Therapy

by David Lodge

  These young people who beg and sleep rough on the streets of London, they bother me. They’re not like the tramps and winos who have always been with us, filthy and smelly and dressed in rags. The new vagrants are usually quite nicely clothed, in new-looking anoraks and jeans and Doc Martens, and they have thickly quilted sleeping bags that wouldn’t disgrace an Outward Bound course. And whereas the tramps skulk like insects in dark neglected places like under railway arches or beside rubbish tips, these youngsters choose shop doorways in brightly lit West End streets, or the staircases and passages of the Underground, so that you can’t avoid them. Their presence is like an accusation – but what are they accusing us of? Did we drive them onto the streets? They look so normal, so presentable, they ask you so politely if you have any change, that it’s hard to believe they couldn’t find shelter, and even work, if they really tried. Not in the West End, perhaps, but who says they have a right to a home in the West End? I have one, but I had to work for it.

  Thus and so went my self-justificatory interior monologue, as I went to bed and, eventually, to sleep. I woke at four and went for a pee. On my way back to bed I pressed the video button on the entryphone, and he was still there, curled up inside his sleeping-bag on the tiled floor of the porch, like a dog in its basket. A police car flashed past in the background, and I heard the strident blare of its siren through the double-glazed windows of the living-room, but the youth didn’t stir. When I looked again at half past seven this morning, he had gone.

  Thursday afternoon. I’m writing this on the 5.10 from Euston. I meant to catch the 4.40, but my taxi got trapped in a huge traffic jam caused by a bomb alert in Centre Point. The police had cordoned off the intersection of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, and the traffic was backed up in all directions. I said to the cab-driver, “Who’s trying to blow up the building – the IRA or Prince Charles?” But he didn’t get the joke – or, more likely, he wasn’t amused. These bomb scares keep the tourists away and hurt his business.

  I dropped in on a rehearsal this morning, as is my usual practice on Thursdays. When The People Next Door was new and still finding its feet I used to attend rehearsals practically every day, but now it runs like a train (or like a train should run – this one has suddenly slowed to a crawl for some reason, and we haven’t even got to Watford Junction) and I just put in an appearance once a week to check that everything’s going smoothly, and maybe do a little fine-tuning on the script. Rehearsals are held in a converted church hall near Pimlico tube station, its floor marked out with lines corresponding to the studio set in Rummidge. Walking in there on a winter’s day would disabuse you of any illusion that television light entertainment is a glamorous profession. (I think that’s the first time I’ve ever used the word “disabuse”. I like it – it has a touch of class.) The brick walls are painted an institutional slime green and curdled cream, like Rummidge General Hospital, and the windows are barred and glazed with grimy frosted glass. There’s the usual job-lot of miscellaneous furniture pushed against the walls or arranged in the various “rooms”: splay-legged Formica-topped tables, plastic stacking chairs, collapsing three-piece suites, and beds with unsavoury-looking mattresses. Apart from the trestle table in one corner with a coffee machine, soft drinks, fruit and snacks laid out on it, the place could be a Salvation Army refuge or a depository for second-hand furniture. The actors wear old, comfortable clothes – all except Debbie, who always looks as if she’s on her way to be photographed for Vogue – and when they aren’t required for a scene they sit slumped in the broken-down chairs, reading newspapers and paperback novels, doing crosswords, knitting or, in Debbie’s case, embroidering.

  But they all look up and give me a cheerful smile and greeting as I come in. “Hi, Tubby! How’re you? How goes it?” Actors are always very punctilious that way. Most producers and directors secretly despise writers, regarding them as mere drudges whose job it is to provide the raw material for the exercise of their own creativity, necessary evils who must be kept firmly in their place. Actors, however, regard writers with respect, even a certain awe. They know that the Writer is the ultimate source of the lines without which they themselves are impotent; and they know that, in the case of a long-running series, it is in his power to enhance or reduce the importance of their roles in episodes as yet unwritten. So they usually go out of their way to be nice to him.

