Funny Girl

by Nick Hornby

  ‘Oh, I’ll give it a go,’ he said.

  Dennis didn’t know whether it was possible to train for a debate with an intellectual on television in the way that boxers would train for a fight with Cassius Clay, but he tried. The night before the recording, he lay in bed imagining every punch Vernon Whitfield might throw at him, while trying to prepare a convincing attack of his own. What could Whitfield say? What was there to object to, in Barbara (and Jim) or any decent popular comedy programme? Did Whitfield think it was lowbrow? What was lowbrow about cleverly observed comedy? Could Dennis think of any examples of clever observation? No, he could not. Or rather, he could, but Vernon Whitfield could simply say that they weren’t clever at all, and Dennis would then have to say, Yes they are, and Whitfield would say, No they’re not.

  What if Whitfield argued that taxpayers’ money should only be used for things that ordinary people didn’t enjoy? What would Dennis say then? He would ask who Whitfield was to tell ordinary people that they should only eat intellectual roughage, that’s what he would do. Ah, but what if Whitfield asked him why he thought that ordinary people didn’t like intellectual roughage? Who was patronizing whom? Well, then he, Dennis, would tell Whitfield that he shouldn’t sleep with other men’s wives, and then they would have a wrestling match, and Dennis would sit on his head, and Whitfield would beg for mercy. Dennis realized at that point that lying awake worrying was leading him to some unhelpful places, but he couldn’t sleep. As a consequence, he awoke the next morning exhausted and fearful.

  Barry Bannister introduced them in the green room, and they shook hands and pretended that it was a perfectly run-of-the-mill meeting between bearded late-night BBC intellectuals. But once Barry had left, there was a long, embarrassed silence. I’m buggered if I’m going to say anything, thought Dennis.

  ‘Thanks for not making this awkward,’ said Whitfield eventually. ‘Very decent of you.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ said Dennis pleasantly, suddenly seeing a way of making things more awkward than anything Whitfield could have imagined, and as awkward as anything in Dennis’s numerous vengeful fantasies.

  Whitfield stared at him, clearly trying to decide whether it was possible that Dennis didn’t know.

  ‘Oh,’ said Dennis. ‘Sorry. It’s fine, really.’

  ‘Well. You’re a gentleman, I’ll say that much for you,’ said Whitfield with the air of a man who wouldn’t say any more than that much.

  ‘We can’t all like the same things, can we?’

  ‘That’s very true,’ said Whitfield uncertainly. ‘So … we don’t?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Like the same things?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Dennis. ‘We can’t, is my point.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry, though.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Whitfield.

  ‘Oh, bless you for apologizing,’ said Dennis.

  He felt sick, and he had to force himself to make eye contact, and he was closer to angry tears than he had been since his twelfth birthday. But he had the advantage, and he wanted to keep it, and that meant not vomiting and not weeping.

  ‘I don’t suppose we did any better this week?’ said Dennis.

  ‘This week?’

  ‘Barbara (and Jim)?’

  ‘The programme?’

  ‘Yes. What did you think I was talking about?’

  Whitfield thought, for a long time, and then said, finally, ‘I thought you might have wanted to talk about Edith.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Dennis. ‘No. God. Just the programme.’

  ‘You know I don’t like the programme,’ said Whitfield.

  ‘We can’t all like the same things, can we?’ said Dennis. He was worried that he’d given up too much by clearing up the confusion, but he could tell that he had irritated Whitfield by keeping it going for so long.

  ‘I’d seen it before, of course. But this week was really pretty poor stuff, I thought.’

  The episode, ‘The Speech’, hadn’t been one of the best, to Dennis’s regret. It had been a good idea: Jim is asked to deliver a lecture at his old Oxford college. Barbara listens to the speech, chimes in with a few improvements and then decides to accompany him. When she gets there she antagonizes and then charms Jim’s old tutor. Dennis hadn’t directed it well, he didn’t think. There was no fluidity, the college room was unconvincing and the tutor had been miscast. But that wasn’t the point. Vernon Whitfield would have hated the best episodes.

