Funny Girl(19)

They never talked about the other thing they may or may not have had in common, but Bill was still shocked when Tony got married. He’d never even mentioned seeing someone. Bill went to the wedding, and Tony’s bride, a sweet, quiet, clever brunette called June who worked at the BBC, seemed to know all about her husband’s partner, or as much as she would have wanted to know anyway. And maybe there wasn’t anything else to find out. Bill and Tony wrote comedy scripts together; that was who they were, and Aldershot Police Station had nothing to do with anything.

They did much better than they had dared to hope. They sold a few one-liners to some of the older radio comedians almost immediately. They were employed full-time to provide material for Albert Bridges, whose only remaining listeners were still grateful to him for his company and good humour during the Blitz. When first the people of Britain and then, eventually, the BBC came to the conclusion that Bridges was past his best, Bill and Tony sold The Awkward Squad, a comedy series inspired by their National Service experience – or the parts of it they felt they could draw on, anyway.

And now they had been invited to write for Comedy Playhouse. They had been itching to try their hand at TV, but when Dennis took them for a drink in Great Portland Street one evening and told them that he wanted a breezy, light-hearted look at contemporary marriage, they were a little cowed by the brief. After Dennis had gone home, neither of them said anything for a while.

‘Well,’ said Bill, ‘you’re married.’

‘I don’t know if my marriage is going to help us very much. It’s quite, you know. Particular.’

‘Can I ask you something about your marriage?’

‘What about it?’

‘Did June know when she married you?’

‘I don’t know what there was to know.’

‘You got nicked for importuning in a men’s lavatory. She might want to know that.’

‘I was released without charge. And I didn’t importune anybody, if you remember.’

‘So you didn’t think that was information worth passing on?’

‘No.’

‘And what about the … well, the practical side?’

‘Is this going to help us come up with an idea?’

‘No. I’m just interested.’

‘Too bad.’

‘You’ll have to be helpful somehow, though. I don’t know what it’s like to sleep with someone night after night. Or argue with them about what side to watch. Or what it’s like to have a mother-in-law.’

‘We always agree about the television. We have exactly the same tastes.’

‘Do you think he knows I’m queer?’ said Bill. ‘And he’s playing an elaborate practical joke on me?’

‘How would he know?’

Bill was extremely careful. He always made sure that he knew the Test score, and that he dressed badly, and sometimes he made careful reference to girls. But then, he was afraid, like a lot of men in his position. He was always one mistake away from prison.

They decided, like God, that if they got the man right, the woman could somehow be made out of him. And the man in Wedded Bliss? wasn’t too bad, they thought. He was sort of odd, and oddly lovable, prone to fits of surreal rage provoked by everything in England that drove Tony and Bill insane – a sort of sitcom Jimmy Porter from Look Back in Anger. But Sophie was right about Cicely, the woman. She turned out to be hopeless, a cartoon sketch. This was unsurprising, seeing as they had borrowed her wholesale from a cartoon, the Gambols comic strip that appeared in the Express. The character of Cicely was as close to Gaye Gambol as they could get in script form. She didn’t look anything like her, though: Cicely, they imagined, was going to be sweet-looking, rather than curvy, probably because all the actresses that Dennis had suggested seemed very BBC, and BBC actresses all had big eyes, sweet natures and flat chests. They certainly weren’t sexy. But they extracted all of Gaye’s feminine idiocies from her and sprinkled them liberally over the script. Cicely lusted after mink coats, burned dinners, overspent her housekeeping allowance and made complicated, childlike excuses for doing so, missed appointments, failed to understand the simplest mechanical instrument. It wasn’t as though Tony and Bill ever believed that Gaye Gambol was real, or true, and nor did they believe that there were any housewives (or women, or people) like her. But they knew she was popular. If they didn’t have the nerve to produce somebody original and fresh, then at least they wanted a safe bet.