Funny Girl(18)

‘You can shut up,’ Bill said to him.

‘And why is she a vicar’s daughter? I know her father’s a vicar. But … it never gets mentioned again. Are you just saying she’s got iron knickers? What’s she going to do with them, once she’s married? They’ll have to come off.’

‘Right,’ said Bill. ‘Thanks.’

‘Sorry,’ said Sophie. ‘I’ve probably said too much.’

‘No, this is all very helpful,’ said Tony.

‘And why is she so dopey anyway? It says in the script she’s been to college. How did she manage that? She couldn’t find her way to the bus stop, let alone university.’

‘Well,’ said Clive, with an air of satisfaction. ‘There’s nothing left to audition for. You’ve destroyed it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and she stood up to leave. She had no intention of going anywhere until they threw her out, but if nobody said anything to stop her, at least she’d know it was over.

‘We can read through it, and then Bill and Tony can go off and do another draft.’

‘Another draft of what, though?’ said Bill. ‘It’s like Clive said. There’s nothing left.’

‘Let’s read through it anyway,’ said Dennis. ‘Please. We’re recording it in just under two weeks.’

There was a lot of grumbling, but no dissent. Everyone turned to the first page. Sophie was torn. She wanted to read as well as she could; she also wanted to read at a snail’s pace. She was desperate to make the afternoon last as long as possible; she wanted to stay in this room, with these people, for ever.





COMEDY PLAYHOUSE





4


Tony Holmes and Bill Gardiner met in a holding cell in a police station in Aldershot the week before Christmas in 1959. The local police wanted the military police to take them back to the barracks; the military police didn’t want anything to do with them. While the two sets of authorities wrangled, they sat there for twenty-four hours, talking, smoking and not sleeping, both of them feeling stupid and very afraid. They ascertained that they had both been arrested in the same place in the same street, two hours apart; they didn’t even tell each other what they had been doing wrong, or where precisely they had been doing it. They didn’t need to. They just knew.

Neither of them had ever been caught back at home, in London, but for different reasons. Bill hadn’t been caught because he was smart, and knew the places to go, the clubs and the bars and even the public conveniences, although he didn’t use them very often. The evening’s events had reminded him why. The policeman who’d arrested him in Aldershot may well have been an agent provocateur, one of those officers who hated his kind with such a peculiar and obsessive passion that they were prepared to spend entire evenings trying to catch them. There were plenty of them in London too. Tony had never been caught in London because he’d never tried anything in London, or anywhere else for that matter. He wasn’t sure about a lot of things, including who and what he was, but he had no clear idea why he’d decided to try and find the answers to these questions right before the end of his National Service. Loneliness, certainly, and boredom, and the sudden desperate need for the touch of a fellow human being, of any gender, though admittedly he was only likely to find one of the two in the gents’ conveniences in Tennyson Street.



In the end, nobody had the stomach to prosecute them, and the following day they returned to the barracks to complete the rest of their National Service. Whenever they looked back on that evening – which they did frequently, although never together, and never out loud – there wasn’t much they recognized about the circumstances of their arrest. Had they really been desperate enough to get so near to humiliation and possible ruin? But the content of their twenty-four-hour conversation stayed reassuring and familiar, even years later: they talked about comedy. They discovered their mutual passion for Ray Galton and Alan Simpson within minutes of meeting, they could quote whole chunks of Hancock’s Half Hour at each other, and they tried to remember as much as they could of ‘The Blood Donor’ so that they could perform it. They were pretty sure they were word perfect on the hospital scene, with Bill playing Hancock and Tony, with the higher, more nasal voice, taking on the Hugh Lloyd part.

Ray Galton and Alan Simpson



They kept in touch when they were demobbed. Tony lived in east London and Bill was up in Barnet, so they used to meet in town, in a Soho coffee bar – once a week, at first, when they were both still working in the jobs they were trying to escape. (Tony was helping his father in the newsagent’s he owned, Bill was a pen-pusher at the Department of Transport.) They spent the first few months talking, and then eventually overcame their embarrassment and started trying to write together, on two notepads. Later, when they took the leap into unemployment, they met every day, in the same coffee bar, and would continue to do so until they could afford an office.