  ‘The studio audience were in stitches.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ said Whitfield. ‘I don’t know where they find the people who turn up for those things.’

  ‘We don’t have to find them,’ said Dennis. ‘They apply for tickets. They come from all over the country, in coaches.’

  ‘I’m sure they do,’ said Whitfield.

  ‘They’re ordinary people.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Whitfield. ‘That’s what troubles me.’

  Finally, Dennis felt a hunger for the fight that he’d been invited to have. They were normal, the people who dragged themselves out to see Barbara (and Jim) every Sunday night; or rather, they were, as far as he could tell, reasonably representative of the millions of people who watched it on television. Sometimes Dennis sat at the end of a row and listened to the conversations around him. He heard talk about the journey, about work, about the desperation for a cup of tea or a smoke. And sometimes he heard lines – sometimes misremembered but always quoted with enthusiasm – or synopses of past episodes, offered to viewers who had often already seen them but who nodded enthusiastically anyway, and chipped in with plot snippets of their own. These people were always excited, no matter how far they had travelled. They couldn’t believe that they were about to see the real Barbara and the real Jim. Dennis didn’t know what any of them did for a living, although he was pretty sure that there wasn’t a broadcaster from the Third or a critic from the Times Literary Supplement among them. And of course he was bound to love them, because they loved the programme, but he was sure of one thing: they weren’t fools.

  ‘Do you not like ordinary people?’ said Dennis.

  ‘I love ordinary people individually,’ said Whitfield. ‘It’s ordinary people en masse that trouble me. They seem to lose the ability to think. And I’m sorry that the BBC of all organizations feels the need to talk down to them.’

  ‘I don’t think we’re talking down to them.’

  ‘Well, of course this is what we should be discussing on air. But … where are we going with all this? The BBC is full of horse-racing and variety shows and pop groups who look and sound like cavemen. What will it look like in ten years’ time? Fifty? You’re already making jokes about lavatories and God knows what. How long before you people decide it’s all right to show people taking a shit, so long as some hyena in the audience thinks it’s hysterical?’

  ‘I don’t think anyone wants to see anyone taking a shit,’ said Dennis.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Whitfield. ‘But the day will come, mark my words. You can sense it. And while I have breath in my body, I will fight it.’

  ‘But to sum up, you think Barbara (and Jim) is hastening the arrival of a programme called Thirty Minutes on the Crapper?’

  ‘I know so, dear boy.’

  Dennis wondered whether he might actually be mad, and then whether he and Edith would end up killing each other, or killing themselves, perhaps while living in a nudists’ colony in Sweden.

  Barry Bannister came to lead them round to the back of the set.

  ‘The other guests are just finishing off their review of the week,’ said Bannister. ‘They’ll sit and listen to you do your bit. Robert will ask you a couple of questions, but mostly he’s there as a facilitator. We want you to talk to each other.’

  Robert Mitchell, the host of Pipe Smoke, was a man with a beard and spectacles who wrote for the weeklies and broadcast on the Third. He and two other men were talking about the death of poetry.

 
; ‘OK,’ whispered Barry. ‘They’re nearly finished. He’ll turn to you in a sec. On you go. And remember it’s live, so try and spit it out first time, eh?’

  They followed him through the gap in the enormous curtain.

  ‘I do wish you hadn’t been sleeping with Edith,’ Dennis whispered, and they stepped into the momentarily blinding light and sat down.

  ‘Good evening,’ said Whitfield loudly, while Robert Mitchell was still talking, and while the camera was trained elsewhere.

  The tiniest flicker of irritation crossed Mitchell’s face, and Whitfield started blinking and sweating furiously. He was wearing too many clothes – a shirt and a tie and a cardigan and a jacket – and suddenly Dennis realized, with a slight pang of disappointment, that Whitfield was going to be completely hopeless on television.

  He kicked off with an attack on the emptiness of light entertainment, mostly routine Third Programme stuff that Dennis had anticipated. The blinking, however, had now been replaced by a wild-eyed stare, and the perspiration was beginning to turn his white shirt translucent.

