Funny Girl

by Nick Hornby

  ‘Is that what you’d prefer? That our boss hated what we do?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bill. ‘Of course.’

  Tony was beginning to realize that he and Bill might want different things. It had never occurred to him before.

  ‘So,’ said Dennis when they reconvened for the second series. ‘What have we all been up to?’

  He was genuinely happy to see them all. He’d been lonely, and he didn’t like any of the other programmes he’d been working on, and he’d missed Sophie, who had achieved mythical status in her absence, a cross between Helen and Aphrodite. When he saw her again, he realized that he’d been selling her short.

  ‘Well,’ said Clive, ‘Sophie’s been sleeping with French pop stars.’

  ‘And Clive has been sleeping with anyone he bumps into.’

  And they both gave thin-lipped smiles.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ said Bill.

  ‘What?’ said Dennis.

  He was bewildered, and appalled. He didn’t want Sophie to sleep with anyone, let alone French pop stars.

  ‘You had to go and bitch it all up, didn’t you?’ Bill said to Clive.

  ‘Me?’ said Clive, outraged. ‘How have I bitched it up?’

  ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ said Tony.

  Dennis now understood only that he was the one person in the room who didn’t understand.

  ‘Am I missing something?’ he said.

  ‘It’s obvious,’ said Bill, in the manner of a detective in the last scene of an Agatha Christie play. ‘These two –’ he gestured at Clive and Sophie – ‘have been at it. Except Clive can never be at it with one person at a time, so it’s all gone wrong. And we have to deal with the consequences.’

  Of course, Dennis thought. Of course these two would end up sleeping together. He was a fool to think any different. He took a deep breath and tried to concentrate on the issues at hand. He was a producer, not a spurned lover.

  ‘Do you want to tell them about Johnny Foreigner, or shall I?’ said Clive to Sophie.

  ‘Is he the French pop star?’ said Bill. ‘You mentioned him a minute ago.’

  ‘There won’t be any consequences,’ said Sophie. ‘We’re professional people.’

  Clive didn’t say anything.

  ‘Clive?’ said Dennis. ‘Are you a professional person?’

  ‘Yes, of course I am,’ said Clive sulkily.

  ‘Right,’ said Dennis. ‘Shall we start?’

  ‘Before we read, can I say something?’ said Sophie. ‘About the script?’

  Bill made a be-our-guest gesture.

  ‘Right. Well. I don’t want to talk about having a family.’

  ‘We’re not asking you to,’ said Bill. ‘We’re asking Barbara to. You can talk about what you want.’

  ‘It’s too much of a commitment,’ said Sophie.

  ‘I agree,’ said Clive.

  ‘I know we’ve told you before, but it’s worth repeating,’ said Bill. ‘These are fictional characters. In the programme, they’re married. In real life, you’re not. We’re not asking you to have an actual baby.’

  ‘We’re not even asking the characters to have a bloody baby,’ said Tony. ‘We’re asking them to talk about it. They’ve been married for a year and neither of them has shown the slightest bit of interest in raising a family.’

  ‘I didn’t sign up to be a father,’ said Clive. ‘That’s a different thing entirely.’

  ‘I know we’ve told you before, but it’s worth repeating,’ said Bill. ‘These are fictional characters. In the –’

  ‘If I become a fictional father, I have a real commitment to my fictional children,’ said Clive.

  ‘Ah,’ said Tony. ‘That might be where we’re going wrong. I don’t know who told you that, but it’s not true. An actor has no legal responsibilities to any dependants named in a television comedy script.’

  ‘I know you think I’m an idiot,’ said Clive. ‘But it isn’t me that gets confused. It’s that lot out there. The viewers. People already say things. If Jim becomes a father, they’ll say more things.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘They …’ He glanced at Sophie nervously. ‘They think I should be at home with Barbara.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When I’m not.’

  The others looked at him, fascinated.

  ‘What do they say?’

  ‘Oh, you know. “I’ll tell Barbara.” Things like that. They’ve been saying it all the time we’ve been off the air.’

  ‘What are you doing when they say it?’ Sophie asked.

  ‘Nothing! Having dinner with a colleague.’

