by Nick Hornby
They shared a taxi on the way back, because they were excited and indignant and giggly, and they couldn’t bear to miss a word of anything anybody had to say. To begin with, all that was said was an endless reformulation of the same outraged complaint: ‘He didn’t know us from Adam!’ ‘He’s never watched a second!’ ‘It was all a public relations stunt!’
And then Dennis managed to change the tone, from one kind of disbelief to another. ‘We’ve just been to Number Ten!’ he said, and so then everyone had a go at rewriting that line: ‘We’ve just met Harold!’ ‘We’ve had a cup of coffee with the Prime Minister!’ ‘Bloody hell!’ ‘Harold and Marcia!’ The third wave of chatter was about Marcia. Nobody was very interested in Sophie’s certainty that nothing was going on, and she understood. They already knew that they would be telling people about the morning for a long time to come, maybe for the rest of their lives, and the taxi ride was the first attempt at a first draft of a story that would have to satisfy parents, siblings, children and grandchildren. If they could somehow convey the impression that they’d been given a privileged glimpse of the Prime Minister’s unconventional personal life, then they were duty-bound to do so. Eventually, somewhere in Paddington, the interjections and exclamations and exhalations gave way to a contemplative silence.
‘How many Beatles records do you think he’d heard before he gave them MBEs?’ said Bill.
‘Oh, he thinks we’re the Beatles now,’ said Tony.
‘Do you think we’re getting an MBE?’ said Sophie. ‘Because I wouldn’t mind.’
‘Bill’s right,’ said Dennis. ‘If there’s something going on, then Harold wants a bit of it, because it’s going on under a Labour government. It’s reflected glory. Even if he doesn’t know the first thing about it.’
‘I’m sorry to go on about this,’ said Sophie, ‘but nobody answered my question. Do you think we’ll be getting MBEs?’
‘We might if we do what he wants us to do,’ said Tony.
‘And you won’t be getting anything anyway,’ said Clive gleefully. ‘It’ll only be me and Sophie. Nobody cares about the writers.’
‘Or the producer,’ said Dennis.
‘Can we do it, then?’ said Sophie.
‘No,’ said Tony, Bill and Dennis at the same time.
‘I told her we would,’ said Sophie.
‘Yes,’ said Dennis. ‘We noticed.’
She didn’t care. She didn’t care that they weren’t going to film at Number Ten, she didn’t care that she wasn’t going to get an MBE, not this year anyway. She didn’t even care that Harold Wilson had never seen the programme. If he had, then wanting to meet them all would have been merely a personal quirk, something just for him and Mary. But Marcia’s invitation was official acknowledgement that they mattered. Dennis was right. Harold had wanted a bit of reflected glory. Well, that meant that they were the glory.
They didn’t film in Number Ten; they weren’t even allowed to put out a show in the week of the general election. The Director-General apparently thought that Barbara (and Jim) was too nakedly political, and would damage the BBC’s commitment to neutrality and impartiality.
‘What a lot of cock,’ said Bill. ‘We’re not taking that lying down, I hope.’
‘No,’ said Dennis. ‘I’m going to march into the DG’s office and tell him that we’re taking over the Crystal Palace transmitter.’
‘Seriously, though,’ said Bill, ‘what are we going to do about it?’
‘I think what Dennis is saying,’ said Tony, ‘is that we’re not doing anything about it.’
‘And that’s all right with you, is it?’
‘I don’t mind a week off. We’ve got plenty to do.’
They had begun work on a new series called Reds Under the Bed, about a cell of hapless Soviet spies becalmed in Cricklewood, and Anthony Newley had asked them to write a screenplay. Hazel turned down other offers most days of most weeks.
‘We’ve been recommissioned, though, if that’s any consolation,’ said Dennis.
‘If they won’t put out a show in general election week, you can tell them where to stick their new series,’ said Bill.
‘Oh, tommyrot,’ said Dennis.