  ‘I wonder,’ said Dennis carefully, ‘whether there’s a different way of looking at intelligence.’

  Whitfield smiled patronizingly.

  ‘I’m sure there is, these days,’ he said. ‘I’m sure people who work in comedy have found a way of redrawing the boundaries so that they include themselves.’

  ‘You don’t think comedy can be intelligent?’

  ‘Some of it can, of course. The new satirical shows are very clever.’

  ‘But then, they’re written and performed by Cambridge graduates,’ said Dennis.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Whitfield. ‘Bright chaps.’

  ‘And what about Shakespeare?’ said Dennis. ‘Much Ado About Nothing and All’s Well That Ends Well and so on?’

  ‘Ah, I see,’ said Whitfield. ‘Jim and Barbara is Shakespeare, is it? Jolly good.’

  ‘Shakespeare made ordinary people laugh.’

  ‘ “Ordinary people”,’ said Whitfield. ‘The last refuge of the scoundrel.’

  ‘But what’s the difference?’

  ‘Much Ado About Nothing,’ said Vernon Whitfield, with all the relish of a man who’d lured his opponent into a fatal trap, ‘had its roots in the Italian Renaissance.’

  ‘Barbara (and Jim) has its roots in the golden age of BBC radio comedy.’

  ‘I’ll presume you’re being facetious and ignore that,’ said Whitfield.

  ‘I’m just pointing out that everything has roots,’ said Dennis.

  ‘Not in the Italian Renaissance,’ said Whitfield.

  ‘Well, no,’ said Dennis. ‘But you can trace a great deal of pornography back to the Italian Renaissance too.’

  He had no idea whether this was true, but it sounded true, and that was good enough. Anyway, it produced a lot of blinking and sweating.

  ‘And, in any case, Much Ado About Nothing has Shakespeare’s glorious language.’

  ‘You’ve got me there,’ said Dennis. ‘Let’s hear some of it.’

  Whitfield stared at him with panic in his eyes, like a dying Nazi in a war film. Dennis smiled politely. There were long moments of silence.

  ‘I wonder whether people laughed, not because of the glorious language, but because of Shakespeare’s technical skill,’ said Dennis. ‘The plays are extremely well constructed. And that’s where the intelligence of my writers goes. Into the construction, and the characterization, and –’

  ‘ “Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more”!’ Vernon Whitfield said suddenly. ‘ “Men were always deceitful”!’

  ‘Marvellous stuff,’ said Dennis. ‘They didn’t call him the Bard for nothing, did they?’

  Robert Mitchell laughed.

  ‘ “Deceivers ever”!’ said Whitfield. ‘Not “always deceitful”.’

  ‘That’s better,’ said Dennis.

  ‘That’s not a very good bit,’ said Vernon Whitfield.

  ‘Perhaps we should move on,’ said Robert Mitchell, fearful of Whitfield’s long, sweat-drenched silences.

  Dennis knew it was over.

  ‘I think you might have been on a show like this four hundred-odd years ago,’ said Dennis, ‘complaining about the morons laughing at Shakespeare.’

  ‘On television?’ scoffed Whitfield.

  Dennis rolled his eyes, and Whitfield became red-faced with rage.

  ‘Don’t roll your eyes at me!’

  ‘What worries me,’ said Dennis, ‘is that Vernon Whitfield and his type don’t really like people enjoying themselves very much. I don’t think he likes people at all, in fact. It won’t be long before Vernon Whitfield starts banging on about eugenics.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Whitfield.

  Robert Mitchell didn’t help Whitfield’s cause at that point by offering him a glass of water, as if he were an old lady overcome by the heat of a sunny summer’s day.

  ‘He sounds very reasonable and intelligent and so on, but earlier on you described the audience for Barbara (and Jim) as a bunch of laughing hyenas.’

  ‘That’s not at all what I said. You’re distorting and coarsening what was, actually, a private conversation.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It seemed relevant. After all, you did use the words “laughing hyenas” to describe the typical audience for a BBC comedy show.’

  ‘Hyena, singular.’