  This week they’re doing Episode Seven of the present series, due to be transmitted in five weeks’ time. Do they, I wonder, have any inkling that this may be the last series? No, I detect no signs of anxiety in their eyes or body language as we exchange greetings. Only between Debbie and myself does a message flash briefly, as I stoop to kiss her cheek where she sits in an old armchair, doing her eternal embroidery, and our eyes meet: she knows that I know that she wants out. Otherwise the secret seems to be safe for the time being. Not even Hal Lipkin, the director, knows yet. He bustles over to me as soon as I come in, frowning and biting his ballpen, but it’s a query about the script that’s on his mind.

  Sitcom is pure television, a combination of continuity and novelty. The continuity comes from the basic “situation” – in our case, two families with radically different lifestyles living next door to each other: the happy-go-lucky, welfare-sponging Davises, having unexpectedly inherited a house in a gentrified inner-city street, decide to move into it instead of selling it, to the ill-concealed dismay of their next-door neighbours, the cultured, middle-class, Guardian-reading Springfields. The viewers quickly become familiar with the characters and look forward to watching them behave in exactly the same way, every week, like their own relatives. The novelty comes from the story each episode tells. The art of sitcom is finding new stories to tell, week after week, within the familiar framework. It can’t be a very complicated story, because you’ve only got twenty-five minutes to tell it in and, for both budgetary and technical reasons, most of the action must take place in the same studio set.

  I was looking forward to seeing this week’s episode in production, because it’s one of those cases where we approach the territory of serious drama. Basically sitcom is light, family entertainment, which aims to amuse and divert the viewers, not to disturb and upset them. But if it doesn’t occasionally touch on the deeper, darker side of life, however glancingly, then the audience won’t believe in the characters and will lose interest in their fortunes. This week’s episode centres on the Springfields’ teenage daughter, Alice, who’s about sixteen. When the series started five years ago, she was about fifteen. Phoebe Osborne, who plays her, was fourteen when she started and is now nineteen, but fortunately she hasn’t grown much in that time and it’s amazing what make-up and hairstyling can do. Adult characters in long-running sitcoms lead enchanted lives, they never age, but with the juveniles you have to allow for a certain amount of growth in the actors, and build it into the script. When young Mark Harrington’s voice broke, for instance (he plays the Springfields’ youngest, Robert) I made it a running joke for a whole series.

  Anyway, this week’s episode centres on Edward and Priscilla’s fear that Alice may be pregnant, because she keeps throwing up. Cindy Davis next door is a teenage unmarried mother, her Mum looks after the baby while she’s at school, and the dramatic point of the episode is that while the Springfields have been terribly liberal-minded about Cindy, they’re horrorstruck at the thought of the same thing happening to their own daughter, especially as the likely father is young Terry Davis, whom Alice has been dating with their teeth-gritting consent. Needless to say, Alice isn’t pregnant or even at risk since she won’t allow Terry any liberties at all. She keeps throwing up because the sexually frustrated Terry is spiking the goats’ milk which is delivered exclusively for Alice’s use (she’s allergic to cows’ milk) with an alleged aphrodisiac (in fact a mild emetic) with the collusion of his mate, Rodge, the milkman’s assistant. This is eventually revealed when Priscilla accidentally helps herself to Alice’s special milk and is violently sick. (“EDWARD (aghast):
Don’t tell me you’re pregnant too?”) But before that a good deal of comedy is generated by the elaborately circuitous ways in which Edward and Priscilla try to check out their dreadful suspicion, and the contrast between their public tolerance and private disapproval of single-parent families.

  “It’s running a bit long, Tubby,” Hal said, indistinctly because he was gripping a ballpen between his teeth as he riffled through his copy of the script. Another ballpen protruded from his wiry thatch of hair just above his right ear – parked there some time earlier and forgotten. (I should be so lucky.) “I was wondering if we could cut a few lines here,” he mumbled. I knew exactly which lines he was going to point to before he found the page:

  EDWARD: Well, if she is pregnant, she’ll have to have a termination.