‘I’m not having them cancel a show whenever they feel like it,’ said Bill.
‘It’s not whenever they feel like it,’ said Dennis. ‘It’s whenever there’s a general election. They may stop you from banging on about the iniquities of the class system during the next one too. Factor in a week off some time in the spring of 1971.’
‘So what’s the bloody point?’ said Bill. ‘Seriously? If they gag you the moment it counts?’
‘Just a gentle reminder that you’re supposed to be writing a situation comedy about a married couple,’ said Dennis. ‘Not the Labour Party Manifesto.’
‘Of course, it would be a gentle reminder,’ said Bill. ‘A gentle reminder about a gentle comedy. Everything’s so bloody gentle and polite. Especially you.’
‘Steady on, Bill,’ said Tony.
‘I’ve been called worse,’ said Dennis.
‘Why aren’t you more worked up about it anyway?’ Bill said to Tony. ‘Trust you to lie on the ground with your belly up and your paws in the air.’
Every story contains a moment you can point at and say, ‘Look, there, that’s where it all unravelled,’ and maybe this was such a moment. That was what Dennis would say, in years to come: ‘It was never the same after that election-week row.’ But Tony was a storyteller, and he knew that if you looked at any narrative closely enough you could trace the unravelling back and back and back – right to the very beginning, if the story was good enough.
The strange thing was that the argument seemed synthetic to Tony. Could anyone really care that much about being paid not to work? The anger was clearly real, though. It was in there, sloshing around, looking for the nearest hole to escape through.
‘Are you really going to tell them where to stick their new series?’ said Tony later. ‘Because I’m not.’
‘You’d do it without me?’
‘No,’ said Tony. ‘Of course not. But I’ve got to do something. I’ve got a wife and a kid on the way.’
‘Oh, have you, Tony? I didn’t know. You should have mentioned that before.’
‘That’s a bit unfair.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Bill, without meaning it.
Tony caught a glimpse of something. Was that what it was all about? Perhaps it was. The nuclear family always represented something to a man, especially a single man, especially a single man with an anarchic streak, especially a single man with an anarchic streak who found himself having to write about a nuclear family to earn his living. And Tony’s nuclear family meant a lot more to Bill than most nuclear families, for obvious reasons. Tony didn’t want June and his unborn child to be a sort of Vietnam, and he didn’t want to be on the wrong side. But he was starting to fear that it was too late and that the battle lines had been drawn up a long time ago.
THE FOURTH SERIES
17
Roger Nicholas Holmes was born in the Bushey Maternity Hospital, three weeks after the last episode of the third series had been broadcast. It was a relatively short labour, five hours, but it seemed like an eternity to Tony. He had started off in the corridor outside the maternity ward, smoking and attempting to do the Times crossword, but the terrible noises and the occasionally urgent dashes of the midwives and nurses upset him too much, so in the end he went to the pub, and came back on the hour every hour until eventually he was presented with a thirty-five-minute-old son.
He’d been worried that he wouldn’t feel enough. He’d wept when Barbara had had her baby in the series, which he’d hoped at the time was an indication of normal human emotions, but afterwards he wondered whether the tears had come because of his investment in the programme, or because he always found it easy to cry at things that weren’t real. He’d been in a right mess at the end of The Sound of Music, for example. But when he held his son for the firs
t time, he was beset immediately by spasmodic and uncontrollable sobs that seemed to start right deep in his stomach. He needn’t have worried. Everyone loved their own children, it turned out. Tony wished there was a way that homosexual men could be given this moment. He’d like Bill to feel what he was feeling.
‘You OK?’ said June.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Very. Thank you.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘I meant, thank you for everything, not thank you for asking. Thank you for sticking with it. Thank you for him.’
It was an inappropriate thought, but the baby wasn’t so much like a love child, the effortless product of the blissful or even oblivious union of two people. He was a different sort of miracle, the effortful product of a tricky collaboration between unlikely partners. He was their version of a television programme.