  ‘So sorry to misquote. It made you sound a little condescending, that’s all.’

  ‘What I actually said …’

  ‘Please, I do want to get this right,’ said Dennis pleasantly.

  ‘… was that you people would show someone taking a shit if you thought some hyena would laugh at it.’

  Dennis had only wanted Whitfield to make a twerp of himself. He hadn’t intended to goad him into the first use of a four-letter word on British television. Now that it had happened, however, Dennis could hardly pretend that it hadn’t. He was duty-bound to stop talking and look towards Robert Mitchell for guidance.

  ‘Well,’ said Robert Mitchell, ‘I do apologize to our viewers for, for the industrial language that was inadvertently used during what became a very heated discussion. Let’s end tonight a couple of minutes early, and we can all put the kettle on and calm down.’

  (Robert Mitchell was also forced to apologize a couple of nights later. The Trades Unions Congress had written to the BBC to point out that it was an Oxbridge intellectual who was responsible for the only four-letter word ever heard on television, not a representative of the British working class.)

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ whispered Whitfield.

  ‘Goodnight,’ said Robert Mitchell.

  Three weeks later, another critic used an even worse word on another programme and Vernon Whitfield’s crime was forgotten, but he never appeared on television again. Later, Dennis regretted the inarguably lowbrow tactics he had used. Now he would never know whether he could have won a fair fight.

  12

  Sophie had finally run out of excuses, so her father and her Auntie Marie came to London for the first time to see her, and her flat, and a recording of the show. They stripped away some of the fun and pride, of course: Sophie sent them the money for first-class train tickets, but they insisted on coming by coach; she booked them two rooms in the Royal Garden Hotel at the end of her road, but when they found out that the rooms cost nine guineas a night, they moved into a smaller, family-run bed and breakfast nearby.

  ‘That hotel had a twenty-four-hour coffee shop,’ George Parker said, outraged eyebrows hoisted as high as they would go.

  He was in her flat, drinking tea and shifting uncomfortably in her Habitat chair. Marie had gone shopping.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sophie. ‘The Maze. I’ve been there.’

  ‘And the restaurant is on the roof.’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been there too. The Royal Roof. It overlooks Kensington Palace. Where Meg and Tony live. I thought you’d like it.’

  ‘Meg and Tony?’

  ‘That’s what people call them.�
��

  ‘No “people” don’t.’

  It was a recurring theme of the visit: people versus people. The people versus her people. London versus the North. Show business versus the world. She had, she could see, become used to a lot of things that she once would have imagined to be a permanent source of wonder.

  ‘Well, we didn’t want meals on the roof, or all-night coffee.’

  ‘You didn’t have to have it,’ said Sophie. ‘But other people might enjoy it.’

  ‘That’s what we didn’t like,’ George said.

  ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘Because if there are people staying in that hotel who want to drink coffee at four o’clock in the morning, then it’s the wrong hotel for us.’

  There was no arguing with them, and she let them stay where they wanted, at a considerable saving of six guineas per person per night, cooked breakfast included.

  They wanted to meet Clive, and when she made the mistake of telling him they were coming, Clive said that he wanted to meet them. She told him that he would meet them, at the recording, but Clive felt that he deserved more.

  ‘I’m sparing you,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t want to be spared. I belong in a different category to Dennis and Brian and whoever else is knocking around.’

  ‘Why do you?’

  ‘Because I’m your on-screen husband, and your off-screen …’

  ‘What? You can’t finish that sentence in a way they’d understand.’

  ‘I’m going to buy you all dinner. Saturday night. I can’t just shake hands after the recording and then disappear.’

  ‘Well, don’t. Stay around for a drink.’

  ‘They feel like my in-laws.’

  She knew he meant it. He would drive her mad. Sometimes they slept together and sometimes they didn’t, and she never knew where she stood, and she found herself getting jealous even though she knew that jealousy was utterly pointless, and in any case belonged to the kind of relationship she didn’t want with him.

  ‘They’ll get the wrong end of the stick.’

  ‘So let them. Where’s the harm? A stick is a stick. Doesn’t matter which end they pick up.’