  ‘Aren’t we your colleagues?’

  ‘Colleagues in the acting industry.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Sophie. ‘You’re in a pub …’

  ‘For example,’ said Clive.

  ‘… having a pint with another chap …’

  She left a pause, but Clive decided not to fill it.

  ‘… and people say that they’ll tell Barbara? Why would they do that?’

  ‘And what does it matter what they say?’ said Tony.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Clive. ‘And it’s embarrassing for my, my colleagues.’

  ‘These fellas, just standing there drinking their pints.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said Bill, scratching his chin thoughtfully, ‘whether it gets even more confusing because you’ve been having sex with the actress who plays Barbara?’

  ‘They don’t know that.’

  ‘They probably will by now,’ said Sophie. ‘That’s all anyone seems to talk about these days, my sex life.’

  ‘Confusing for you, I meant,’ said Bill. ‘You probably wouldn’t mind them saying that they’ll tell Barbara if you didn’t care whether Barbara knew.’

  ‘There’s nothing for Barbara to know,’ said Clive.

  ‘There’s nothing you want to tell her, anyway.’

  ‘All I’m saying is that it’s a right palaver, being on a successful TV show,’ said Clive. ‘And I don’t want to make it worse. What if I wanted to leave?’

  ‘Are you talking as Jim or Clive?’

  ‘Clive, you idiot.’

  ‘If you left, we would no longer have a show entitled Barbara (and Jim),’ said Bill.

  ‘That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.’

  ‘It would just be called Barbara,’ said Sophie. She never tired of that joke.

  ‘But that’s what worries me,’ said Clive. ‘If I walked out on Barbara and the kids, I wouldn’t be able to go out anywhere. I’d be attacked in the street.’

  ‘What about you, Sophie?’ said Dennis. ‘Why don’t you want kids?’

  ‘I do,’ said Sophie. ‘I just don’t want them with him.’

  ‘You should have thought of that before you married him,’ said Clive.

  Dennis suddenly understood that Bill’s joke didn’t work any more: Barbara and Jim were not fictional characters. Their popularity, the public’s investment in them, made them real, and they needed care and guidance. He was prepared to do it, because he had nobody at home to worry about. He hoped the others felt the same way.

  The majority of the episodes had been two-handers, and writers, cast and critics seemed to prefer them that way. ‘The Anniversary’ was mostly set in a smart restaurant, however, and Tony and Bill had written parts for another, elderly couple at a nearby table, who end up bellowing out their marital grievances and disappointments, much to the consternation of Barbara and Jim – Jim is eventually obliged to separate the pair when the wife starts raining blows upon the husband’s head.

  When Dennis arrived for work on Wednesday morning, the two actors he’d booked were sitting outside the rehearsal room looking perplexed. The man was wearing a bow tie and the woman was wearing a hat that she might have borrowed from Mary Pickford. They both looked desperate, and they’d both lied about their age – Dennis had specifically asked casting for a couple in their sixties, the man just retired, the well-p
reserved woman active in the Women’s Institute, that sort of thing. These two, however, looked like they’d been let out of an old people’s home for the day. If the violence went ahead as scripted, there would be deaths.

  ‘Barbara (and Jim)?’ said the man hopefully.

  He had a loud, posh voice. If bow ties could talk, Dennis thought, that was exactly what they’d sound like.

  ‘That’s us,’ said Dennis. ‘Me anyway. I don’t know where everyone else has got to.’

  They walked into the rehearsal room and Dennis put the kettle on while Dulcie and Alfred fussed around with coats and hats and scripts. Their clothes and even their names smelled of mothballs and Edwardian defeat.

  ‘We loved it,’ said Dulcie.

  ‘We read our scenes aloud to each other in bed last night,’ said Alfred.

  Dennis was momentarily startled.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘You’re married?’

  The question clearly disappointed them.

  ‘People forget,’ said Dulcie to Alfred sadly.

  ‘This young man might not even have known in the first place,’ said Alfred. ‘It’s been nearly fifty years.’

  ‘How old are you, dear?’ said Dulcie.

  ‘I’m twenty-nine.’

