Funny Girl(42)

Clive slumped into his chair. He couldn’t speak for several moments.

‘Where does it say that?’

‘It doesn’t.’

‘Oh, bloody hell. Where is it implied?’

‘Page nine. Did you not understand a word you were saying just now?’

‘I just read the lines. I don’t think about them.’

He scanned the page.

‘Oh, Christ. “Hydraulic failure?” What would happen if I marched straight round to see a solicitor the morning after the first episode has gone out?’

‘A solicitor?’

‘There’s got to be something legal here. Slander. Libel. Something.’

‘You’d be suing a fictional character who you’d agreed to play. I’d go to every day of the trial, if it came to court.’

‘I should never have agreed to those brackets,’ said Clive. ‘I’ll be saying that for the rest of my life.’

‘It might have been the brackets that made us think of it,’ said Tony. ‘They’re sort of a droopy punctuation mark, aren’t they?’

‘Well,’ said Clive, ‘mark my words: nobody’s going to believe it.’

He was wrong. They believed it and loved it and carried on loving it. There was one kind of life for them before the first episode of the new series and another kind of life afterwards, and the night the programme was transmitted marked the end of the life before. They would all remember the transmission at some point or another in the years to come, and they never failed to be surprised by the memory: their new lives had already been born, but they watched television with people who belonged to the old. Sophie went home to watch with her father and Auntie Marie; her father was appalled and confused and proud, and tried to anticipate jokes and plot developments, and always got it wrong, and then tried to make a case for the superiority of his own version, which meant that half the lines, and all the subtleties of timing and delivery, were lost. Dennis watched with Edith, who didn’t laugh once, and told him at the end that it was very good indeed, if that was the sort of thing one liked. Clive could not resist going home to Eastleigh, to watch with Cathy and his mother and his gratifyingly disbelieving father, who had recovered himself by the end of the episode. He enjoyed the brackets and the hydraulic failure more than Clive’s performance, he said, and told Cathy that she was well off out of it. Tony watched with June, who wept tears of pride at the end; they had both invited Bill, but he went home to Barnet to watch with his parents, who, he felt, with absolutely no evidence, seemed relieved by the unambiguous heterosexuality of the programme. After that night, they belonged to each other as much as they belonged to anyone else.

TELEVISION REVIEW:

BARBARA (AND JIM)

You will probably remember Barbara, the pneumatic, kinetic Blackpool lass who leapt, thrillingly, through the screen and into our living rooms, from a recent and especially noteworthy episode of Comedy Playhouse; you may even remember Jim – or, as the title of the show cruelly has it, (Jim), who was lucky enough to pick her up in the West End pub where she was working. Jim is now her handsome but hapless Home Counties husband, and he works for Mr Wilson at 10 Downing Street. But now Barbara (and indeed Jim) have been given their own BBC Television series, they will be as hard to forget as one’s own immediate family.

We are, of course, talking about a comedy series here, and therefore one should hesitate before invoking the practitioners of other, greater, art-forms. But the superb work of Tony Holmes and Bill Gardiner (who wrote the popular but generic radio show The Awkward Squad), with its careful attention to the cadences and rhythms of ordinary speech, and its affection for the sorts of people who, until the last few years, have been under-represented in any form of drama or fiction, brings to mind the work of Messrs Braine, Barstow and Sillitoe; none of these writers, however, are famous for their jokes, as yet, so one must of course acknowledge the debt that Mr Holmes and Mr Gardiner owe to Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, and perhaps even to Kingsley Amis.

There is, as yet, no Galton and Simpson series that attempts to deal with the relationships between men and women, however, specifically the relationships between husbands and wives; nor have the creators of Hancock’s Half Hour yet ventured north of Watford to find their characters. Mr Holmes and Mr Gardiner, both from London, have to these ears provided Sophie Straw, the young and hitherto unknown actress who plays Barbara, with strikingly authentic dialogue; she must be thanking her lucky stars for their ears every single day she goes into work. But then, she has repaid them in heaped spades, because Miss Straw is the most extraordinarily gifted comic actress I have seen since the war. She could not shine as she does without the subtle, unshowy but nonetheless impressive work of Clive Richardson, another Awkward Squad alumnus, but Miss Straw is a revelation, and the soul of the series.