Funny Girl(32)

At the end, the man with the APPLAUSE board didn’t even have to lift it above his head. Clive ushered her forward so that she could take a bow, and the audience cheered, and he applauded too. He hadn’t been left with a lot of choice.

Sophie was beside her father’s hospital bed by lunchtime on Monday afternoon. He hadn’t died, and he hadn’t had any more heart attacks, and he was awake and talking. There was an argument to say that this was the worst of all possible outcomes, because now he could sit there, looking wounded. Marie was on the other side of the bed. She wasn’t wounded. She was just sour and disappointed. Sophie gave her dad the grapes she’d bought in London, and a bottle of Lucozade, and a Commando War Stories book called At Dawn You Die.

‘You must be made of money,’ he said, by way of thanks.

‘Or made of guilt,’ said Marie.

Sophie took a deep breath.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Yes, but what are you sorry for?’ said Marie.

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t come.’

‘Not good enough,’ said Marie. ‘We talked about this. We decided you had to be sorry you didn’t come. Not sorry you couldn’t come.’

She understood the difference. They wanted her to admit she’d made a mistake.

‘I couldn’t come,’ she said. ‘I wish I had been able to.’

‘So why couldn’t you?’ said her father. ‘What was so important?’

‘I was in a BBC programme.’

‘What do you mean, you were in it? In the audience?’

‘I was in it. Acting in it. A Comedy Playhouse.’

They both stared at her.

‘Comedy Playhouse?’

‘Yes.’

‘On the BBC?’

‘Yes. That Comedy Playhouse. And we had to rehearse on Saturday and they recorded it on Sunday and if I’d come home I might have lost my chance. And it’s a big chance. They want it to be a series, and it’s about a couple, a man and a woman, and I’m the woman.’

They stared at her some more, then stared at each other.

‘Are you … Are you sure?’

She laughed.

‘I’m sure.’

‘And did it go all right?’

‘It went well. Thank you. Anyway. Do you understand better?’

‘You couldn’t have come,’ said her father. ‘Not if you had a Comedy Playhouse.’

‘With the hope of a series,’ said Marie.

‘You’re going to be on telly!’ said her father. ‘We’d be so proud of you!’

It had never occurred to Sophie that she would be forgiven so readily for her trespasses and she wasn’t sure that she liked it. She had refused to visit her dangerously ill father in hospital because her career was more important to her, and the least he could do was judge her. You could get away with anything, it seemed, if you were on the telly.





THE FIRST SERIES





7


Clive Richardson was an actor because being an actor was easily the best way of meeting pretty girls. He’d suspected as much before he got into the game, and he hadn’t been disappointed: there were pretty girls everywhere he went. It started at LAMDA, his drama school, where he understood properly for the first time that actresses were better-looking than ordinary people; if he’d gone to teacher training college, or a school of medicine, then he’d have had to reject nineteen out of every twenty classmates. At LAMDA, he wanted all of them. And then he left, and went on to work at the BBC and in the repertory theatres, where there were hundreds more.

Out in the real world, he discovered that it wasn’t just pretty actresses who were available to him. Pretty girls who worked in other professions loved actors. Sometimes they were looking for a way into the entertainment business – and as far as Clive was concerned, he was as good a way in as any – but mostly they just wanted the association. An actor has the pick of the pretty girls, so any pretty girl he looked at seemed to feel validated in some way: he wants me! It was beautiful. Being an actor was like having a system for the horses that actually worked.

Clive’s chief objection to comedy was that he feared the system would stop working for him if all he did was make people laugh – especially if he made them laugh by being stupid. He wasn’t at all sure pretty girls liked that. Richard Burton and Tom Courtenay and Peter O’Toole were movie stars, and that brought advantages of a different order entirely: Clive had not yet bagged an Elizabeth Taylor. But were they movie stars because they were born movie stars? Or were they movie stars because they refused to play Captain Smythe? The only comedian whose career gave him pause for thought was Peter Sellers: he had recently married Britt Ekland, and there had been rumours about his off-screen relationship with Sophia Loren. If Clive could be guaranteed women of Ekland/Loren quality, he’d speak in silly voices to whoever would listen, but Peter Sellers was doing his voices in Dr Strangelove, on the big screen, not The Awkward Squad on the wireless. He suspected that Sophia Loren wouldn’t be terribly interested in the man who played Captain Smythe. Wedded Bliss was a television programme, at least, but his character showed very few signs of doing him any favours.