphorical bongs of Big Ben. Indeed, the revelation may be too startling for some, and one suspects that, as we speak, the Director-General of the BBC will be looking with some dismay at thousands of green-inked letters asking him to resign. He should on no account do so. The very existence of Barbara (and Jim) indicates the birth of a modern Britain, one prepared to acknowledge that its citizens are as sex-obsessed as our neighbours across the Channel, and that those who have not received the benefit of a public school or university education are just as likely to make clever, amusing observations as those who have – maybe more so, if poor old Jim is any guide. This marriage can, over time, come to contain everything we have only just begun to think about in Britain; perhaps we would have done so sooner, had not the war and the long years of austerity intervened. Barbara (and Jim) could not be better, funnier or more congenial guides to a decade that seems, finally, to be shaking off the dead hand of its predecessor.
The Times, 11 December 1964
9
The interview galvanized her, and anyway she hated the idea that she might get caught
out in a lie, so she found a flat in the neighbourhood she’d already described – to Diane and the readers of Crush – as home: in Kensington Church Street, just up the hill from Derry and Toms. Sophie could walk out of the front door and be buying cosmetics at her old counter within ten minutes, if she wanted to. And it was only a little bit further on to Biba in Abingdon Road. She walked there on the first morning she woke up in her own bed and bought herself a brown pinstripe dress.
Marjorie seemed to be under the impression that they would be moving together.
‘Oh,’ said Sophie. ‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well,’ said Sophie. ‘It’s only got one bedroom.’
‘This place has only got one bedroom.’
‘Yes,’ said Sophie. ‘But I didn’t think either of us liked it that way.’
‘I don’t,’ said Marjorie. ‘I wish you were moving into a place with two bedrooms.’
Sophie hadn’t really thought of Marjorie as a dependant, someone she’d be carting around until Marjorie got married, or got promoted, or got her own television series.
‘We never talked about staying together,’ said Sophie.
‘I didn’t think we needed to,’ said Marjorie. ‘I thought it was just one of those things.’
‘No,’ said Sophie. ‘It’s not.’
That degree of firmness felt uncomfortable, and Marjorie could tell.
‘You are lucky,’ said Marjorie.
‘I know.’
‘I don’t think you do.’
‘I do.’
‘It’s all looks,’ said Marjorie. ‘Honestly, I’d cut your face and bust off and put them on me if I thought it would make any difference. I don’t know what I’d do about your waist. You can’t steal waists, more’s the pity.’
Oh dear, thought Sophie. Not this again. She couldn’t share a flat with Marjorie any longer, not with all the sharp implements around.
‘You can’t steal busts and faces either, is the truth of it,’ said Sophie.
‘No, but at least they’re actual things. A nice waist is sort of the absence of something, isn’t it?’
‘Anyway,’ said Sophie, who felt they were drifting away from the subject at hand, ‘I know how lucky I’ve been.’
‘But you don’t want to share the luck.’
‘We’re flatmates, Marjorie. I don’t know how much I owe you.’
‘A lot, I think.’
‘I can tell.’
‘I took you in when you had nowhere to go.’
‘You were looking for someone to share the rent.’
‘There’s always two ways of looking at everything.’
There was nothing to be done about good fortune, if that’s what she’d been given. Sophie could see that as long as it lasted, people would want some of it.
‘You’ll get someone else in,’ she said. ‘It’s a nice flat.’
‘It’s not.’
‘It’s handy for work.’
‘So this is it, then?’ said Marjorie. ‘You’re just … off?’
‘I think so,’ said Sophie. ‘I’ll pay rent for another month, though.’
‘Ooh, the last of the big spenders.’
She couldn’t get her stuff out quick enough.
Her home in Blackpool had dark furniture and wallpaper and paintings of horses on the wall. The dark furniture had been inherited from her grandparents, and couldn’t have been worth anything; the paintings of horses had been bought from Woolworths. But every home she went in was the same, even if the people she was visiting had a bit of money – the same fustiness, the same feeling that the good things in this country, the things that people valued, had all happened a long time ago, way before she was born. Before she’d moved to London, she’d loved looking at magazine photos of famous people at home, young people, fashion designers and singers and film stars, and she was dazzled by the white walls and the bright colours. Was it really only young people who wanted to paint over the misery of the last quarter of a century? The first thing she did when she moved in was strip off the brown wallpaper, and then she paid a man to paint the place white. As soon as she had the money and the time, she’d find things to hang on the walls. She didn’t care what these things were, as long as they were yellow and red and green and there were no sailing ships or castles and there was nothing with four legs anywhere.
She bought herself two Le Corbusier-style chairs and Afghan rugs and a bed and two beanbags and even some pasta jars, though she hadn’t ever bought or cooked pasta, from Habitat in the Fulham Road. The first people to visit were Brian and his wife; they came for drinks and then took her out to supper. The first person to stay the night was Clive.