June and Tony spent a contented few weeks walking and sitting in parks eating ice creams while their newborn slept, and then, after the phoney war, the job of being a husband and a father started properly. It turned out to be a difficult job too. The baby had made everything seem solid and frightening, and Tony was finding it much harder to breathe, all of a sudden. If being part of a family was a job like any other, then Tony would have been counting the days until Christmas, and the other holidays to come, but there was no respite, and there never would be. He didn’t even enjoy the return to the office, because he had a living to earn – a proper, serious living, enough for three people. Everything was down to him, now that June had given up work. He had to turn the contents of his head into prams and rusks and reins and mortgage payments, and suddenly there seemed to be less in there than he’d hoped. Each listless hour spent shooting paperclips at the light fittings with a rubber band, or listening to music on the record player they kept in the office, seemed ominous, rather than an indulgent part of the routine. Could he seriously keep this going for ever? Was it really possible to come up with enough ideas – for lines, jokes, characters, plots, episodes – to feed and clothe and educate a child?
He was relying on Bill, and Bill had disappeared. He came to the office every day, but he wasn’t there, and didn’t even seem to want to be there. He spent most of the time playing the Beatles’ Revolver LP over and over and over again, until Tony started to dislike it.
‘Do you remember when they were all “I love you yeah yeah yeah”?’ said Bill.
‘ “She loves you”, I think,’ said Tony.
‘Same difference.’
‘What about it anyway?’
‘They’ve gone from that to this in whatever it is … three years. Where have we gone?’
‘Where do you want to go? Where should we be going?’
‘Moving.’
‘Moving where?’
‘I can’t think of a single new permutation of domestic life. The in-laws to stay. Going to stay with the in-laws. Anniversaries. Embarrassing dinner parties at home. Embarrassing dinner parties out. Babies. Bathrooms. Nannies. New carpets.’
‘Moving!’ said Tony. ‘That’s brilliant! “The New House”.’
Bill shrugged.
‘Might as well. We haven’t got anything else.’
‘You don’t seem very excited about it.’
‘It’s not a seam we’re going to be mining in five years’ time, is it? If we’re still banging on about it in episode two we’ll be stretching it thin.’
‘What’s brought this on?’
‘I dunno.’
‘Till Death Us Do Part?’
The series was showing now, and everybody was talking about it, and nobody was talking about Barbara (and Jim) any more because nobody ever talked about two television programmes at once, especially when one of them was old hat. Alf Ramsey had turned into Alf Garnett – Alf Ramsey had just won the World Cup for England, and nobody, least of all the BBC, wanted his newly hallowed name besmirched by the fictional character’s bigotry and belligerence. But otherwise Alf was the same character, and, somewhat alarmingly, the people of Britain loved him, in ways that his creator might not have intended.
‘I don’t care about that lot,’ said Bill, in a way that conveyed both hurt and irritation. ‘I do care about us being stuck. It’s one marriage, between two people. Have you got any more to say about it? You’re the one with the family. Where are the gags? Where are the stories? Come on. You’re the expert. Although I have to say, you haven’t looked like a man with the keys to the comedy bank vault since you became a father.’
‘I’m bloody knackered, that’s why. Knackered and a bit frightened.’
‘Ah, bless him. What are you frightened of?’
‘You and your movement.’
‘Don’t you want to move?’
‘No. I don’t want to go anywhere.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘It is! I’m happy! I just want to fill up pages!’
