Funny Girl(21)

She hesitated.

‘Not until … Well, quite recently.’

‘When you moved down?’

‘A bit before that.’

And then, just because she felt safe in the room, she decided to tell them the truth. ‘I entered a beauty competition back in Blackpool. There was a girl from London who’d gone in for it too. A holidaymaker. Is there somewhere called Gospel something?’

‘You’re a beauty queen? Oh, that’s just perfect,’ said Clive with glee.

‘She only said she entered,’ said Bill.

‘I won it,’ said Sophie before she could stop herself. ‘I was Miss Blackpool. For five minutes.’

‘Well, this explains everything!’ said Clive.

‘What does it explain?’ said Dennis.

‘Look at her!’

‘I think she won a beauty competition because of the way she looks,’ said Dennis. ‘I don’t think she looks like that because she won a beauty competition.’

‘Why only for five minutes?’ Tony asked.

‘Because then I realized I didn’t want to be a beauty queen and I couldn’t live in Blackpool any more. I wanted to come to London and … Well, I want to be Lucille Ball.’

‘Ah,’ said Bill. ‘Now you’re talking.’

‘Am I?’ said Sophie.

‘Of course you are,’ said Bill. ‘We all love Lucy.’

‘Really?’

‘We’re students of comedy,’ said Tony. ‘We love anyone who’s funny.’

‘Lucy is one of our people,’ said Dennis. ‘Galton and Simpson are our Shakespeare, obviously. But she’s our Jane Austen.’

‘And we’re literally students,’ said Bill. ‘We watch and listen to things over and over again. We prefer the repeats, because then we can start to take things apart.’

Sophie burst into tears, suddenly and to her intense embarrassment. She hadn’t known she was about to cry and she couldn’t really explain the intensity of her feeling.

‘Are you all right?’ said Dennis.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Do you want to call it a day? You could come in tomorrow and we could all talk some more.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m fine. That’s the thing. I’m having fun.’

They were all still there two hours later.

‘How about this? Alan is a handsome, snobbish, angry Conservative. Cicely is a beautiful, chippy, Labour-voting northerner,’ said Bill.

‘She’s hardly likely to be called Cicely, is she?’ said Clive.

‘Fair enough,’ said Bill. ‘What shall we call her?’

‘What goes with Blackpool?’ said Tony.

‘Brenda,’ said Clive. ‘Beryl.’

‘What about Barbara?’ said Dennis. ‘Barbara from Blackpool?’

They all looked at Sophie, who seemed to have lost interest in the conversation and was staring hard at the ceiling.

‘I like it,’ said Tony. ‘Not too common. Just common enough. Alan and Barbara.’

‘I don’t like Alan,’ said Clive.

‘What on earth is wrong with Alan?’

‘I think what Clive is saying is that if she gets a name-change, he should too,’ said Bill.

‘It’s not that at all,’ said Clive crossly. ‘My best friend at junior school was called Alan. He was killed in the Blitz.’

‘I’m betting that’s an awful lie,’ said Tony.

Clive smirked.

‘It was the word “friend” that gave it away,’ said Bill. ‘You’ve never had any. What do you want to be called, then?’

‘Quentin.’

‘Nobody wants to watch a programme about someone called Quentin.’

‘Jim, then.’

‘Oh, I don’t care,’ said Bill. ‘Jim is fine. Jim and Barbara. So how did they end up together?’

‘He knocked her up,’ said Clive.

‘I think you’ll find he didn’t,’ said Sophie firmly.

‘I don’t think it would go down so well upstairs either,’ said Dennis.

‘Oh, here we go,’ said Bill.

Bill and Tony loved Dennis, and not just because he loved them. He was clever, and he was enthusiastic, and he was endlessly encouraging. But he was a Corporation man to the tips of his brown suede boots, and his playfulness tended to disappear if he thought that the future of the BBC, or his own future within it, was under any threat, real or imagined.