Funny Girl

by Nick Hornby

  Never, thought Tony, has a beautiful girl been impregnated with such irritation and reluctance.

  In the end it was Bill’s idea, the scene in which Barbara tells Jim and the people of Britain that he is going to be a father. It was a good one too – so unexpected and clever that it felt to Tony as though Bill’s professionalism, imagination and talent would always trump his reluctance and hostility. In ‘The Surprise’, Barbara simply forgets to say anything to Jim, on the grounds that it’s such a cataclysmic piece of news that he’s bound to know already. Jim wanders into the living room while Barbara is on the phone to her mother, and comprehension, which is signalled by the slow lowering of the newspaper, dawns on him at exactly the same time as it dawns on the studio audience, just as Tony and Bill had hoped. Clive’s expression, when it was finally revealed, was perfect, a moment that ended up representing everything people loved about the show. Tom Sloan came to the recording, for the first time, and was so pleased with what he saw that he caused two bottles of champagne to arrive backstage. And the champagne, in turn, helped Clive and Sophie to find their way back into Sophie’s bed.

  Sophie was beginning to realize that there was nothing to be done about actors: they would always end up sleeping with each other. They had always done so, and they probably always would. Actors were more attractive, by and large, than ordinary people. That was one of the gifts with which they had been blessed – perhaps the only one that counted. In a lot of cases, there weren’t any others at all. And these attractive people spent a lot of time together, and other, less attractive people dressed them, put make-up on them, lit them in ways that accentuated their beauty, told them they were wonderful. They were often penned up together in glamorous locations a long way from home. They were frequently given adjoining bedrooms in nice hotels, and everything in their lives encouraged a late-night knock on the door. Clive and Sophie were a permanent irritant to each other, a constant itch that had to be scratched. They slept together, then vowed not to do it again, and then did it again, and they always enjoyed it very much when it happened. There was no harm in it that Sophie could see, but neither was there much future in it, usually; Clive wasn’t someone who could see beyond the next morning’s breakfast. The thing about ‘The Surprise’ was that it provided them with the excuse to romanticize a sort of substitute future.

  ‘I don’t mind having a baby with you,’ said Sophie afterwards. ‘In the show, I mean. I’m sorry I said what I said before.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Clive. ‘I feel the same way. And I’m sorry too.’

  ‘I think we’ll make very nice screen parents,’ said Sophie.

  ‘Maybe this will be good practice for me,’ said Clive. ‘I can poke my toe in the water, sort of thing.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  She liked his sense of responsibility, and she didn’t want to discourage it, but she felt obliged to keep the conversation grounded.

  ‘You know it will be a plastic doll, most of the time?’

  ‘Yes, of course, but it’s symbolic.’

  ‘D’you think?’

  ‘Absolutely. I’ll have to become a different person. Someone I’ve never been before. Some people would say, “Yes, but you’re an actor, that’s your job.” It’s not just that, though. Jim’s got to change, and I’ve got to change with him.’

  ‘I’d say … Jim’s got to change less than you have. No offence.’

  ‘None taken. Why d’you think that?’

  ‘Well, he’s a devoted husband, really, isn’t he? He’s besotted with her. And he has a proper job, and –’

  ‘What’s a proper job?’

  ‘I don’t know. One where you have to put a suit on and do important things.’

  ‘Yes, but I’ve been playing him rather well, if I do say so myself. So it can’t be that much of a stretch.’

  ‘I’m just saying. Jim’s ready to be a father, but you’re not.’

  ‘Should I be insulted?’

  She was trying to insult him, she supposed.

  ‘No, of course not. I just mean … Can you imagine being a real father?’

  ‘God, no.’

  ‘Really? Never?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure I’ll be one, one day. But I can’t imagine it. Just … don’t have the imagination. That’s another reason I’m pleased about Barbara’s baby.’

  ‘And yours.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. That’s how I should think of it. Anyway. If Tony and Bill write it for me, I’ll be able to see it all more clearly.’