  PRISCILLA (angrily): I suppose you think that will solve everything?

  EDWARD: Hang on! I thought you were all in favour of a Woman’s right to choose?

  PRISCILLA: She’s not a woman, she’s a child. Anyway, suppose she chooses to have the baby?

  PAUSE, AS EDWARD FACES UP TO THIS POSSIBILITY.

  EDWARD (quietly but firmly): Then of course We shall support her.

  PRISCILLA (softening): Yes, of course.

  PRISCILLA REACHES OUT AND SQUEEZES EDWARD'S HAND.

  I’d already had a run-in about these lines with Ollie Silvers, my producer, when I first delivered the script. Actually he’s much more than my producer nowadays, he’s Head of Series and Serials at Heartland, no less; but since The People Next Door was in a sense his baby, and still gets better ratings than anything else Heartland does, he couldn’t bear to hand it over to a line producer when he was promoted, and still finds time somehow to poke his nose into the detail of every episode. He said you couldn’t have references to abortion in a sitcom, even one that goes out after the nine-o’clock watershed when young viewers are supposed to be tucked up in bed, because it’s too controversial, and too upsetting. I said it was unrealistic to suppose that an educated middle-class couple would discuss the possible pregnancy of their schoolgirl daughter without mentioning the subject. Ollie said that audiences accepted the conventions of sitcom, that some things simply weren’t mentioned, and they liked it that way. I said that all kinds of things that used to be taboo in sitcom were acceptable now. Ollie said, not abortion. I said, there’s always a first time. He said, why on our show? I said, why not? He gave in, or so I thought. I might have known he’d find a way to get rid of the lines.

  When I asked Hal if the cut was Ollie’s idea, Hal looked a bit embarrassed. “Ollie was in yesterday,” he admitted. “He did suggest the lines aren’t absolutely essential to the story.”

  “Not absolutely essential,” I said. “Just a little moment of truth.”

  Hal looked unhappy and said we could discuss the matter further with Ollie, who was coming in after lunch, but I said it was too late in the day to have a knock-down-drag-out argument on a matter of principle. The cast would pick up the vibrations and get anxious and uptight about the scene. Hal looked relieved, and hurried off to tell Suzie, his production assistant, to amend the script. I left before Ollie arrived. Now I wonder why I didn’t put up more of a fight.

  The senior conductor has just announced that we are approaching Rugby. “Rugby will be the next station stop.” BR has taken to using this cumbersome phrase, “station stop” lately, presumably to distinguish scheduled stops at stations from unscheduled ones in the middle of fields, concerned perhaps that passengers disoriented by the fumes of bacon and tomato rolls and overheated brake linings in carriages with defective air-conditioning might otherwise stumble out on to the track by mistake and get killed.

  Thursday evening. I got home at about 7.30. The train was only twelve minutes late in the end, and I found my car, unscathed by thieves or vandals, waiting for me where I had left it, like a faithful pet. I roused it with the remote button on my keyring as I approached and it blinked its indicator lights at me and cheeped three times, as the doorlocks clicked open. These remote-control gadgets give me an inexhaustible childish pleasure. Our garage door is operated by one, and it amuses me to start it opening as I turn the corner at the end of the road so that I can drive straight in without pausing. As the door yawned open this evening I saw that Sally’s car wasn’t parked inside, and when I let myself into the house I found a note in the kitchen to say that she’d gone down to the Club for a swim and sauna. I felt unreasonably disappointed, because I was all primed to tell her about the crisis over Debbie Radcliffe and the argument about the cut in this week’s episode. Not that she would be dying to hear about either topic. Au contraire.

