Funny Girl(40)

Dennis nodded his head thoughtfully along to the music. He could see what Bill meant.

‘It’s not funny,’ said Bill. ‘But at least it’s cheerful.’

Dennis got Jimmy Page to do ‘Freddie Freeloader’ the next afternoon. He had now gone through fifty-eight pounds of the forty-pound budget he’d given himself for music. He’d wanted to get a proper photographer, David Bailey or Lewis Morley, to take a picture of Sophie, and a local wedding photographer to do Clive, but the overspend made that impossible. Instead, he spent an entire day collecting artefacts – lipsticks and pipes and book jackets and miniskirts – intended to represent the couple, and got an in-house chap to snap them all on a background of white chipboard. It looked better than he’d dared to hope. He held the pictures up while he played the theme song and suddenly felt a little thrill of possibility.

Bert hated everything, the music and the photographs.

‘You just want everyone to turn off before the actual programme starts?’

‘I don’t think they will,’ said Dennis.

‘Oh, they will,’ said Bert. ‘I would.’

‘Of course you would,’ said Dennis. ‘That goes without saying.’

‘And my missus will,’ said Bert.

‘You won’t tell her to stick with it because you directed it?’

‘I can try,’ said Bert. ‘But it won’t do any good. Not with that racket.’

‘So it’s the music you particularly object to?’

‘And the pictures.’

‘Right. You and your missus would turn off because you don’t like the photographs in the opening titles.’

‘No,’ Bert said patiently. ‘We’d turn off because of the music.’

‘So if the opening titles were to play silently …’

‘We’d think the sound had gone.’

‘Bert,’ said Dennis. ‘What I’m trying to do here is locate the objection to the images. I understand you don’t like the music …’

‘It’s horrible.’

‘… But what is the problem with the pictures?’

Bert shuffled through them again.

‘I like it when a comedy starts with a little cartoon,’ he said.

‘I thought we’d try something a bit more daring,’ said Dennis. ‘Something a bit different.’

‘Well,’ said Bert, ‘different has never worked before.’

Later that day, after a conversation with Tom Sloan, Dennis became the producer and the director of Barbara (and Jim). He went straight to see the set designer: he wanted the marital home to contain the youngest, most fashionable living room in television. And with every suggestion that the set designer made – white walls! Op art posters on the walls! Danish furniture! – Dennis felt that the ghost of Bert, and the ghosts of stale British light entertainment, were being banished to the Shepherd’s Bush streets.

At the end of the read-through, Dennis made the Big Ben noises intended to indicate that the marriage between Jim and Barbara had been consummated, but nobody laughed or cheered. Bill and Tony were too busy trying to gauge the expressions on the faces of Sophie and Clive; Sophie and Clive, expressionless, were too busy flicking back through the pages of the script, trying to work out precisely what had been intimated about their characters’ sex lives.

‘When I say …’ Sophie began.

‘Yes?’ Bill said.

‘Oh. I see. Right.’





‘Which page?’

‘Fifteen.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well. Does that mean what I think it means?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are we allowed to say that?’

‘We’re not saying it.’

‘Bill,’ Dennis said patiently. ‘I don’t mind making that argument to the Powers That Be. But let’s be fair to our cast. Yes, Sophie. We are saying –’

‘Implying,’ said Bill.

‘We are saying that Barbara is sexually experienced.’

‘Oh, bloody hell.’

‘We don’t have to,’ said Dennis. ‘If you’re not comfortable with it.’

‘Oh, don’t we?’ said Tony. ‘What else have you got, then, Dennis?’

‘What don’t you like about it, Sophie?’ said Dennis.