What he meant was that it was a job he enjoyed, loved even, and a job he could do, and a job he was well paid for. All of this seemed like a miracle to him. He had been given more luck than he could have predicted for himself. So, yes, he wanted to fill up the pages, with jokes and observations and situations that Dennis, the BBC and the audience wanted. If he did that, then he’d be allowed to do it over and over again. He didn’t think about anything else. He didn’t think about what else he had to say, or whether he was frustrated by the confines of their chosen medium. He just wanted to keep page thirty of the script well away from page one, like a mechanic wanted to fix a car, like a doctor wanted to make people better. He couldn’t imagine mechanics getting frustrated because engines were too simple. Presumably every engine presented a different problem, just as every episode offered a new challenge. And if you were up to it, then why not keep going?
‘What an ambition.’
‘There are worse things to aim at than making people happy.’
‘I feel like we keep coming back to the same place,’ said Bill.
‘We must be going somewhere, then. Even if it’s round and round.’
‘You can honestly see yourself doing this for ever?’
‘If we can keep it good, why not?’
‘You wouldn’t get bored?’
‘We’re beginning to sound like a problem in a women’s magazine,’ said Tony. ‘ “Dear Evelyn, Our marital life is becoming humdrum and I worry he’ll go elsewhere. What should I do?” ’
‘She’d tell you to put on lacy underwear.’
‘I will, if it will help.’
‘She’d tell you to do something different anyway. What she wouldn’t say is, “Just keep doing the same old thing and eventually he’ll become so old and uninterested that he’ll forget all about it.” ’
‘I thought your novel might be enough.’
‘The trouble is, I like doing it too much. Makes me realize what I’m missing.’
Tony sighed. ‘It’s hard, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I dunno what you’d call it. This. You and me. Our marriage. You start off thinking someone’s exactly the same, and as the years go by you realize they’re not.’
‘I knew we weren’t the same after the army,’ said Bill. ‘When you chickened out.’
‘Of what?’
‘You know.’
‘You think I chickened out?’
‘What would you call it, then?’
‘You think I married June because I was scared?’
‘So why did you?’
‘I … Well, I fell in love with her.’
‘So you’re ambidextrous?’
‘Both or neither, I don’t know. At the time it felt like I was completely … ’armless.’
‘Very good,’ said Bill, without actually registering amusement on his face.
‘Thank you.’
‘It was very convenient that June was the one you fell for, then, wasn’t it?’
‘Why was it convenient?’
‘Because that was the easier option. And here you are, in a nice lit
tle house in Pinner with a wife and a baby.’
Tony could only give a helpless shrug.
‘Yes. And it suits me. I’m happy. I couldn’t do what you do.’
‘You have no idea what I do.’
‘You break the law any time you do anything.’
‘The law’s an ass.’
‘I know that. I’m just saying. If you can go both ways or neither, why go the way that’s going to get you banged up?’
‘I didn’t have any choice.
‘I know that. But I did. And that doesn’t mean I’m always going to make the boring, safe choice.’
‘I’m sure that’s what it feels like to you,’ said Bill.
He was being kind, not confrontational, Tony knew that, and Tony suddenly understood what he meant: one thing led to another. The years since they’d started writing Barbara (and Jim) would have been entirely different for Bill if he hadn’t been queer. He’d met different people, of course. But he’d read different books, seen different plays and films, heard different music, wandered into a world a long way from Tony’s little house in Pinner.
‘We need more than an agony aunt,’ said Tony. ‘We need the Marriage Guidance Council.’
And Bill’s eyes suddenly brightened, for the first time in weeks.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Dennis when they told him the idea. ‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘What’s wrong with them,’ said Bill, ‘is that they’re the opposite.’
‘But they’ve always been the opposite,’ said Dennis. ‘That’s what the show is about.’
‘Yes, and now it’s coming to its logical conclusion. They’re struggling to make their marriage work, because they’re too different. They need help.’
‘Just checking,’ said Dennis. ‘You’re keeping it as a comedy, are you? Or is it a Wednesday Play? Perhaps he could strangle her at the end.’
‘Why can’t marriage guidance be funny?’ said Bill.
‘How many couples who go to marriage guidance are laughing?’ said Dennis.
‘How many of them want to be?’ said Tony.