The day after the first episode, with its ruinous insinuations, had aired, Clive took the view that he needed to mount a desperate public relations campaign that would entail sleeping with as many girls as possible, the less discreet the better. By the time he got to Bev, a lovely little thing he’d picked up at a party to launch a new cabaret club in Glasshouse Street, the naked female form was beginning to appear a little odd to him, and he didn’t enjoy the occasion as much as he might have done. He didn’t think Bev had noticed. He was, after all, a good actor, and, unlike Jim, he was never afflicted by any bizarre psychological and/or physiological problems. He was almost uncannily reliable, but as he rarely slept with the same girl for more than a couple of weeks, he didn’t receive as many admiring comments as he thought he deserved. It was, he supposed, a good argument for marriage, perhaps the best he’d come across. If he were to sleep with the same woman all the time, then that woman would know just how extraordinarily dependable and responsive he was.
‘Can I say I cured you?’ said Bev afterwards.
‘Cured me?’ he said, as if he didn’t know what she was going to say next.
‘In the first episode of Barbara (and Jim) …’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yes. I see what you mean. I’d forgotten all about that.’
There had been two episodes since, neither of which, thankfully, made any reference to his marital inadequacies; he had urged Bill and Tony to include references to his subsequent marital adequacies, just to help the audience develop a fuller picture of the marriage, but they hadn’t shown any interest in his notes so far.
‘The thing is, I was cured by the end of the episode,’ said Clive. ‘Don’t you remember? The chimes of Big Ben and all that?’
‘I didn’t really understand that bit,’ said Bev. ‘I thought it was New Year’s Eve, suddenly.’
‘No,’ said Clive. ‘The bongs represented satisfactory sexual congress.’
‘Lost on me,’ said Bev. ‘But I do love the programme. I never go out on Thursdays now.’
Bev was not alone. They had started off with ten million viewers, and so far they had added another million a week.
‘What’s she like?’ said Bev.
‘Sophie? Yes, she’s very nice.’
‘You should be with her,’ said Bev.
There was no wistfulness in her voice. She seemed to be speaking as a television fan, rather than as a lover.
‘Do you think?’
‘Yes. Can you imagine?’
‘Imagine what?’
‘You’d be like the Burton and Taylor of the BBC. Everyone would go mad.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Well, I’d love it, and I’m lying in bed with you.’
It was quite a persuasive observation.
Clive took Sophie to the Trattoo, just down the road from Sophie’s new flat, on a Saturday night, after the technical rehearsal for the fourth episode. He told her that Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers ate there all the time, but there was no sign of either of them. And in the absence of any proper celebrities, heads turned when they walked into the restaurant and people started whispering. And because the sight of the other diners whispering was so startling, Clive and Sophie started whispering too.
‘Are they whispering because we walked in?’ said Sophie.
/> ‘I think so,’ said Clive.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Sophie.
‘I know,’ said Clive.
‘Has that ever happened to you before?’
‘Because of my radio work on The Awkward Squad, you mean?’
‘This is so odd. What do we do?’
A lady on the table behind Clive’s shoulder smiled at her. Sophie smiled back.
‘Give them something to talk about.’
He took Sophie’s hands in his and looked into her eyes. The whispering in the room didn’t get louder, because the people were all very well dressed and well behaved, but it got faster: the s’s all got squished up together until the room sounded like the African bush, and Sophie had a giggling fit. Clive looked hurt.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Did you mean that?’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I did, rather.’
And that was how their relationship began. There was more to it than that, of course. There was wine, and delicious food, and Sophie deciding that Clive was actually very handsome indeed. After dinner, they walked up the road hand in hand, and she invited him in, and they drank some more, and then they went into her bedroom and he made love to her. There were no difficulties whatsoever, so Clive didn’t mind Sophie referring jokily to Jim’s first-episode nerves afterwards. But it didn’t seem quite the same, when they were on their own. It was rather as if the point of them had been lost. They couldn’t give the people what they wanted, if there were no people around to receive the gift.
Towards the end of the series, Tony and Bill found themselves running out of inspiration and straying back dangerously close to Gambols territory. All they had for the last episode was an idea about a new secretary starting in Jim’s office at Number Ten.
‘Let me guess,’ said Clive when he saw the title page of the script. ‘Jim employs a new secretary and Barbara gets jealous.’
Tony and Bill didn’t say anything.
‘Oh, Christ,’ said Clive.
‘Line by line it’s funny,’ said Bill.
Clive closed his eyes and opened a page at random.
‘Don’t do that, you bastard,’ said Tony.
‘If it’s funny line by line …’