  She kissed him on the shoulder. He was very sweet, and funny, and hopeless.

  THE THIRD SERIES

  14

  Tony and Bill had forgotten what it was like to have the luxury of time – time to plan, time to talk, time to write and rewrite. Time was money, a beautiful crisp, new ten-pound note, and they weren’t going to break into it. They were going to save it up and spend it on sixteen new episodes, each one funnier and richer and more truthful than anything they’d written before. They were going to find clever and elegant ways of dealing with the Baby Problem so that they could eventually forget about the little sod entirely.

  They needed a break, of course. They were exhausted, and they both felt sure that the writing would come more easily if they had a couple of weeks away in the sun, eating and drinking and sleeping and thinking and not staring at each other in the sickly fluorescent glare of an office. Bill went to Tangier with an actor friend, and Tony and June booked a hotel by the sea in Nice, for their first and last holiday as a childless couple. None of them had been abroad before, not even during National Service; none of their parents had so much as held a passport. So they were all staggered to learn that abroad was an astonishingly beautiful place. They’d been told, several times, by colleagues, actors and writers and agents, that the sea was warmer over there, and the skies bluer, and the food was like nothing you could buy in London no matter how much you spent. But none of these colleagues had done what Tony wanted to do when he got back: grab people by the lapels and shout at them, wild-eyed, until they agreed to book tickets. Most people in England, he thought, had no idea that within a few hours they could be somewhere that would make them begrudge every single second they’d ever spent in Hastings or Skegness or the Lake District. Perhaps it was better that way.

  The trips left them with a little bit less time than they’d accounted for, because it proved impossible to coordinate holidays – Bill’s actor friend had a repertory season starting in August, at precisely the moment June had booked her annual leave. Still. No matter. What was the difference between four months and three?

  They weren’t worried about the time they had been asked to spend translating the best episodes of The Awkward Squad into the language of television. They were sure that most of the changes required would be grammatical rather than structural, and that therefore their secretary, Hazel, could do a lot of the work. Television wasn’t so different from radio, just as Spanish wasn’t so different from Italian, a joke was a joke in any language, and so on.

  What they hadn’t anticipated was that The Awkward Squad had been written, not in Italian, but in Latin. Its jokes were creaky and tired and over-familiar, probably even at the time they had written them, and guiltily they began to remember how much they had borrowed from shows and comedians they admired back then. The few women they had bothered with were shrewish or stupid, and the men were unattractive, leering buffoons who, as far as they could remember, were intended to be likeable. The world had moved on, and if The Awkward Squad was ever to appear on television, it would need to be reconceived. They didn’t even know if they wanted to think about National Service any more, or if anyone else did either. It made them feel old. The Beatles had missed the army altogether. That was another country, all that. They spent a desultory couple of weeks working on a pilot episode, but to their fury and their relief, it never did get made. They suddenly found themselves with less than three weeks left to spend on Barbara (and Jim), the only
thing they cared about.

  This panic explained but did not excuse the first episode of the third series, their attempt to portray Barbara and Jim preparing their nest for the new arrival. Tony, who was preparing his nest for his own new arrival, had recently attempted to install a sink at home, after watching a do-it-yourself programme, and comical pandemonium had ensued – June had laughed like a drain when the waste pipe simply dropped off the first time the taps were turned on. In ‘The New Bathroom’ Jim decides to do without the services of a plumber after watching a do-it-yourself programme on television, although he tries to do not just it but everything himself. Tony was working on the mathematically dubious basis that a sink plus a bath plus a lavatory would produce sufficient comical pandemonium to entertain the entire population of Britain, rather than just a very pregnant and slightly hysterical June. It turned out, though, that the more porcelain a script contained, the less amusing it became, a discovery that might one day be helpful to future generations of comedy writers but was of no use whatsoever to Tony and Bill. It was too late. They had spent the entire tenner, frittered it away, and they had nothing else.