  ‘There you are, then,’ she said to Alfred.

  ‘Ask your mother,’ said Alfred.

  ‘I will,’ said Dennis. He could see that it wouldn’t be wise to ask for help with the exact form of the question.

  ‘Will the writers be in?’ said Dulcie. ‘Because we do have a few suggestions.’

  ‘Good,’ said Dennis. ‘I’m sure they’d love to hear them.’

  It would serve them right for being late.

  It was an hour before Bill and Tony arrived with a new version of the script, an hour that reminded Dennis of a wet summer that he’d once had to spend with his grandparents in Norfolk during the war.

  ‘Who have we got here, then?’ said Tony.

  ‘It’s Dulcie and Alfred,’ said Dulcie with a big smile.

  ‘You come as a pair, do you?’

  Dulcie’s smile vanished.

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Alfred. He left it for as long as he could, but it became clear that elucidation was required. ‘We’re married.’

  ‘Good for you,’ said Bill.

  Dulcie gave her husband’s hand a consoling squeeze.

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘Television people,’ said Alfred darkly.

  Tony gave Dennis a mystified look, but Dennis could think of no wordless way of explaining that Dulcie and Alfred may have been famous around the time of the Great War, and that their union had possibly been a cause for national celebration.

  ‘We’ve got a few notes for you,’ said Alfred to Tony and Bill. ‘Nothing major.’

  ‘Just think of them as observations,’ said Dulcie.

  ‘Do you mind if we don’t think of them at all?’ said Bill pleasantly.

  Dulcie gasped and clapped her hand to her mouth.

  Sophie and Clive were last in.

  ‘We’re not unprofessional,’ said Sophie to Dulcie and Alfred. ‘We knew the script was going to be late.’

  ‘We’re great admirers of yours,’ said Alfred.

  He stared at Sophie hopefully and smiled. She thanked him and smiled back. She was clearly supposed to say something else, but she couldn’t think what, and this failure to reciprocate, to tell Alfred and Dulcie how much they had meant to her over the years, caused another collapse in morale, another bout of hand-squeezing.

  ‘We’re still working, that’s the thing,’ said Dulcie.

  ‘And we’re still together,’ said Alfred.

  ‘So we see,’ said Clive. ‘Lovely.’

  Clive looked at the others, to work out whether they wanted to hang themselves too. The longevity of both the relationship and the career felt like a terrible lesson to them all.

  ‘Shall we push on?’ said Dennis.

  They read the script out loud, and it sang, beautifully, as it usually did once it had cleared its throat, and despite Alfred’s tuneless, tone-deaf bellow. Dulcie turned out to be surprisingly good. She was understated and intelligent, and Bill and Tony ended up writing her a little bit more.

  And suddenly Barbara and Jim became the only people that mattered in the world, and the only marriage that counted, and everything else fell away. Clive became clever and kind and steady, Sophie swam in the confidence and security that come from being loved. Dennis enjoyed the company, Tony the simplicity and the straightforwardness of the attraction, Dulcie and Alfred the youth and the promise. It was such a joyful world that Tony worried for a moment whether he and Bill had gone soft, but these characters had real problems, and they spoke in real sentences, so it wasn’t that. It was the form itself, with its promise of next week, another episode, another series; it couldn’t help but offer hope, to its characters and to everyone who identified with them. Tony didn’t think he would ever want to write anything apart from half-hour comedies. They contained the key to health, wealth and happiness.

  ‘We should do an anniversary episode every year,’ said Dennis.

  ‘For the next fifty years,’ said Sophie.

  Dulcie and Alfred smiled sadly.

  ‘Oh,’ said Sophie. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Barbara and Jim probably wouldn’t have sat next to the same couple in the same restaurant every year anyway,’ said Clive.

  After the recording, and after Dulcie and Alfred had been helped into their taxi, they sat in the BBC Club drinking wine and talking about getting old.

  ‘It was sort of pathetic, wasn’t it?’ said Clive.

  ‘What else are they going to do?’ said Sophie.

  ‘The crossword. Gardening. Jigsaw puzzles. Anything but acting.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dennis. ‘All those waiting-to-die things. They should just accept that they’re filling in time with good grace.’