  In my experience there are two kinds of writers’ wives. One kind is a combination of nanny, secretary and fan-club president. She reads the writer’s work in progress and always praises it; she watches his programmes at transmission and laughs at every joke; she winces at a bad review and rejoices at a good one as feelingly as he does; she keeps an anxious eye on his mood and workrate, brings him cups of tea and coffee at regular intervals, tiptoeing in and out of his study without disturbing his concentration; she answers the telephone and replies to letters, protecting him from tiresome and unprofitable invitations, requests and propositions; she keeps a note of his appointments and reminds him of them in good time, drives him to the station or airport and meets him again when he returns, and gives cocktail parties and dinner parties for his professional friends and patrons. The other kind is like Sally, who does none of these things, and has a career of her own which she considers just as important as her spouse’s, if not more so.

  Actually, Sally is the only writer’s wife of this kind that I’ve met, though I suppose there must be others.

  So it wasn’t that I was hoping for sympathetic advice and knowledgeable counsel when I got home, just an opportunity to get some oppressive thoughts off my chest. Driving from the station, I felt a growing conviction that I had made a mistake in giving in so easily to cutting the reference to abortion in this week’s script, and began to torment myself by wondering whether or not to re-open discussion of the matter by phoning Ollie and Hal at their respective homes – knowing that I would be in a very weak position, having agreed to the cut this morning, and that I would create bad feeling all round by trying to revoke that decision, without actually achieving anything in the end anyway because it was probably too late to change the script again. Probably, but not necessarily. The actors rehearsed the cut version this afternoon, but could if required restore the missing lines at tomorrow’s rehearsal.

  I paced restlessly around the empty house, picked up the telephone a couple of times, and put it down again without dialling. I made myself a ham sandwich, but the meat was too cold from the fridge to have any flavour, and drank a can of beer that filled my stomach with gas. I turned on the telly at random and found myself watching a rival sitcom on BBC1 which seemed much wittier and sharper than The People Next Door, and switched it off again after ten minutes. I went into my study and sat down at the computer.

  I feel self-esteem leaking out of me like water from an old bucket. I despise myself both for my weakness in accepting the cut and for my vacillation over whether to do anything about it. My knee has begun to throb, like a rheumatic joint sensitive to the approach of bad weather. I sense a storm of depression flickering on the horizon, and a tidal wave of despair gathering itself to swamp me.

  Thank God. Sally has just come in. I just heard the door slam behind her, and her cheerful call from the front hall.

  Friday morning 19th Feb. There was appeal from MIND in my mail this morning. First time I’ve had one from them, I think. They must have got my address from one of the other charities. Inside the envelope was a letter and a blue balloon. There was an instruction at the top of the letter: “Please blow up the balloon before you read any further, but don’t tie a knot in it.” So I blew up the balloon, and on it, drawn in white lines, appeared the profile of a man’s head, looking a bit like me actually, with a thick neck and
no visible hair; and packed inside the cranium, one on top of the other, like thoughts, were the words: BEREAVED, UNEMPLOYED, MONEY, SEPARATED, MORTGAGE, DIVORCED, HEALTH. “To you,” said the letter, “the words on the balloon may seem just that – words. But the events they describe are at the heart of someone’s nervous breakdown.”

  Just then, the doorbell rang. Sally had left for work, so I went to the front door, still holding the balloon by its tail, pinched between thumb and index finger to stop the air from escaping. I felt a vaguely superstitious compulsion to obey the instructions in the letter, like a character in a fairy tale.

  It was the milkman, wanting to be paid. He looked at the balloon and grinned. “Having a party?” he said. It was half past nine in the morning. “Your birthday, is it?” he said. “Many happy returns.”

  “It just came in the post,” I said, gesturing lamely with the balloon. “How much do we owe you?” I fiddled a ten-pound note out of my wallet one-handed.

  “Cracking programme the other night,” said the milkman as he gave me my change. “When Pop Davis hid all those cigarettes around the house before he gave up smoking … very funny.”

  “Thanks, glad you enjoyed it,” I said. All the local tradesmen know I write the scripts for The People Next Door. I can do instant audience research on my own doorstep.

  I took the balloon back into my study and picked up the letter from MIND. “Just as the words grow larger with the balloon, so somebody’s problems can seem greater as the pressure on them increases,” it said.