  ‘You can say it was my idea,’ said Tony before the first rehearsal.

  ‘I will, because it was your idea,’ said Bill.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ said Tony.

  ‘It’s going out with my name on it, so I’ll defend it.’

  ‘Do you want to take your name off it?’

  ‘Of course not!’ Bill said quickly. ‘No.’ The ‘no’ was delivered with much less conviction.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘What do you think it means?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It means, “We’ve never done that before.” ’

  Tony laughed.

  ‘I knew it meant something. Do you want to see how it goes down with the others?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means no. Definitely. That’s a terrible idea.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re saying that if they all think it’s a load of rubbish I can take my name off? But if they think it’s all right I take half the credit?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘That’s a recipe for disaster. We can’t run a partnership like that. But maybe it’s something to think about in the future.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it be a recipe for disaster then?’

  ‘We just agree in advance. Before a word’s been written. “I just fancy doing this one on my own.” Or, you know, “The baby’s teething, will you take over this week?” Maybe the break would do us good.’

  ‘I see what you mean.’

  It made perfect sense to Tony, and it scared him half to death.

  ‘It needs a bit of work,’ said Tony after the read-through. ‘And a lot of it will be funnier once the special effects are in.’

  The script hadn’t got a single laugh. Even Dennis, who usually tried to help them out with a sticky first draft, seemed nonplussed.

  ‘Special effects?’ said Clive. ‘It’s a leaky tap, not The Ten Commandments.’

  ‘Did you even understand what you were reading?’ said Bill. ‘It’s a flood. The bath, the WC, the sink …’

  ‘Hilarious,’ said Clive. ‘The WC overflows. Do you really want to begin this series with lavatory humour?’

  ‘It’s not lavatory humour,’ said Tony. ‘It’s humour about a lavatory. And a sink, and a bath. That’s different.’

  ‘But it’s that physical unfunny stuff.’

  ‘Like Laurel and Hardy, you mean?’ said Bill. ‘Or Harold Lloyd?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Clive, slightly mystified as to why Bill would make his argument for him.

  Bill rolled his eyes.

  ‘You don’t think Laurel and Hardy are funny, Clive?’ said Dennis.

  Clive simply laughed.

  ‘I’ll tell you what it reminds me of,’ said Clive. ‘An old Lucille Ball episode. I mean that in a bad way, Sophie, before you get excited.’

  But it was too late.

  ‘Give me something to do,’ she said to Bill and Tony. ‘I just stand about shrieking.’

  ‘I don’t know what else you can do when your toilet is flushing straight through the ceiling,’ said Tony.

  ‘Why can’t Barbara watch the do-it-yourself programme?’

  ‘Why would Jim think of having a go? If Barbara’s the one who’s watched the programme?’ said Clive.

  ‘I think what Sophie is suggesting,’ said Dennis, ‘is that she has a go at plumbing the bathroom.’

  Clive snorted.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ said Sophie.

  ‘Hopefully, the idea of Barbara plumbing a bathroom,’ said Dennis.

  ‘Yes, the idea of it,’ said Clive. ‘But not the, the reality.’

  ‘What wouldn’t be funny about the reality?’ said Dennis.

  ‘And are we talking about me, or Barbara?’ said Sophie.

  ‘And are you just snorting at the idea of a woman doing the plumbing?’ said Tony.

  Clive was looking hounded, but Tony’s question offered him an escape.

  ‘Well, I presume she’s going to make a right mess of it,’ he said. ‘Otherwise there’s no show.’

  ‘She will make a mess of it, yes,’ said Tony. ‘But the idea of a woman plumbing a bathroom isn’t funny per se.’

  ‘I disagree,’ said Clive.

  The conversation, Tony thought later, neatly captured all the maddening contradictions of the show. Jim plumbing the bathroom was boring and obvious; Barbara making a mess of it was funny and fresh and then entirely predictable. Maybe that was how television – and, he supposed, life – always worked.