  ‘I’m going to be like her,’ said Sophie. ‘People are going to have to throw me out.’

  ‘They will,’ said Clive. ‘That’s what happens.’

  11

  The week before work began on the second series, Dennis was cornered in the canteen by Barry Bannister, the producer of Pipe Smoke. Dennis hated Pipe Smoke, even though he watched it every night. It was a programme in which men with beards and spectacles (but no pipes, which had recently been banned because the fug was making life difficult for the cameraman) talked with an annoying certainty about God and the H-bomb and theatre and classical music. Dennis had a beard and spectacles, and he smoked a pipe, but he hoped that he wasn’t as insufferable as Bannister’s terrible windbags. Pipe Smoke was the last programme in the schedule before the 11.20 close-down, and Dennis sometimes wondered whether its dullness was deliberate, an attempt by the BBC to persuade the workers of Britain that they needed more sleep than they were getting.

  ‘Do you know Vernon Whitfield?’ Bannister asked him.

  Dennis hopped into the nearest available rabbit hole, which led down into a whole labyrinth of interconnected tunnels. These all brought him to rooms full of pain and humiliation: letters tucked inside books, chilly bedtimes, lies, tears and (towards the end) a long poem about loss that Edith had read out to him, naked, with no explanation for the poem or the nudity, while she wept. Time passed, and all he did was smile at Barry blankly. This sort of thing had been happening a lot since Edith had gone. Entire minutes could go by, in shops and pubs and work meetings, in which he seemed to lose track of himself. When he came back again, he frequently found that people had given up on him. Conversations had moved on, shopkeepers were serving somebody else. He was, he supposed, glad that his marriage was finally over, but he hadn’t managed to prepare himself for the shock of it, the sheer exhaustion.

  ‘Hello?’ said Barry Bannister. ‘Are you receiving me?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Dennis. ‘Late night.’

  ‘Vernon Whitfield?’

  ‘Know of him, of course. Don’t know him.’


  ‘Well, he wants to come on Pipe Smoke and attack your programme when it comes back again.’

  ‘Why on earth would he want to do that?’

  ‘It’s nothing personal,’ said Bannister, and Dennis resisted the temptation to apprise him of all the relevant information. ‘He just thinks that the BBC should be aiming higher than fatuous comedies about uneducated young women. His words, not mine.’

  ‘And what do you want me to do about it?’

  ‘I wondered whether you’d come on and defend yourself.’

  ‘Why me? Why not Tony and Bill? Or one of the actors?’

  ‘Because … Well, you’re the producer and the director. And you’re more of a Pipe Smoke man, aren’t you? Cambridge, articulate, well spoken. I’m not saying we’re against people who aren’t …’

  ‘That’s very tolerant of you.’

  ‘… but what’s interesting from our point of view is that you’ve chosen to go and bat for the opposition, as it were.’

  ‘Who are the opposition?’

  ‘Light Entertainment.’

  ‘You think of Light Entertainment as “the opposition”?’

  ‘I don’t personally. But I suppose the guests we usually have on the programme might. And quite a few of our viewers too.’

  It was true, then, Dennis thought. He’d always suspected it, but nobody had ever come out and said it. Some of the cross-looking men he saw beetling around in the dingier corridors of the BBC believed that comedy was the enemy. They actually wanted people not to laugh, ever.

  ‘So what would someone like Vernon Whitfield want, then?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, if we’re the opposition … How does he win? Does he get us taken off the air?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think he’d want that. He’d just prefer it if you were on the commercial channel. I can’t speak for him, but I suppose he’d argue that the taxpayer shouldn’t be paying Sophie Straw’s salary.’

  Dennis hated Vernon Whitfield for personal reasons, and he hated people like Vernon Whitfield for philosophical, political and cultural reasons. More and more frequently, Dennis found himself in the middle of a fantasy in which he turned someone like Vernon Whitfield, but usually Vernon Whitfield himself, into a big sobbing red-faced baby, and here was Barry Bannister giving him the chance to make his dreams come true. Was he clever enough, though?