  One member of the audience was physically sick during the recording. Laughter took hold of her body and shook it and shook it until she was forced to vomit all over the back of the seat in front of her. The business with the flood – and admittedly Tony and Bill had rebuilt and polished and tinkered until the script was a gleaming, ugly, loud machine, an American motorcycle of an episode – had to be re-recorded because the delight of the audience drowned out the dialogue. Sophie plumbed and flooded with such artful dizziness that finally she earned comparisons with Lucille Ball, in the popular press anyway. The scene in which Jim comes in to find Barbara standing on the toilet cistern, whereupon she pretends that nothing has happened, was shown in the BBC’s Christmas highlights programme four years in a row, and came to define Barbara (and Jim). And Bill, in a spirit of desperation, began to take his novel seriously.

  15

  Dennis had been invited to more dinner parties since Edith’s departure than he had during his entire marriage, even if he discounted the ones that his mother had been throwing with humiliating regularity. He seemed to have become an official Eligible Bachelor. He had been introduced to single women who were terrifyingly similar to Edith, and single women who were clearly intended to be the opposite. The Ediths were tall and skinny and intellectual; the opposites were short and stout and intellectual. Dennis’s Cambridge degree, which was apparently as cramping and defining as a devout religious belief, meant that the cleverness was an unalterable given, but he found it hard to convince himself that short, stout intellectuals were his type. This was, he was sure, due to his shallowness, but there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it.

  Edith’s true opposite was a quick-witted, unpretentious, high-spirited, funny, curvy, clever, beautiful blonde. Dennis had been in love with Sophie for far longer than he would ever admit, but it had only occurred to him relatively recently, probably because of this plague of anti-Ediths that was being visited upon him, that every single one of the qualities that he worshipped in Sophie was absent in his former wife. Maybe he was being unfair and she’d changed since he’d last seen her, but he doubted it. It was hard to imagine that Vernon Whitfield had brought out Edith’s previously buried fun-loving side.

  He wasn’t, as far as he could tell, Sophie’s type. Both Clive and
Maurice were what one might call conventionally good-looking, if you were prepared to overlook Clive’s rugger nose and Maurice’s deranged smile. They were also famous, and though Sophie would be horrified by the implication of the observation, he knew to his cost that it made a difference. Maybe Edith had gone off with Vernon Whitfield because of his mind, but if that mind had been buried deep in some dusty varsity history department, then she might have decided that it was best enjoyed in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement rather than in bed.

  Dennis had been working on the assumption that it was best to suffer in silence. A declaration of love would almost certainly be met by embarrassment and, if he was lucky, a little speech about how lovely he was, how much she valued his friendship and professional support. And anyway, what kind of producer would risk damaging his relationship with his leading lady and possibly, if Sophie were indiscreet, his leading man, by confessing a devotion that might well be a direct result of recent psychological trauma anyway?

  He was finding it increasingly hard to keep it bottled up, however. That wasn’t the point of love, in his opinion. Love meant being brave, otherwise you had already lost your own argument: the man who couldn’t tell a woman he loved her was, by definition, not worthy of her. He had finally decided that he had to say something when Clive and Sophie announced their engagement.

  They told everyone on the first day of rehearsals for ‘The Arrival’, right at the end of the read-through. The last couple of pages of the script, written by Tony in anticipation of his own emotional state, were serious, shot through with love and tenderness, and clearly the happy couple had been so overcome that they could no longer keep the news to themselves. The audience for the announcement included Sandra, the rather difficult and unlikeable actress that Dennis had cast as the midwife. Sandra was the first to speak; Tony, Bill and Dennis merely gaped in disbelief and, in Dennis’s case, misery.

  ‘That’s marvellous news,’ said Sandra. ‘I’m so happy I was here for it.’

  ‘We didn’t know you were going to be here for it, to be honest.’